Chapter 1. How Will UX Mapping Change Your (Users) Life?

In this book, I will change your life. I will show you techniques that will help you to understand your users, gain strategic insights, and improve communication within the team and with stakeholders.

In this introductory chapter, we will perform the following things:

• Create our first User Experience Map.
• Similar to the other chapters of this book, we will solve a real-world problem, but for this one, we will start with a rather fun and unusual one.
• After setting the scene, we will take a look into the shortcomings of the old requirements document from the waterfall product management model.
• This naturally leads to the solution that states that most problems can and will be solved with improved communication.
• We will see how mapping can be the ideal tool to facilitate communication.
• We will have to discuss some basic mapping terms, output, outcome, and opportunity.
• The next sections of this chapter are about visualizing and creating a backlog.
• All this should equip the reader to create their first UX map on paper.
• Then, they should be able to do it digitally. (You should use the software you are most comfortable with to map. In the following chapters, we will use a wide array of software tools, but for this chapter, I have chosen Microsoft Word.)