Congratulations on working through your project and making a user journey. If you haven't had a chance yet to publish your project, anytime is great, feel free. It's always handy to get things out in the world and get feedback, or have questions, or just sort of take that victory lap say, I did it, taking a look back at what we have explored and practice in this class. So whether you're on a solo project, you've got this practice of listening, thinking, questioning, observing, taking notes and structuring them in a journey, and it creates a deeper understanding who your audience is, and what do they do and what's it like for them to experience what you made. And then for teams, well, the same thing is true. It's that you've got that understanding that is a wider perspective and even bolstered by people who Have more backgrounds then then then in any individual could have, that is a huge benefit toward making this a collaborative tool for those of you who are new or new ish to wearing the hat of design, extra congratulations.

These tools are definitely for you. And they're for anyone who wants to get in that process of digging in investigating from a wider perspective, to make some good decisions for who they're serving. When this goes well, okay, this is uh, looking ahead, or looking back at other projects that you've you've been on. So, again, they've gone well, if you've included more than one perspective, you've mapped these perspectives in a way that helps the user. You have an idea where to go next with the map, and then the whole map represents it an easier story to tell. But of course, it's possible for things to not go well with mapping.

So you could be basing the map on assumption, and then never doing anything about it to to learn more or test the assumptions. That is not a positive outcome for mapping. Hopefully you're using it is a way to investigate and to learn. in some form or another, a map to be of its most use, it needs to include all the perspectives, which means really including your audience, not necessarily only a hypothetical person of that audience, but really doing things that let you test ideas and get insights that you're using to bring back to the map so everyone can participate in the learning. So if you never include real users in what informs your map, that's going to be not as good as it could be. And the third area to be wary of not going well with a map is if the map itself is the project as opposed to making something that the map was used to help learn to go make where you could be stuck revising a map, and it can feel productive, it can feel collaborative, you can do a lot, you could include your users, you could do all the parts of making a healthy map except never moving ahead to making something and then I would say the map really isn't living up to what it could be.

You could get feedback on your journey map, you can get feedback from fellow designers, if you have a design mentor, that's a great place to have this conversation. And also just from the people on your team, are they finding what they need to find from this are they finding their voice represented is it has this been a useful process for them? Good to get that feedback from your collaborators. You can use this in real projects and share with your team. Just make use of it and be sure that it gets another your team member Hands. You can try new framings Well, instead of maybe you just need start middle and end, maybe you want before the beginning but you don't want after the end.

Or you can even use it in class and in conversations that are about strategy about how do we, how do we think of what could happen now, next, and in the future, different framings would be just a different sequence, whatever you would need to explore. You can always try using different tools to do your mapping, the dry erase board, the sticky notes, paper, and all sorts of other options are available, and of course, our good old digital tool friends, all fun ways to convey this sort of learning. And finally, it feels different to do this apart from a group versus with a group. So using mapping in live collaboration, getting a group in a live situation to put their brains at that one map and then get there. Voices involved and write ideas down or each to share the marker and what ever method makes sense for your group.

Practicing that live is very different than doing the investigating, writing things down, sharing it, do investigating, write things down and share it. Very different feeling. Now what what's next, you've built your map, you're ready to build more, you can always refer back to this class. So if you've built this map with a team, whatever you do next, whatever is decided, and however you move forward collectively, everyone who you've worked with has more context for what happens next, you have a reference to what you've discovered. Together, you have greater consensus among your collaborators. You've worked together to learn and create a greater understanding from the perspective of your users.

I wish you well in your collaborations. And thank you so much for your time and attention and thoughtful effort in this class for creating user journey maps.