Mapping Stakeholders and User Journeys

Warning: This post is largely an excuse to post a few photos of elaborate post-it note creations!

The NMS team (and our collaborators at LiveWork) recently spent a day thinking about the various stakeholders that are affected by the project and its aim to develop a national strategy for the collection, preservation and digitisation of monographs.

We began by mapping the stakeholder landscape and visually representing this complex, interrelated and multi-stakeholder space. We wrote as many of the stakeholders in the space down on post-it notes and stuck them on the wall.

This visual representation allowed us to begin mapping the key actors, actions and behaviours as well as other factors such as technology and policy.

NMS stakeholder map

It also enabled us to begin tracing some of the user journeys through this landscape.

We can map out the important ‘actions’ that occur when a user interacts with a monograph, such as being aware of a title, searching, finding, using and so on.

What you begin to build is a user lifecycle.
NMS user lifecycle

Against this lifecycle we can begin to see where, for different users, the significant interactions and touch points are, as well as the actual and potential pain points.

What this process has helped us do is begin to see through some of the complexity of this space by focusing on the users of monographs and their interactions with them.

This is inevitably a simplification – but it is an important start to ensuring that we follow our own principle of delivering benefits to users, especially students and researchers.

NMS stakeholder map and lifecycle

These stakeholder and user journey maps will be important both for our experts workshop where these will provide a frame and context to the activities we’ll be doing, but also for the ongoing project and ensuring that it is able to identify the right opportunities in this space for effective interventions.

As the project progresses,this map and these journeys will become more refined and will begin to provide us with a user-focused framework within which potential solutions can begin to be dropped.

 

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