User Journeys for inspiring UX Design
User journeys are a critical path in UX design projects. They are a diagrammatic representation of the tasks users go through to reach their goals, mapping stakeholder pain points and perspectives along the way. By detailing current workflows, user journeys provide valuable insight into users’ motivations and objectives that is used to form the foundation of the UX design direction. One such project that reaped the benefits of user journeys was Ormco’s digital orthodontist application.
We began our design process by conducting User Needs research. During this phase our Research team discovered members of the orthodontist healthcare staff were using the system differently. This caused a fragmented approach to tracking and monitoring patient care and appointments. Areteworks created personas—different characters created to represent each segment type— to better understand the needs and wants of the different users accessing the application.
Our UX designers then mapped out user journeys performed by each group. Creating user journeys from the different types of personas provides a clear user narrative and focuses attention on the stakeholder’s needs and pain points. Our design team made use of the user journeys to find innovative solutions to numerous workflow issues. Among the many design solutions our UX specialists implemented was a dashboard screen to give orthodontists a quick overview of their upcoming appointments and the status of recent patient care. In addition, we also gave technicians more intuitive avenues to view and access case alerts with a quick way to search for patients.
User journeys foster a user-centric design approach, which ultimately leads to a more innovative and inspiring user experience. By utilizing our expertise in conducting user journeys and providing intuitive and achievable solutions to stakeholder’s needs and frustrations, Areteworks was able to deliver a simple and successful user experience for Ormco’s digital orthodontist application.