Creating A User Journey Map
Businesses must understand how a potential user moves from discovering the product to deciding to use the product to becoming a recurring user in order to provide great experiences while using their products. Businesses need to understand, map out, and intentionally plan the touchpoints and user experience.
A user journey map is a visual representation of a user’s experience with a product, from when they first encounter the product until they complete a predefined task. It is a diagram which identifies the steps, touchpoints and emotions a user goes through while interacting with a company’s product.
It is a useful tool which offers valuable insights into understanding user needs and pain points and optimising user experience. Leveraging your user journey map will help the company create better strategies and user experiences. By giving a visual walkthrough, a user journey map gives life to the term A Day in the Life of a User, potential or existing, helping businesses point out how to make their products better for the user, designing better experiences, reducing friction, increasing customer acquisition and customer retention rate.
Importance of A User Journey Map
The good news is that a customer journey map is not just restricted to digital products. This means businesses can map out a user’s experience, whether they are accessing services, physical goods, and digital products. Before we can build a user journey map, the business or product designers need to decide on the reason they are undergoing this task.
- Understanding Customer Needs And Pain points
From idea generation to product deployment, there are many stages involved in creating a product. It is natural for internal members to develop a bias toward the product because they have had repeated contact with it. A user journey map shows how a potential user will progress from the discovery stage to the adoption stage on a single sheet of paper. It reveals to the business organisation the touchpoints on the user’s journey.
This process forces the business to adopt the lens of the user to move through phases, which helps the business isolate points where the user might have problems.
- Team Alignment
It becomes obvious how crucial it is for everyone to understand the product when multiple teams are involved through its development, deployment, and implementation. When the team aligns with the twists and turns of the product, then scaling is achievable. A user journey map brings to focus the user’s experience for everyone. Other teams asides from the product team can provide valuable insights that the product team can’t gather analytically. The team builds empathy as they gain a better understanding of the intended users of a product, their frustrations, and their needs. It also helps align everyone with the business goals.
Building A User Journey Map
Interestingly, a great tool such as the user journey map needs only a few elements while designing it. It is quite normal for the business or product designer to customize the user journey map according to their users and needs. Across user journey maps, you’ll find these same elements present in them.
- User Persona: you need to select a user persona which covers the target audience you are trying to create a journey map for. Specificity is important here, as you want a journey map which helps you understand and solve the needs of a specific group of users.
- Scenario: This is the interaction or the journey the user persona is trying to go through. The designer has to provide a specific scenario for the journey map.
- Goals: You, as a business or designer, need to set the goals the user hopes to achieve using your product. Goals vary for different users and products, so set goals relevant to your product and business.
- Phases: In a nutshell, phases are outlined headings that depict the user’s journey. Typically, these are discovery, consideration, conversion, and adoption. Under these stages, user actions, emotions, and thoughts can be tracked.
- User Actions, Emotions, and Thoughts: these contain the meat of a journey map. The actions the user will take to achieve the goal using your product, the emotions they feel, and their thoughts make up this element. If aptly captured, we can improve the user experience for the user.
- Opportunities and Ownership: Businesses must identify and implement improvements if they are to achieve their objectives. We can identify opportunities for growth and create a better user experience from the map while assigning the team to leverage these opportunities.
Building and leveraging a user journey map should be specific to help the business understand how a user uses the product. Drawing from the well of knowledge this tool offers could position businesses to become great at their product offering by building customer-centric products.
