A new perspective on personas and customer journey maps: Proposing systemic UX

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102583Get rights and content

Highlights

  • User experience is often measured by aggregated levels of satisfaction and pleasure.

  • Innovations in services may not be pleasurable for a number of users.

  • A novel approach is proposed attempting to minimise displeasures.

  • Designers should incorporate systemic views of pleasure into innovations.

  • Systemic user experience can result in more efficient technological innovations.

Abstract

This article explores user experience research within a consequentialist philosophical framework, where an optimal design depends on users’ resultant levels of satisfaction and pleasure. Personas and customer journey maps can be pragmatic in indicating the requirements of a system by aggregating the overall pleasure of the majority of users. However, a revised approach, focused on minimising displeasures at the expense of reducing the pleasures of others, may level out individuals’ satisfactory experiences with a view toward more holistic, systemic satisfaction for all users. We explore our philosophical thinking and illustrate these premises with a project set out to develop technological innovation for the rail industry. We conclude with recommendations of how designers could think about user experience to incorporate systemic views of pleasure when proposing innovations.

Introduction

Models for increasing customer satisfaction are built on designing pleasurable products and providing value-adding services (Kuniavsky et al., 2012). The concept of experience is central to the pursuit of better customer satisfaction. Experience can be defined as an episode or a length of time that one individual goes through (Hassenzahl, 2010), involving tangible perceptions through senses and also feelings and thoughts. User experience (UX) is a very personal phenomenon: what engages and enchants one user may bore or irritate another (Blythe et al., 2006). UX design focuses on interactive products and services that create, facilitate and mediate the process of experiential perception and the resultant satisfaction levels felt by individuals (Hassenzahl, 2010). Interactive products and services that we encounter in our lives have the power to shape what we feel, and will inevitably influence our experience (Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, 2006). Customer satisfaction is highly related to what people expect to receive from the service provider (Zeithaml et al., 1993), hence the importance of evaluating what users need and desire.

Socio-technical systems such as transportation are challenging fields to integrate these ideas into. Design strategies across different modes such as road, rail or air transport show that user perceptions in terms of utility and ease of use are important determinants of uptake and acceptance (Aceves-González et al., 2016; Fei et al., 2016; Kefalidou et al., 2016; Oliveira et al., 2019). We build on these concepts of UX design to spur system acceptance, staged in the contextual challenges posed by rail transport. We argue that any kind of system-wide utility not only stems from individual users’ feelings of pleasure and ease, but at once relies on an interconnected network whereby users’ negative values can impact other users’ valuations of a system. In other words, one person's negative experience can damage the total ease of use felt across all users’ experiences. This shared staging of interdependent utilities – broadly branded as ‘systemic’ throughout this article – is reflected in our application of personas and customer journey maps that collate and contrast data obtained from multiple users. This work is particularly pertinent to addressing the problems surrounding British rail transport, which otherwise seeks to standardise and conform users’ experiences.

Importantly, this reasoning calls into question the credibility of design decisions generally: how, and should we, incorporate into our methods techniques for more fairly and socially-responsibly researching the systemic impacts of designs? This question is in part inspired by pre-existing research, as well as wider conceptions of gender equality, which call for more diverse applications of shared responsibility in designing from a feminine ethics of care (Basart et al., 2015). The present research is grounded in contemporary revisions of traditional philosophy toward better grasping the interconnectedness of users, around care and compassion. Through our methods, these sentiments are organised into concrete nodes, or ‘values’, that are woven into data collection and the strategies for its presentation. For example, the data puts forward the limits and non-exclusivity of individuals’ pleasures, so that one user's experience may well be hampered by encountering and negatively experiencing other users during a journey. This strategy follows previous research that has outlined value-oriented approaches to user research (Pereira and Baranauskas, 2015). Categorising users’ values, it is possible to define shared interests and interactive goals across a system, for example, affection, security and adaptability. These terms fit into the wider framework of what this research titles as ‘systemic’ values, fleshing out the emotional implications of shared user experiences. Moreover, when applying this research to designing with systemic principles in mind, values referring to “cultural particularities” between individuals (Pereira and Baranauskas, 2015, p. 71) can be referred back to for a breakdown of system-wide values that are shared by users in socio-technical systems.

