Co-creating User Journey Map - A Systematic Approach to Exploring Users' Day-to-Day Experience in Participatory Design Workshops

Mutual learning scaffolds co-realization and knowledge exchange between the users and designers to facilitate effective collaborative creation and decision processes in participatory design. Two common challenges recognized in mutual learning processes are how to efficiently uncover users' experience and immerse designers or engineers in users' know-how of their everyday experience. In this study, we intend to introduce a collaborative user journey map creation process among users, designers, and system engineers. Unlike other user journey maps created by the researchers and served as a reference for workshop discussion, in this study, we had the older participants, the engineers, and the designers to co-create the user journey map during the workshop to enhance mutual learning. The new user journey map building process included using LEGO (R) to build the participants' life space representations, interviewing the participants about their typical day experience with the living space representation and event sheets, building up the user journey map with event sheets' information and advanced interviews, and identifying the life challenges within groups. The post-interview analysis showed that the chronological and visual features of the user journey map effectively revealed older participants' life experiences and challenges with other workshop members. The new way of making user journey maps engaged all the workshop participants in the journey map co-creation activity and enhanced designers' or engineers' commitment to the mutual learning process.