As part of a company-wide initiative to improve the onboarding experience, I led an effort to map the journey of a key user persona during his initial interactions with our product. The goal of the project was to synthesize insights from across several customer-facing departments, identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement, and foster shared understanding and alignment among the leadership, engineering, product, and UX teams.

From the initial ask to document issues with onboarding, we narrowed the starting point to a journey map for a single persona, Devon the Developer, from the time that his organization acquires our product through the completion of several core tasks.

We chose journey mapping as a method because it would allow us to create a unified vision of the user’s experience as he interacts with different parts of the organization and product, to get started quickly by leveraging internal knowledge, and to use the collaborative creation process and visual storytelling to build empathy and a shared sense of purpose among stakeholders to drive improvements. We selected the target persona both because he represents the largest segment of users and based on anecdotal evidence that he faces the most challenges using the product.

Due both to time and resource constraints and underutilized sources of internal knowledge, I adopted a hypothesis-validation model. To gather insights about Devon’s onboarding experience, I ran a series of hands-on workshops with employees in services and support who have substantial contact with new users as they navigate the product for the first time.