Stuck designing your journey maps? Here's how to find your lowest common persona.

Problem: I'm quickly trying to map out a user flow but there's too many conditions/branches that are coming up

During the journey mapping part of design sprints I typically focus on a specific persona so the rest of the flow has some context. This persona isn't backed by any research, because the whole purpose of a design sprint is to quickly generate a prototype based on the assumptions the whole team has about what they should be building.

Let's be frank, hardly anyone starts doing research when you're about to make a new project. There's a ton of excitement around the idea, and the possibility for how successful it is. We make assumptions about who will use our product, the problem that is most important to that audience, and the solution that we brilliantly came up with.

This is all fine, as long as you're able to get those assumptions out of your head and tested quickly with some potential customers. When you start designing though, you'll notice there's going to be a bunch of conditions that you didn't think of. So the gut reaction, especially if you're engineering focused (or like to procrastinate) will be to try to design for all those edge cases.

STOP

It's not necessary, simplify as much as possible. Especially in the design phase it can just keep going and going. So take a step back, give your user journey some context with a persona. Otherwise you'll keep going off track and trying to design for every edge case for everyone.

I'll call it a "lowest common persona" for the time being cause I don't know what the official name is. Here's how to create one...

You have a target audience / customer base for your product. Lets say it's an online forum for people who want to get information and help to create an online business.

This is such a broad user base, because you'll probably encounter:

1. Developers who are highly technical who need some business perspective

2. Someone comfortable at their office job but wants to be their own boss cause Katarina in accounting is annoying

3. An art student who are trying to figure out how not to be a statistic in the "starving artist" leaderboard

4. Etc.

5. Etc.

6. Etc.

So whats this lowest common persona? Someone who is not very technical, who is starting to think about entrepreneurship, perhaps they don't have all the required skills to make their ideas into reality, and probably doesn't have much work experience.

Now you have the context for your user journey and don't have to do as much branching!

Boom. Done... Now get unstuck!

Part 2: Read Designing for the extremes which is basically adding a second persona, which is pretty much opposite of the lowest common persona, this way you cater for a larger variety of people.