User journey mapping

Purpose:

  • Establish a shared understanding of typical user journeys through the platform, especially the challenges users are facing
  • More focus on a holistic picture of the user experience instead of point solutions
  • By applying focus we can identify patterns rather than reacting to individual customer complaints that may not be representative
  • Understanding biggest problems for target user personas helps prioritise work

Method:

  • I started with interviews and observations, then transitioned to simulated using a demo instance with me playing the roles of various collaborators. Notification emails were mocked up in Figma.
  • I looked at activities from authoring to delegation, approval and review
  • I mapped out the specific journeys taken
  • I divided the journey into 9 phases:
  • Migration
  • Editing
  • Collaborating
  • Requesting approval
  • Approval
  • Amending
  • Review reminding
  • Review awareness
  • Reviewing
  • And recorded and clustered pain points by journey phase and by theme
  • For the later sessions I used ChatGPT to help analyse transcripts (anonymised)

Discoveries

  • The most problematic journey is the Policies and Controls management lifecycle (although Risk management is very close). All the other observations relate to this journey.
  • The structure of the platform, and the content in it is widely valued
  • Users have a wide variety of ways of working in their org and with the platform and there were often a wide range of routes through these phases.
  • When writing, users often have some reference material open in another view.
  • Problems were clustered around collaboration, especially approval
  • A surprising number of Optimise users had not migrated all of their company policies to ISMS.online. Instead they uploaded Word docs or PDFs or linked to SharePoint files within the ISMS.online policies.
  • Our Note editor (Redactor) was seen as a significant pain point due to formatting issues
  • Customers use a variety of methods to collaborate/communicate: To-dos, Discussions, inline comments in Notes, Slack or face-to-face
  • On submission for approval, users have no easy method to summarise why and what they are changing
  • There’s often no clear distinction between approved and interim versions
  • Some want the option of making a change without requiring approval
  • To-do lists are hard to use due to filter options
  • Users struggled to find approval requests