A website’s success depends on how its customers behave and interact with the website. Thus, understanding its customers’ nature is increasing and getting more critical with time. But, sometime, it might be challenging to take valuable information from the gathered metrics. So, how can companies make this task easier? This user journey map has been introduced to shed light on the whole experience of its customers from their perspective. It lets you be in the customer’s shoes to understand their changing behavior.
In this article, we have explained what a user journey map is, what problems they can resolve to help the teams, the benefits of using a user journey map, the working process of a user journey map, and what type of information is fed to a user journey map to conclude potential results and some user journey map tools.
What is a User Journey Map?
A user journey map is critical for every business running websites. It highlights the trend about what type of relationship a customer has with their products. Not only this, this map captures the trend across different channels. It lets the business understand how customers interact with their website and its components in real-time.
Many companies and marketers use the user journey map to see things from their perspective and try to find the website’s weak points to improve their experience. These maps contain information about all channels used by the customers to interact or access the website. You can also say that a user journey map is a visual diagram depicting how the user flows through the website from their landing on the website to their exit.
These maps help the business identify the fundamental interactions and touchpoints with your website or mobile app and determine the customer’s goals, motivations, and feelings at each step.
Why are user journey maps helpful?
Several factors decide the overall performance of any website. If your website is not up to the mark, it requires some changes to keep the customers engaged. UI/UX designers strongly rely on the customer’s data to make those changes. They use a user journey map to get better insights into their website’s components and how they impact the customer’s decisions. These maps help the designers to see their website from the customer’s eye, letting them understand which element needs to change and why.
Such a customer-centric approach helps the business create an experience their customers prefer, leading to more leads. With user journey maps in place, a team can understand better and find answers to unanswered questions, such as what if.
The complete mapping process reminds you to consider every emotion and feeling of your customer. It is essential to determine your customer’s pain points and address them as soon as possible so that they won’t bounce back. For your customer to take desired actions, such as clicking CTAs, signing forms, etc., you need to work on understanding the nature of customers and what strategies can be used to make them click those buttons. Such things can be taken care of using the user journey maps.
Once you get the nerve of your customers, you can tailor your websites and make a fantastic experience for your customers that they have never experienced before.
What are the benefits of user experience mapping?
There are many reasons you should map every customer’s entire journey, as different customers may behave differently. If you do not consider going through a detailed analysis of your customer’s behavior around your website, you might lose ample opportunities. So, you must look at how user journey mapping can benefit your business in the long term.
- A user journey map allows the team and the designers to put their foot in the customer’s shoes and understand what they think of their product. It lets the team switch their perspectives from personal to the customer, letting them make more significant and more effective changes. This map challenges the product makers to understand what changes are required instead of making anything that seems feasible.
- The teams are enticed to have conversations and discussions that bring out the best with user journey mapping. It creates the foundation for the shared vision and keeps the entire team on the same page.
- A website comes with different sections and some experts dedicated to all sections. Each section requires understanding their specific customers and why customers are not responding as expected in their sections. Teams can create section-specific user journey maps and understand their thinking level. It lets the team create a bigger picture and understand where their assumptions had failed.
- A team can easily find the user’s potential touchpoints and interaction with their product with a user journey map. A user journey map is a structured overview of their customers with different thinking.
Common mistakes
Sometimes, creating and analyzing user journey maps is just a waste. You must understand its necessity, why you need it, and where you can use it if you are still unsure where to use it or when not to. Most companies prefer using user journey maps when they intend to collaborate and work with customers daily. We have listed some scenarios where you can say no to using maps.
- Unclear goals
If your team does not have a specific goal set initially, you must avoid working on the user journey map, as it will take a lot of work and effort. If you are just building it to build it, you will not find the potential flaws in the entire customer’s journey. Every customer journey map requires high-end research, so you must have the answers to what and why you want to analyze customer’s behavior, what process you want to improve, who should look into this process, which departs should be involved, and others. If you do not have a clear picture ready, avoid the user journey map.
- Not enough research
You can either rely on surveys, interviews, feedback, etc. If your team takes a shortcut and decides to make assumptions based on a few surveys, you cannot get a desired customer journey map and will fail. Without proper research, you will get non-reliable and incorrect data about customers’ journeys. Also, your clients will struggle as you mistakenly made things worse at those customer journey points requiring attention. To avoid this, you must work on statistics and gather meaningful information.
- Wrong perspective
If you are putting effort into creating a customer journey map without getting into their perspective, it will not work. Without understanding their thinking, you might not be able to create a better experience for them. You must put yourself in the customer’s shoes and start creating user journey maps around their experience, goals, channels, etc.
