A Tester’s Experience with User Experience Mapping

Let's take an off-the-beaten-path approach to quality—testing based on actual user experiences. Being aware of surroundings and emotions while using intuition and instincts are attributes of great testing. With the right tools and approaches, we can learn to tap into users’ experiences to understand and exploit their underlying emotions. Marjana Shammi explains the basics of experience mapping and describes how testers can use that information to generate great test ideas. Experience mapping is an activity that examines the journey of how the user experiences an application. This map contains the user’s interactions with the application, depicted through a journey with highs and lows. By identifying the risks, retrieving information from an experience mapping session, and determining important areas to focus on in future test coverage, testers can generate test ideas and focus on the user’s concerns. Testing can be more in-depth and explorative, providing valuable insights for product development. Using this approach will bring another dimension of the test basis to improve test coverage.