Teaching “Journey Mapping: A Must-Have in Every Design Thinker’s Toolkit
with Design Thinking:DC
THE PARTNER
Design Thinking:DC (DT:DC) is Washington DC’s premier professional group for learning and experiencing design thinking. With monthly 2-hour workshops, DT:DC provides unique opportunities for professionals and students from all backgrounds, industries, and experience levels to learn foundational design thinking concepts and practice them in a safe, guided environment.
THE MAIN TEACHING POINTS
A Journey Map is a design artifact that visually conveys the experience of your user over time.
Journey Maps are useful because they embody the complete, end-to-end experience in a single artifact and they help create a shared understanding of what a user experiences.
Pay attention to extreme users—users whose experiences differ from the majority because they have differing needs or behaviors.
Choose the swim lanes of your journey map based on the purpose of your journey map and the context in which it will be used.
My values in action: Build ownership in others.
WORKSHOP AGENDA
Picture of sheet of steps
1. Write your experience
Each workshop participant wrote the steps of how they got from their home to the workshop—one step per yellow sticky note. They also shared the positive and negative feelings on green and red sticky notes.
Rationale: I wanted participants to use real data that captured a journey they all could relate. What’s one journey they all had in common? Getting to the workshop!
2. Teaching content
This short segment taught what a journey map (JM) is, why it is useful, two kinds of JM (current state and future state), and the anatomy of a JM.
3. Climate Setter
Participants each wrote a random object on a sticky note and placed it on their journey map butcher paper. They then crafted a story that involved the group’s sticky notes, adding steps along with the objects.
Rationale: Get each group familiar with adding sticky notes to their journey map butcher paper and have them
Heard from and Collaborated with Frontline Staff
Not only did parents have critical, first-hand experience, but so did frontline staff. We would capitalize on this through 6 workshops, one for the central office and one for each of the 5 regional teams. Before each workshop, we shared a Googledoc for team members to list out the steps of their intake process and the things that were and weren’t working about each step. The content of each document was moved to a large piece of butcher paper to be used in a workshop.
In each workshop, a wide range of staff (e.g. speech therapists, nurses, administrators) did the following:
Reviewed findings from our parent research
Verified the steps of their process
Shared what was and wasn’t working about each step
Prioritized the issues to address
Brainstormed ideas for how to address the most pressing issues
My values in action: Build ownership in others, Lived experience is expertise, Be a shepherd.
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Each workshop was attended by 8-18 people, ranging from occupational/physical therapists who worked directly with parents and children to administrative staff to team leaders.
Introductions activity, Norms setting, Objectives, Agenda
Each person introduced themselves and shared with the group why they found their work meaningful. We reviewed a set of norms I presented and added to it. We aligned on objectives for the workshop and reviewed an agenda for our 2 hours together.Review and update intake process map
This ensured that we had a record of each team’s intake process, complete with key details.Review parent feedback
Staff had an opportunity to review quotes from parents and place them on the process map with a green dot for positive sentiment and red dot for negative sentiment. They also marked quotes they felt were particularly insightful or important. This was a way for them to synthesize (make sense of) the parent feedback. At the end, we could visually see where in the process the parent experience was predominantly positive and where it was predominantly negative.Synthesize and Prioritize parent feedback
Staff worked in pairs to summarize parent feedback into themes. Each staff member received a number of dot stickers to vote on themes to ideate (generate solutions) on. Through voting, we aligned on 3-4 themes to take forward.Brainstorm/Ideate solutions
For each theme to ideate around, we put up butcher paper that had three prompts:Ideas that might work if there were no requirements of constraints
Ideas you could implement as early as next week
Ideas that use new or existing technology in new or different ways
Prioritize ideas
Each staff member received a number of dot stickers to vote on which ideas to implement first.Next steps and close
OUTCOME
More Transparency + Improvement Ideas
The work from each workshop was digitized and shared with central leadership and all regional teams. They now have everything they need to see and learn from one another’s processes, strengths, and pain points. The prioritized issues and ideas were aggregated across teams in a summary document to show which issues were experienced by multiple teams and which ideas had support from multiple teams. MCITP leadership will be hiring two additional full-time intake staff to help implement many of the ideas that came out of this project.
See the digitized artifacts below:
Process and Parent Research
Ideas
FEEDBACK
“We did a year-long leadership training, meeting weekly, and it didn't go anywhere. Working with you has been thought- provoking and we generated doable ideas! ”
— S.W.
“This [workshop] was so encouraging! This is the first time I feel like we might actually implement some changes!”
— H.S