Design tools are frequently used in the process of improving and developing products and services, allowing people from multiple disciplines to engage in service design (Broberg et al., 2011; Mackrill et al., 2017). One of these tools is the Customer Journey Map, which can provide a graphical representation of users’ encounters with products, services or systems. These diagrams present stages of the journey, user actions and emotions at specific times and locations (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010). They usually display the points of contact with a system, illustrating users’ affective responses during interactions. Journey maps are applied in the process of creating new technologies, where designers map problematic touchpoints and determine where innovation can improve or worsen user satisfaction. An apt method for plotting a continuum of experiences throughout a rail journey, the importance attributed to discrete touchpoints in turn signals the extent to which the collective user experiences of rail transport is grounded in shared, interdependent and systems-based events.

Another common design tool, personas are used to represent archetypal users and facilitate the understanding of user behaviours, needs, motivations, characteristics and limitations (Cooper, 1999; Goodwin, 2009). Having a small set of personas can make real users more tangible and facilitate empathy from the development team. Personas can be pragmatic tools for the development of products for specific users and their needs, and help during the prioritisation of product requirements (Miaskiewicz and Kozar, 2011). The resulting proposed product or service should be the one that mostly satisfies users, and developers must allow enough adaptation and customisation so the system is able to “bend and stretch and adapt to the user's needs” (Cooper, 1999, p. 127). Importantly for this project, Oliveira et al. created personas to represent train passengers (2018) and crewmembers facing new technology at work (2020), and Marshall et al. (2015) demonstrated how personas were used to evaluate the accessibility of rail transport and indicate failure points involving ticket machines and navigation at stations.

A discussion of these two research methods bears context-based relevance to rail transport, which links empirical insight to theories that mandate a more social and systemic model for UX. This paper seeks to produce a methodological framework that works against the independence of individual consumers’ satisfaction. Instead, our methodology frames a more holistic, interrelated system that designs for unified networks of interests and experiences. Central to this is minimising the displeasure felt by any user on the basis that this damages the overall utility and value of a system. This is realised through our philosophical considerations of contemporary utilitarianism, which opens up to broader systemic thinking. Concretising these concepts in our research, we leverage persona-based research, in line with the socio-technical interdependence evidenced in the continuum of mapped experiences shared between any and all users of rail transport. As is usual with product and service design (Maguire, 2001; Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010), our research focuses on consumers, but in addition philosophically observes the possibly invisible needs of a minority of users as part of designing shared and holistic utilities in socio-technical networks.

User experience research follows a philosophical logic akin to consequentialism, or that the value of properties depends on the consequential experiences evoked in users. Utilitarianism, a form of consequentialist philosophical logic, originates in the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. They suggested that an ethically – or efficiently – justifiable system depends on the maximisation of individuals’ levels of satisfaction and pleasure (Bentham, 1996; Mill, 1864). This calibration is essentially quantitative, and the final calculation is one of deriving net utility felt by the majority of users. However, there are many criticisms of utilitarian consequentialism, originating from Bentham's contemporaries in the 19th century (Bentham, 1996), who attacked the unstable and subjective aspect of hedonistic fulfilment. What is pleasurable to one may be a source of pain for another. Quantitative hedonists simply aggregate the pleasures of people within a group, calculating a net utility by adding all people's pleasure and subtracting their pain. This was problematic: not only was there a question of what defined a pleasure and determined it as a unit of measurement for utility, but many highlighted the dynamism and variation amongst one another in what was deemed a pleasurable experience.

A follower of Bentham, Mill's (1864) utilitarianism, then, proposed a revision of higher and lower pleasures. In determining some pleasures as more valuable or higher than others, a qualitative aspect was introduced to the calculation of net utility. This research interrogates what the basis might be for these qualitative evaluations in the UX sphere, resourcing personas and customer journey maps as a method for collating the complexity of human affect in terms of valence and activation (Posner et al., 2005). The problem of hedonistic reasoning still remains: is being calm and serene comparable to being excited and enthusiastic? Are we capable of calculating an aggregation of people's various pleasures, and what determines some of their values to be higher than others? And in our particular case, how can we translate this into our UX research for working through the various and disparate utilities users associate with rail transport?

Since the works of Bentham and Mill, more contemporary philosophers have introduced a variety of debates and additional premises toward defining the optimal form of consequentialist good. Nozick's (2013) imagining of the ‘experience machine’ thought experiment introduces many of these contemporary concerns. He asks: would people consent to entering a virtual reality machine that engineered an individual's experience of the world to be maximally pleasurable, without any discomfort? We are led to wonder whether an individual's consenting decision would be influenced if they were conscious of the machine as virtual reality; the system they occupied would be fictitious, void of other people or agencies beyond the user. Whilst hedonists may select purely sensational pleasures and consent to entering the machine, and whilst Mill may solely be concerned with the qualitative aspects of independent pleasures, contemporary revisions more so focus on propositional pleasures that are dependent upon and invite the agencies of other users and as well as the possibility of accommodating negative sensations within a system (Feldman, 1997). This reformulated kind of consequentialism, termed propositional utilitarianism, can be condensed into the example ‘I am happy that you did that for me’, whereby my pleasure derives from a certain state of affairs outside of myself, the fact that something was done without me, but positively affects me and thus the system we occupy together.

Through these contemporary revisions of utilitarianism, we can discern a more systemic landscape opening out, through which utility can be thought of more collectively and interdependently, toward care and compassion for other users in a system. Similarly, in UX research, contemporary work should consider whether the most efficient design is justified merely on the basis of each individual's discrete satisfaction. Instead, the maximisation of systemic satisfaction might be better achieved by attending to a holistic set of interrelated needs. Still working toward maximal profit and positive branding, previous research can be observed that advocates for greater attention in the design process to maximising users’ affective responses. Particularly, attention is given less to the recognition of discrete product utilities and more so to how such a product contains and coordinates users within a positive relational field – systemic satisfaction. A specific instance of this, pertinent to the current research, recent arguments have suggested the benefits of designing along an “affective path [which] may have more influence than the utilitarian path in facilitating branded app loyalty” (Tseng and Lee, 2018, p. 1307).

This research seeks to justify the kinds of compromises individual users want (and sometimes need) from profit-seeking rail companies. Handling primary data so as to highlight the importance of systemic needs (modelled after the propositional and preference-based contemporary revisions of utilitarianism), this research leverages customer journey maps and personas as foundations to build a more unified and systemic model of optimal utility across users’ experiences of the rail transport system. Following one of the major proponents of systems theory, Gregory Bateson, this paper is informed by his conception of three interrelated systems: the individual, the society and the ecosystem (Bateson, 1972). This research seeks to apply his sentiment that “human consciousness is considered as the coupling of these systems”, toward reconfiguring questions of human purpose and adaptation within a systemic “balance[ing] between man, his society and his ecosystem” (Bateson, 1972, p. 446). This sentiment is applied to the field of user experience and the particular design of rail transport services, considering the networking of individuals within socio-technical systems. Moreover, with a specific interest in the introduction of emerging technologies into the rail network, a preliminary cautiousness is guided by Bateson's notion that distortions implemented by modern technology can become destructive of the balances within systems.

The above sections can be specifically contextualised alongside ongoing research into the UXs of rail transport, as this article attends to the specific potentiality for the implementation of emerging technologies to achieve better functionality and customer satisfaction. Technology developments, together with increasing user connectivity and demand for more information (Transport Focus, 2014), present remarkable opportunities to increase the number of features available to passengers. There are opportunities to improve pre-trip, boarding, onboard, post-trip information, fare collection processes and wayfinding guidance in the attempt to improve passengers’ experiences (Camacho et al., 2013; Foth and Schroeter, 2010; Groff et al., 2014; Oliveira et al., 2019; Peña Miñano et al., 2017). Framing this with contemporary revisions of utilitarianism, central issues arise regarding the possible struggles and obstacles a minority of users will inevitably face with the increased technologising of a service. There are reports of resistance prior to the adoption of technology, when users consider a range of factors such as ease of use and usefulness, but which are less prominent after continued usage (Karahanna et al., 1999). Other barriers should also be considered, as not all passengers use smartphones, and some of them fear being disadvantaged if other people get lower prices and better services (Transport Focus, 2014).

Travel time can be a gift to the individual traveller, who often is immersed in their own activities during journeys to pass the time (Lyons et al., 2016; Oliveira et al., 2016). However, not all journeys are experienced in quiet comfort: activities of fellow passengers may be a source of distress (Jain and Lyons, 2008; Wardman and Murphy, 2015). Specific demographic groups have more difficulties with certain parts of journeys, for example when boarding or alighting (Aceves-González et al., 2016). On top of this, given the propositional and systemic nature of pleasure and utility, this research further questions the extent to which the minority's displeasure may impact and interrupt the journeys of the majority.

