Course 2 Review / Loop In :

Empathy maps, personas, user stories, and user journey maps are tools UX designers commonly use to expand our understanding of the people we're designing for.

• Empathy maps help UX designers understand a user's behavior when interacting with a product. To get a little more specific, empathy maps focus on four main motivations of users: what the user says, thinks, does, and feels. In other words, empathy maps tap into our users' minds and hearts to help us understand their thoughts and feelings in a given situation.
• A user story is a fictional one-sentence story told from a persona's point of view to inspire and inform design decisions. It introduces the user, lays out an obstacle, and states our ultimate goal.
• User journeys build off the personas and user stories you've already created. User journeys help you come up with ideas for designs that truly support the user's needs and reduce their problems, or what we also like to call "pain points.”
• Together, empathy maps, personas, user stories, and user journey maps help us create a problem statement, or a clear description of a user's needs that our design should address.

Earlier in the course, you used four tools - empathy maps, personas, user stories, and user journey maps - to help gain a deeper understanding of users’ needs. All of these tools informed the creation of a problem statement and will guide your ideation process moving forward. As a quick refresher:

• Empathy maps explore users’ four main motivations: what the user says, thinks, does, and feels. The insights gathered from empathy maps help you come up with ideas for solutions that address the user’s real problems.
• Personas place the users who you’re designing for front-and-center. By creating detailed user profiles, you can clearly envision potential users that you’d design for.
• User stories determine which user needs are the most critical to address with your designs. This direction will help focus your ideation.
• User journeys help you come up with ideas for designs that truly support the users’ needs and solve their problems.
• A problem statement is a clear description of the user’s need that should be addressed. The problem statement you created in the last course will guide the focus of your ideation.

User research provides insights into how users behave, how users experience or think about a product, and more. Whether you conduct the user research yourself or with the help of a designated UX researcher, your research findings will help you understand how to design your product based on what your users really need. As UX designers, we always keep users top-of-mind, so using findings from research can go a long way in informing the ideation process.

• Goal Statements : What the product lets the user do, who the product effects, how the product solves the problem

User Flows - the path taken by a typical user on an app or website so they can complete a task from start to finish

Outlining a User Flow :

• Circles = Actions
• Rectangle = Screen of a digital product
• Diamond = Decisions
• Arrow = Directions

In UX design, a storyboard is a series of panels or frames that visually describes and explores a user’s experience with a product.