Freshfields approached us to help them create a number of personas and to use those personas to develop a series of in-depth user journeys ahead of a major forthcoming redesign.

Freshfields were interested in utilising our experience of persona development and user journey workshop facilitiation to help validate vital user information ahead of a major website redesign.

The main objectives of the project were to:

• Facilitate a persona development workshop, fleshing out three primary personas as typical users of the website.
• Use those personas to inform the creation of a series of user journey maps.
• The maps detailed the user’s thoughts, needs and worries along with multiple touch points they would likely have with Freshfields, their partners and their competitors
• Develop those user journey workshop discussions into full-colour journey maps, highlighting the user’s progress towards success.

We find that user journeys are a great way to communicate what we’re trying to achieve to stakeholders – and as such they are a standard tool in our user experience toolkit. They help us demonstrate how the future state of a website or service could look. Along with personas they are frequently one of the key outputs from the requirements gathering stage at the start of a project.

We often use them to help us understand how users will interact with your website or service and what they expect from it. Furthermore they aid identification of possible functionality at a high level. By understanding the key tasks users will want to complete, we can start to understand what sort of functional requirements will help enable success.

The persona and user journey development workshops were a great success. The five members of staff dedicated themselves to the task and all felt like it had been a worthwhile session.