Personas are documents: plain, simple documents that describe the target user or the actors (persons) you are designing for. The outcome of this document will help you get a clear understanding of the actor’s behavior during the experience, which will lead you to finding pain points (frustrations), satisfaction (likes) and general needs.
Sitemaps help to identify a site or application hierarchy, to set connections among the components that are part of the system. There exists a formal nomenclature and rules for creating site maps, you can easily find them online.
A wireframe contains what would be the visual representation of the functional behaviors of an application. Content and navigation structures would also be laid out. If you previously had a sitemap then wireframes become easier to visualize. In my opinion, either high or low fidelity, they can help to solve many issues before jumping to create our design on the computer, so I’d definitely use them as part of my artifacts toolset. There are even specialized competitions solely dedicated to creating wireframes (see how to profit from sketching in challenges, a light-weight approach). Why would we create one then?
Testing is another mini-universe within UX Design. There are many books written about how to approach usability testing, different techniques, and methods to test and validate your concept.
Journey maps are a common UX tool. They come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. Depending on the context, they can be used in a variety of ways. This article covers the basics: what a journey map is (and is not), related terminology, common variations, and how we can use journey maps.
The actor is the persona or user who experiences the journey. The actor is who the journey map is about — a point of view. Actors usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data.
Provide one point of view per map in order to build a strong, clear narrative. For example, a university might choose either a student or a faculty member as actor — each would result in different journeys. (To capture both viewpoints, the university will need to build two separate maps, one for each of the two user types.)
The scenario describes the situation that the journey map addresses and is associated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations. For example, one scenario could be switching mobile plans to save money, and expectations for it include to easily find all the information needed to make a decision.
Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated — for products that are yet in the design stage.
Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events (such as shopping or taking a trip), describe a process (thus involve a set of transitions over time), or might involve multiple channels.
Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario. Here are some examples: