Let’s recap

As a user researcher, there are a number of common tools and concepts that you will frequently encounter. Some help scope, define, or understand the problem, while others help you to keep track of work and communicate information to the rest of the team.

In our introductory course, we learned about a number of these, including user needs, user stories, and roadmaps. This week, we will recap what we learned in the first course, study these concepts in more detail, and introduce you to a few more, including:

• user personas and archetypes
• empathy maps
• journey maps

In government roles (and in many other industries), there is a significant amount of technical vocabulary and jargon that you will need to learn.

If you are new to user research, do not worry! You will gain understanding through experience as you see how they are applied or used in context, but it is helpful to begin with basic definitions and examples to aid your learning.

If you need a reminder of anything later in the course, you can refer back at any time to the summaries in the next two steps, but we will go into more detail for everything in steps 1.4 and 1.5 throughout this week.