# Summer Intern Series: Using User Research Artifacts to Meet Stakeholder Goals August 12, 2024 Tyra Briscoe During my time as a UX & Discovery Intern this summer, I was fortunately able to participate in a variety of projects that allowed me to gain real world experience with user research in an academic library setting. One such project was the Curator Empathy Mapping project, which taught me a lot about how important it is to be flexible when it comes to approaches to UX research and honed my assessment skills. The initial goal of this project was to create two journey maps that reflect the process that Harvard Library staff take when curating a digital collection using either CURIOSity or another platform. Our stakeholders were the members of the Digital Collections Discovery team, who wanted an artifact that would highlight opportunities where their team could enhance support for curators. A [journey map](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-101/) is a user research artifact that illustrates the chronological stages of a user’s interaction with a given system while also displaying their thoughts and emotions across different points of the process. In our case, we wanted to use this artifact to depict the curation experience from beginning to end. With this in mind, we set off on the user research process and wrote a script structured around distinct phases of curating a collection, conducted ten interviews with library staff, and performed UX note-taking on the interview transcripts to generate findings. As the intern team began to dive deeper into our analysis, where we grouped and arranged our findings to create themes and insights, it became increasingly difficult to envision how our data could be applied to the linear format of the journey map. The interview data showed that there wasn’t a single journey to a curated digital collection that looked exactly like another; our interview participants demonstrated varying priorities, experiences, and actions that ultimately could not be simplified into a one-size-fits-all journey map. This realization led us to explore empathy maps as another option for a research artifact. While journey maps rely on chronological and linear information, empathy maps offer a holistic view of what users say, do, think, and feel. This visualization method was more closely aligned with the data we collected, and would allow us to capture the spectrum of experiences, emotions, thoughts, and actions that surface across the digital collection-building process. My biggest takeaway from this project experience is about what it means to work as a user researcher–our job is to meet the goals that the stakeholders set, but it is important to think critically about those goals and how to appropriately and effectively communicate what the stakeholders really want to know. In this case, if our team had stuck with the journey maps as our chosen artifacts, we would not have been able to highlight the range of experiences and challenges that curators could have, and it would have been an incomplete answer to the Digital Collections Discovery team’s questions about how to better support staff at Harvard Library who work to make digital materials more accessible. Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)