Generative Research is a vital component of UX and design. In the world of user experience, the Generative Research that precedes innovative design and improvements to products / services provides a holistic and transparent view of the human behind the user. Generative Research not only precedes design, but increasingly, generative insights are required for an iterative and agile UX project. We like to think of UX research as an ongoing process that is organic with insights providing a range of dynamic and human-centred data for UX designers and design ops teams as a whole.

Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are used in user research. Traditional methodological approaches, such as focus groups, in depth interviews (IDI’s), user surveys, and ethnographic research are commonly used techniques in this area. Typically, user research is at its most informative during the discovery phase of UX. Generative, or exploratory research formulates if viewed at providing the foundations for UX design. As it would have it, exploratory and generative research can also be referred to as foundational research. Essentially, all of these terms pretty much mean the same thing. What is most important, irrespective of the term you adopt, generative research aims to uncover contextual insights about the user experience. More often than not, we will see user research conducted through qualitative approaches to uncover these contextual insights.

At this point, you might be wondering how user journey mapping fits into all of this. Our understanding of user journey mapping can sometimes be clouded by the idea that it only captures touchpoints of the user journey - that being a quantitative view of digital touchpoints. However, the process of journey mapping can add incredible value to UX, product, and service design. New journey mapping tools underpinned by qualitative insights fit right into the generative phase of your project.

What is a User Journey Mapping tool?

First, it is important to distinguish between journey mapping, from the perspective of Generative Research, and a journey map itself. A user journey map is the visualisation of touchpoints across the journey relative to one or many user personas. The map provides a collective understanding of the user journey for your team.

Journey Mapping then, is the process of capturing these touchpoints. Coming directly from your users/customers, this process encompasses more than just the activities and interactions of the user journey. As journey mapping is increasingly being used to identify problems experienced by users, it is adopted more during the generative phase of design. A journey mapping tool gives us the ability to uncover these real user problems. 

Aligned with qualitative research methods, and operationalised through various technological capabilities, a user journey mapping tool gathers users (research participants) experience throughout their journey. Whether it be experiences across a full service, or a digital journey, the tool itself captures user experiences in context, and in the moment. Based on the activities you require to understand, your users will document their journey at each activity via photo, video, text, screen recording - or a combination of all. As research participants interact with your product, they provide you and your team with insights including their perceptions and opinions about various aspects of each touchpoint. 

The added layer of this includes the multimedia data that showcase the user experience at each touchpoint of a journey. At each moment of user interaction, the uploads from your research participants are automatically segmented to build the user journey. Therefore, the journey mapping tool populates the user journey in real time. With an added quantitative layer to this, a journey mapping tool will provide you with ratings. These ratings allow you to get a holistic view of the positive and negative aspects of the user journey, as reported by your research participants.

Leveraging Journey Mapping as a tool for Generative Research

As mentioned previously, when we think about user journey mapping, we often imagine the final product - the visualisation of a user journey map. Even more, the concept of user journey mapping is commonly thought of as a primarily quantitative way of capturing touch points across the user journey.

Generative Research is hybrid. More importantly, it is a flexible UX research method that can easily adopt a diverse set of methodologies. Taking this into consideration, along with the exploratory nature of generative research, we can design an objective that will enable us to optimise user journey mapping. Here are key ways to leverage a user journey mapping tool for generative research.

When can I use User Journey Mapping for my Generative Research project?

Generative research comes into play when we are seeking to identify issues our users/customers face when using our product, or engaging with our brand more generally. Essentially, generative research aims to highlight key user problems that occur in the real world. Through an exploration of our users behaviours and experiences, we can generate accurate problem statements for the next phase of our product/service design. User journey mapping fits in here. It will give you the ability to identify these problems at specific touch points throughout the user journey. It is always important to note that the journey mapping tool itself, will gather and map qualitative data for your generative research.

How can I integrate user journey mapping into my generative research design?

First, it is important to outline an objective that will encapsulate the user journey across one or many areas within this journey. For instance, you may want to, or more precisely, need to focus specifically on the digital user journey. In this instance, the narrow scope of your objective will allow you to set out tasks for your research participants that will only concern their digital journey. Alternatively, you may want to capture the entire user journey, through awareness, to the final purchase of your product or service. When designing your project, the journey mapping process will need to cover all possible channels your users will interact with.

What questions or tasks do I need to ask of my Generative Research participants?

Remember, when conducting Generative Research (what is Generative Research?), the aim is to not rely on binary, or yes/no results from your research participants. The objective is to dive deeper into their experiences. Explore how they behave with your product. Develop an understanding of the pain points they experience across the digital journey. And, build empathy through the qualitative insights they provide you with.

Therefore, be open-minded and develop tasks for your research participants that are open-ended. The goal is to empower your users and give them a voice. One thing to note here is that you design your tasks according to various stages of the journey. Although you might have a general idea of the user journey, there is always the possibility that your users interact and behave differently. This means that you will more often than not uncover new touchpoints, unknown areas of their online path to purchase that are underserved in UX. These are just some examples.

The main point is that you design tasks that aim to capture the key areas of the journey, but expect unknowns to service from your exploratory design.

How does a User Journey Mapping tool manage all the generative insights?

This research is completely optimised by technology that will speed up your data sorting and analysis time. The process is simple, and everything is connected. Research participants report on their journey as they are notified about the tasks you have set out for them. For example - The first task may require them to provide a mobile screen recording of them navigating to your website. Within that, you might ask your users to describe the activities and identify areas of their interaction that worked well, and that did not work well. Let's refer to this as Task 1.

As soon as your research participants receive notification of task 1, the journey mapping tool is live and awaits the upload. Once research participants have completed task 1, they will submit. The journey mapping tool gathers, and segments this into a live journey map. From the perspective of the researcher, you will be able to dive right in and uncover insights instantly. 

Benefits of using a Journey Mapping tool for Generative Research

Journey Mapping can often be viewed as a technique carried out by quantitative measures. Even more, the journey mapping process itself can be overlooked as many view the primary goal is to have a final depiction in the form of a journey map. We encourage researchers and UX teams to adopt an agile approach to journey mapping. The benefits can be seen throughout all stages of a project. Journey mapping tools, now leveraged by multimedia insights and in the moment mapping, can be extremely useful for exploratory research. It enables us to uncover a variety of insights about our users, giving us far greater knowledge about the details of our customers' lives and experiences with our brand and our competitors.

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We’ve supported thousands of research projects covering everything from mapping the path to purchase for aquarium filters to mortgage buyer journeys to mapping the patient journey of kidney transplant patients.

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