A review of

The Persona and Journey Map Playbook: Designing Human-Centered Artifacts to Inspire and Drive Change

Apress

374 pages, 18 chapters

About this book

by Andrew Schall

Book Website

A good reference for Methods/How-To

Primary audience: Researchers and designers who are new or have some experience with the topic

Writing style: Matter of fact

Text density: Mostly text

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Personas and journey maps are long-established tools in the UX field that are used to describe users, their goals, and key tasks. But they are often impractical, misaligned with larger organizational goals, and after their initial presentation, fail to inspire action or drive decision-making. Andrew Schall’s book, The Persona and Journey Map Playbook, analyzes why these tools can fail and, more importantly, proposes a new framework for creating data-driven, impactful personas and journey maps.

The core of the book is a step-by-step guide that walks readers through creating personas and journey maps—from identifying organizational needs and user goals, to conducting research and building artifacts, to ensuring these tools stay relevant and measurable over time. Each chapter of the book has a clear purpose that builds upon the knowledge shared previously while including examples that are easy to understand. The writing style is direct and instructional, and the images and graphics provide helpful context without being irrelevant or distracting.

Schall’s central argument around why most personas and journey maps are universally ineffective is that there are simply too many of them, designed by different teams at different times using differing levels of detail, which makes it very hard for organizations to align on a shared understanding of their users. To counteract the “fog” he describes, Schall introduces the paradigm of altitudes to create personas and journey maps at specific levels of detail. Schall uses a metaphor of flying where, at high altitudes, you can see broad aspects of the landscape, such as mountains or rivers, whereas when the plane descends, you can recognize cities and roads, and then, at the lowest altitude, you can see details of houses and cars emerge. The metaphor is used to describe how personas and journey maps should be designed to support a specific level of granularity of information. The author writes, “Increasing and decreasing altitudes provide a telescoping lens for viewing various levels of detail and context” (Schall 2024, 42). For example, high-altitude artifacts represent the most common attributes of the user base, which is something any team in the organization should understand. A level down, mid-altitude artifacts are most relevant for individual departments or for helping inform product roadmaps. Finally, low-level artifacts reflect nuances of user types and behaviors, which is most meaningful for teams building specific product features.

Before building personas, the author recommends that organizations calibrate their unique user altitudes within a Persona Attribute Framework. Think of each attribute as a characteristic of a persona that represents a key aspect of what makes that persona unique. The book uses an example of a company building a gaming mobile app; persona characteristics may be the amount of time spent gaming (casual or frequent) or how familiar the persona is with the app (new or returning user). The Persona Attribute Framework diagram shows how the attributes relate to one another, so it’s visually clear which attributes are more discrete and detailed, and which are more relatable across a range of possible personas. Schall writes, “A persona’s characteristics will vary, but they should all possess distinct differences that help define and clearly distinguish a persona from all the others. Defining levels allows personas with the same detail and context to ‘live’ in established altitudes” (2024, 57). Once the framework is complete, existing personas in the organization should be mapped to a Persona Family Tree to visualize the relationships between the personas and to prevent duplicating new personas. Foundational personas appear at the trunk of the family tree, from which all other lower-altitude personas originate. As the branches fork and become smaller, they represent personas within the same family that are more detailed and granular. These sections of the book describe Schall’s new framework using the author’s examples and visuals to transform mere theoretical concepts into practical tools.

Chapters covering research that informs the design of personas and journey maps may be familiar in terms of content, but the book is comprehensive and provides specific methodological guidance. These methods are not fuzzy exercises based on preconceived organizational notions about users; they form a process based on rigor. The book provides direction on the elements of effective personas, which the author argues should be designed with a modular approach. Schall writes, “Creating templates for personas is essential to ensure that they will be easily understood and utilized by various teams within an organization. Templates establish a common language and framework facilitating communication and collaboration across business units” (2024, 150).

The aviation metaphor returns with a description of the flight path, representing the beginning and end points of the journey map. Each journey should be linked to a persona and their unique goals. As Schall writes, “A persona’s goal is fundamentally linked to the concept of a flight path in journey mapping, as it serves as the destination that guides the entire journey. Just as a pilot plans a flight path with a specific endpoint in mind, you will map out a user’s journey with the persona’s goal as the final objective. This alignment ensures that every step, interaction, and waypoint in the journey is purposefully directed toward helping the persona achieve their goal” (2024, 213). Schall consistently challenges the reader to create journey maps that align with organizational goals so they can be measured to track progress over time. Instead of a typical emotional line, which is subjective and often flawed, he introduces an “Experience Quality Score,” which is a numerical representation of the quality of the user experience at specific touchpoints in the journey. A baseline score of zero represents the neutral or expected experience; a score above or below the neutral line indicates the experience has deviated either positively or negatively from user expectations. The score is calculated using a mix of data sources, which could include web analytics, customer support interactions, customer surveys, and usability test findings. The book’s central message is that personas and journey maps are living artifacts that must be refreshed based on new data and connected with other insights and initiatives to be effective. For readers in leadership positions, the discussion of the development of a user artifact program and the governance process may be especially relevant.

The Persona and Journey Map Playbook is both comprehensive in scope and accessible because of its clear structure and examples that are easy to understand. Readers with more limited experience are taught the fundamentals of research, analysis, synthesis, and even visual design techniques needed to create personas and journey maps. More experienced practitioners can learn Schall’s framework for applying a systems lens to these tools and may potentially re-evaluate their existing approach. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to create more impactful and inspiring personas and journey maps.

Representing users at many altitudes may have you reaching for an air sickness bag. Instead of generating many personas and journey maps to represent every aspect of your users, the concept of altitudes can make it much easier to establish a common view and consistent framework.                                                   

A small set of high-altitude personas can help represent the overarching types of audiences that an organization needs to support. From there, you can break down the audiences into subsets of the higher altitude persona, which is then represented by a set of mid-altitude personas that provide a deeper level of their context and unique needs while still inheriting the traits of the higher altitude persona. Lower altitude personas are reserved for use cases that require the team to understand very specific subsets of user groups.