User Journey and how it helps

A user journey is a series of steps (typically 4-12) which represent a scenario in which a user might interact with the thing you are designing. User journeys are helping in demonstrating the way users could interact with the platform. Demonstrating the vision for the project. User journeys are a great way to communicate what you are trying to achieve with stakeholders. They show an example of what the future state of the platform would be. 

A user journey as the name suggests is for each specific user and a specific goal.Example user journeys: Clients with the goal to hire temporary candidate or Clients with the goal to approve timesheets and so on. 

To create user journeys first step is to simply write down:

• your user’s goals
• their motivations
• their pain points
• their overall character and
• the main tasks they will perform to achieve their goal. 

Second and most important thing a user journey should contain is a series of steps. These steps could be simple text based or visual wireframes. There are hundreds of free tools available to create wireframes, but a simple hand drawn sketch should do just fine. But a user journey should never be detailed and beautiful. Since we do not want the reviewers to be distracted by beauty, but rather focus on the core functionality. 

Here is an example of text based : 

and visual sketch based user journey

You want to differentiate user journey vs the platform logic. Meaning a user journey should focus on what is it that the user is doing on the platform and not what the platform is doing on the back or how platform is doing something.

To give an example of Shazam app: The user journey will include steps like this:

1. User is at a restaurant or pub and listens to a nice song and want to know what song that is. 
2. User opens the Shazam app and clicks the button: Identify the song
3. User waits a few seconds and gets the name of the song along with artists and other details. 
4. User can do one of the following: Add song to its library, Listen on Apple Music or Spotify, View lyrics or just ignore the song. 

If you see in this user journey we do not discuss how we identify songs (that would go under Logic/Algorithms) and that we need the permission of device's microphone to listen to the song(that would go under edge cases).

While designing you will also want to think broadly in each step about things such as: Context (where is this user? what is around them?), Progression (How each step enables them to next), Devices (what device they are using), Emotion (what is their emotional state when using the platform)