We build user personas and journey maps in the vocabulary of the same ontology that describes your data and systems, so that what research learns about people can be connected directly to what the systems do for them.
Research that lives in a separate document
User research usually produces artefacts in its own language: a persona with goals and frustrations, a journey with stages and touchpoints. They are valuable and they are isolated. The touchpoint called “checkout” in the journey map has no formal relation to the service called “order capture” in the architecture, so the insight cannot travel from one to the other without a person carrying it.
The same concepts on both sides
We model personas, goals, journeys and touchpoints as classes in the enterprise ontology, related to the capabilities, services and data they involve. A stage in a journey is linked to the system that serves it and to the data it reads. A frustration found in research is then attached to a component, and the component’s owner can see it beside the incidents and the changes that concern the same thing.
Evaluation that closes the loop
Usability evaluation produces findings in the same vocabulary, so a measured difficulty at a touchpoint is a fact about a known component, comparable across rounds of research and across products. Interaction design decisions cite the journey they serve and the evidence behind them.
What this gives you
Research that compounds instead of being rediscovered, and design decisions that can be traced to a person’s need and to the system that meets it. Your user experience becomes a property of the same model that governs everything else, rather than a separate account of it.