In terms of this specific environment, with a wealth of challenges and criticism currently surroundings issues in rail transport, much of the blame is being placed on the corporatisation of what was once a nationalised sphere. Calculations of costs and benefits guided the British rail privatisation programme, a project with questionable results (Jupe and Funnell, 2017; McCartney and Stittle, 2017). By using a utilitarian approach, it was given the diverse components of the industry accounting values, and entrepreneurial freedom was seen as the solution to bring about improvements to the industry. Benefits proposed by privatisation included lower fares, increased number of passengers transported and improved quality of service. However, journeys are being compromised by the increasing crowding (ORR, 2015; Wockatz and Schartau, 2015), there has been a decline in passenger satisfaction over recent years (Lyons et al., 2016), and poor public transport can impact passengers’ quality of life and health (Friman et al., 2017).

There appears to be a reliance on technology as a facilitator to improve passenger experience (Transport Committe, 2016), even though the problems surrounding rail transport in the UK seem considerably more complex. The philosophy that arose from these issues was also boosted by the current emphasis on the development of transport services that “take into consideration the greatest diversity of potential end users” (Santana et al., 2018, p. 152). Ethical questions emerged and heightened the need for research and analysis of user experiences of the travelling public.

The premises for this article originated from the potential improvements brought about by emerging technology in the pursuit of better products and services for train passengers. As part of a multidisciplinary, academic-industry partnership project, this research was set to critically view UX research in its attempt to inform the requirements of technological innovations. We framed the potentials and promises of technology within a revised utilitarianism that considers the systemic nature of pleasure and utility.

The aim of this article was then to propose the concept of systemic UX as an innovative design approach that attends to the balancing of users’ needs and ensuring that minority demographics are not overlooked. Rail transport is focused on as a particularly relevant and challenging context framing these concepts. Design methods of personas and customer journey maps provided the platform for testing these propositions from an integrated standpoint. This writing should be read as a commentary not just on the use of UX research, journey maps and personas, their shortcomings and possible solutions. These problems and revisions also reflect the larger philosophical concerns of many people surrounding the direction of individualisation in public service fulfilment, and the ways in which UX research can accommodate and efficiently apply these concerns toward fostering more shared and equal experiences.

Section snippets

Methods

This research started by collecting and incorporating literature from diverse disciplines to build the core of our argument. Philosophical principles of revised consequentialism (Feldman, 1997) were introduced alongside systems theory, as is commonly applied to the fields of family therapy (Kerr, 1981), and studies of human affect in order to better understand the relations between users (Posner et al., 2005). These disciplines were brought together, creating a system of thought through which

Qualitative data analysis

The thematic data analysis performed during this research indicated that participants have generally strong negative and positive opinions regarding a range of issues related to train travel. Table 4 summarises our dataset and the ways in which we coded responses according to specific thematic areas, representative of the particular aspects of utility. We observed participants’ relationship with the railways in terms of the touchpoints with the system and eventual painpoints. The first column

Discussion

This section expands upon the rationale behind the project's aims, methods and findings, assessing in what ways and the degree to which this reasoning was successfully implemented during our research. By reference to the previously included Table 4 as well as journey maps and personas, this discussion tends toward trying to work through the realisation of a systemic, interconnected socio-technical network in the data and their presentation. User personas and customer journey maps were decided

Conclusion

Containing some methodical description, this research triggered wider philosophical interrogation as to the use, coherency and viability of the use of personas and customer journey maps - common methods of presenting research and influencing design. Personas appear as paradigmatic of the overall UX research mandate, both expressing interests in realising goals and fulfilling these, inducing maximal pleasure for individual users. Questions were also placed on customer journey maps and their fit

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Callum Bradley: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Luis Oliveira: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision. Stewart Birrell: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Project administration. Rebecca Cain: Conceptualization, Methodology,

Declaration of Competing Interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The first and second authors contributed equally to the production and revision of this manuscript. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough comments, which helped improve the quality of this publication. This research is performed as part of the “CLoSeR: Customer Loyalty and Dynamic Seat Reservation System” project, funded by RSSB / Innovate UK (grant no 102483). This project was selected through the competition ‘Enhancing Customer Experience in Rail’.

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