In my UX Immersion course I am delving more deeply into understanding how a user experiences the Ahoy! responsive web app I will be designing. Understanding how a user experiences a web app is about crafting accurate user personas, developing realistic user journey maps, and applying these to careful task analysis for an efficient user flow. Taken together, these steps can create a positive user experience of the web app being developed.

User Personas

A user persona is a representation of the goals, challenges, and behaviors of a hypothesized subset of users. Personas are informed by research, typically through the user interview process at the beginning of a project. Personas are then continuously refined based on actual user behaviors throughout the user testing phase.

The ultimate goal of a persona is to generate empathy for potential users. The personas make the design thinking process more personal, allowing the UX designer to see the user experience from the POV of users. This will also help in telling a story about users to other stakeholders and in presenting designs to developers.

In my Intro to UX Design I created a Proto-Persona (one persona representative of the typical user of the app). In my UX Immersion course I have created two personas to represent the primary groups of recreational boaters based on my user surveys and interviews. My two personas for the Ahoy! boating weather app are Robert and Anthony.

User Journey Map

Next, I wanted to think about how my users would move through the Ahoy! app – to experience it the way would. This is where the User Journey Maps come in handy. It is the process, as the name suggests, of mapping a user’s journey through the app toward achieving a goal. Each persona has a scenario which includes what they are doing, and they goal they want to achieve. The purpose is to empathize with how the user is engaging with the app in a series of phases. Each phase has for the user a task(s), thoughts, and emotions. By better understanding these, we can recognize opportunities for our app that will improve the user experience.

Task Analysis and User Flow

Following the User Journey Maps, a Task Analysis and User Flow are developed to go deeper into visioning the actions the user will take in navigating the app.

For the Task Analysis we define the user’s objective and then ask questions about our user in the process.

Answering these questions helps us define the most efficient path the user will take toward achieving their goal (which goes a long way toward providing a positive user experience).

• What is it that’s prompted my persona to begin the task?
• What will tell the persona that their task is finished?
• What information does the persona already know about the process?
• What additional information does the persona need to know to complete the task?
• Finally, what tools will the persona need to complete the task?

Our responses are not formed in a vacuum. The entire process is informed by our research with actual users – those surveys and interviews. It is a process of better understanding our users’ needs as we build toward defining the parameters of our UX design.

These stages in the UX design process will provide valuable information as I move into articulating the apps information architecture.