Drawing a usage map from interview notes

A usage map is not a poster of the sitemap. The sitemap is the landlord’s plan. The map is the tenants’ feet. Interview notes give you the feet. Records tell you whether those feet were exceptional.

The method on our table is plain. Each conversation is reduced to a sequence of rooms the person actually entered, in order, with a mark for a stall, a turn-back, or a telephone call out of the product. We do not average the sequences. We lay them on top of one another on tracing paper until a thick path and a thin path appear. The thick path is not “the user.” It is the path many of these people took.

Then the sample of records is asked a rude question: does this thick path exist outside the twelve people we sat with? If the records are too coarse to answer, the map stays a sketch and the report says so. Giorgi will not ink a line that is only a good story.

Margin notes do the rest. A dead end after an expired-card message. A help page opened more than a catalogue. A return visit that never finds the order. These notes are written in the product’s own names, even when those names are ugly. “Step 3 of 7” is allowed. “Friction” is not.

The sheet is printed large because teams argue with their hands. A file on a laptop keeps the argument in the person who holds the laptop. An A1 sheet on Chavchavadze Street puts the argument in the middle of the room.