Course 2 week 2 continues on the Emphasize part of the UX Design process. It talks about tools such as user stories and journey maps and ends with how accessibility is not an option but a necessity.

Week 2: Creating User Stories and User Journey Maps

User Story

1. A user story is a fictional one-sentence story told from a persona's point of view to inspire and inform design decisions. It introduces the user, lays out an obstacle, and states their ultimate goal.
2. User stories should be written in the following format:

• Example 1: As an online shopper, I want to receive a text when the item arrives so that I can pick it up right away.
  • Type of user: Who we are designing for?
  • Action: What the user hopes will happen?
  • Benefit: Why the user wants the action to happen?
• Example 2: As a dog owner, I want to trust my dog walker so I can hire them for regular dog walks.

Edge Cases

1. Happy Path: Describes a user story with a happy ending.
2. Edge Cases: Rare situation or unexpected problem that interrupts a standard user experience.
   • Good UX anticipates edge cases and reroutes users back to the happy path when things don't go as planned.
   • In edge cases, the obstacle is often beyond the user's control to fix.
3. Example: Let's say you are ordering something for someone who lives in America through an American delivery service. Now if you live in a country that doesn't have states and the service has that field marked as compulsory to proceed ahead, you will have no other option but to stop the transaction or look for an alternative service.

User Journey Map

1. A User Journey is the series of experiences a user has as they achieve a specific goal. User journeys are built off the personas and User stories.
2. To start the user journey, we need a journey map. A journey map is an illustration of what the user goes through to achieve their goals.

   Think of it like reading a book. If the persona is your character, the user story is your plot, and the journey map is your story outline.

3. The benefits of user journey maps include:
   • Helping UX designers create obstacle-free paths for users
   • Highlighting pain points
   • Identifying improvement opportunities
   • Reducing the impact of designer bias
4. A user journey map helps UX designers create obstacle-free paths for users.

Creating User Journey Maps

Step 1. Add each action in the journey until the user reaches their goal.
Step 2. Add action descriptions, including all the smaller things the user must accomplish before graduating to the next main task.
Step 3. In User Journey maps we need to think about not only the user's physical journey but the mental and emotional journey as well.
Step 4. Add opportunities for improvement.
Step 5. Revisit and consider accessibility for each step of the user journey map and explore ways to reduce the impact of designer bias.

Accecibiltiy and Empathizing

1. Accessibility is not just designed to include a group of users with varying abilities. Instead, it extends to anyone who is experiencing a permanent, temporary, or situational disability.
2. Let us consider some examples to understand 3 different types of disability:
   1. Touch:
      • A person with one arm has a permanent touch disability
      • A person with a hand injury has a temporary touch disability
      • A new parent holding their newborn baby has a situational touch disability
   2. Speech:
      • Permanent: A mute person
      • Temporary: A person suffering from Laryngitis
      • Situational: A non-native speaker
   3. Hearing:
      • Permanent: A deaf person
      • Temporary: A person suffering from an ear infection
      • Situational: A person standing in a noisy place

The Curb Effect

1. A curb cut is the name for the slope of the sidewalk that creates a ramp with the adjoining street. Thanks to curb cuts, people with disability can navigate their neighborhoods with a lot more freedom. However, the benefits of curb cuts extend to everyone, from people pushing strollers to bicyclists, movers, and the elderly.
2. The curb-cut effect is a phenomenon that describes how products and policies designed for people with disabilities often end up helping everyone.
3. Some more examples where designing for accessibility in case helps everyone:
   • Auditory traffic signals
   • Closed captioning
   • Bumpy blister paving on the sidewalk's curb
   • Ramps/elevators instead of stairways/escalators

The purpose of this series is to capture the entirety of the UX design course in a brief form for revisiting and revision purposes. That's why I have not included many of the external resources linked in the course. These two videos, although might not be helpful from this POV, I just couldn't help myself from not adding them here. Disability Technology and How the blind use technology to see the world

Here is my submission for the hometown bookstore app's User Journey map. I am, by no means, an expert in UX. So if you have any feedback on any of my submissions, do reach out. And vice-versa for something you might be working on.