- Weak personas
Demographics are crucial to persona creation, but some do not work on this theory. Some do not believe that previous experience of personas doesn’t matter. At the same time, some ignore the motivation and goals part and intensely focus on customers’ pain points and frustrations. Customer persona refers to the specific segment of your clients, so you can assume that the others within the same person will feel the same. If you do not have a specific or wrongly planted image of a person, you will have incorrect data to create the map. So, you must consider the different sides of the person for better clarity and focus on their traits to get better insights into the customer’s behavior.
Process of user journey mapping
Before working on your user journey map, you must review your goals to align the map-creating process with your goals. If you get distracted from your goals, you will not have a meaningful map. We have explained the process, but it might vary from business to business. But almost every process is created around the following standard steps.
- Decide the scope
Several segments within a website require some customer action, such as payments, CTAs, subscriptions, etc. Each section will have a different user journey map for better understanding. You need to have a scope in mind of what you want to analyze and what section needs more focus. If you do not know what you want to test, you might not be able to start. So set a scope and get started.
- Create a user persona
A user persona defines a specific segment of customers with the same thinking and interests. Companies segment their customers based on some features they get from the historical data gathered. Then they create a user journey map by focusing on that primary persona and understanding their experience throughout their journey on the website. This process starts with detailed research of your customers to date and analyzing the changing trends. Always avoid working with assumptions. Else you can never understand your customer’s pain points and provide a solution to them. You can conduct surveys and interviews to gather data from potential customers. Then, conduct tests to conclude.
- Define user expectations
Customers’ behavior tends to change under different circumstances. So, while gathering data, you must consider the scenario. Also, keep in mind your expectations regarding a specific scenario; if you get unexpected results, analyze where you have gone wrong and what needs improvement.
- Create a list of all touchpoints
In the case of the user journey mapping, the touchpoints refer to the user actions and interactions with the specified products. So make sure that you create a list of all possible touchpoints and all channels associated with those touchpoints. This will help the team understand what action has been taken by the user and using which channel. For example, if the user has made the payment online or offline.
- Consider user intention
Sometimes, some website components work as a motivator to influence users to interact with your products. You must understand those components and try to improve them with time. But, apart from this, a customer’s intention also matters in performing the desired action. You must understand your customer’s problems and why they prefer your product over others. So, understanding the customer’s intention plays a vital role in achieving your goals. Some customers just look around the website without any intention to buy. But, if you motivate them, analyze their channels, consider their actions, and try to resolve their pain points, they might make the purchase. So, focus on your customer’s intention.
- Sketch a rough journey.
Now, gather all the information and compile them together to sketch an entire journey of your customers. Each step will determine their interaction with your website, product, and others.
- Analyze customer’s emotional state
One of the essential points to consider is the customer’s emotional state when they make the interaction. If you understand their emotional state, you might be able to connect with them emotionally and influence them on why they should use your product. You must also consider the emotional part while creating a journey map. It lets you tailor your website and products to their ups and downs.
- Refine user journey
The user’s journey should be accurate facts rather than assumptions and false stories. Make sure to validate the user’s journey. Make it a regular practice to gather and analyze information about your users. For example, run for user feedback to improve your understanding of the user journey.
How do we gather data for user journeys?
Data required to create a user journey map needs to be realistic and based on what users think of your product. Otherwise, you will not get the expected results. You need to consider colossal information and compile them together. But covering only a single source of information will not do wonders. So, make sure that you at least consider the following sources to get appropriate information about your potential customers.
- Desk research
You might have stored user data on your system that will determine the trends of your customers. You need to dive into that information and look for hard drives, historical trends, UX research repos, and other relevant files to get the information. You can pick the information that is enough for the analysis. Go for product reviews, user feedback, competitor’s journey, etc. such information will help you achieve your goals.
- In-house experts
The people for whom and whom you have been working are a great source of information, as they know everything around their website. You can consider interacting with people from different business sections, such as sales, logistics, UX, customer insights, etc. You can ask your team members their opinions and how they have experienced different customers with different thinking levels.
- Qualitative research
Create an accurate user journey. Qualitative research methods are more exciting for getting relevant information about the customers, such as their experiences, thoughts, desires, intentions, etc. You must start talking to real users interested in your product for quality data. You must work on the actual scenarios for concrete data by interacting with the real users. In such a way, you can create accurate journey maps.
- Quantitative research
Implementing some quantitative methods into your product experience can give additional insights. After determining the cornerstones of your user journey map, you can conduct surveys for your customers to let users rate what they want from your website. This might work for you to determine their mood at certain phases of the journey. Also, you can know from where they get to learn about your product and ask why they prefer your product over others.
Best tools to visualize your customer journey
Gathering and analyzing a tremendous amount of customer information is impossible with manual efforts. For managing such information, you need some tools that will help you create user journey maps based on the gathered information. Some of the classic customer journey mapping tools are the flowchart builders that will be considered every piece of information. After you collect the relevant information using an analytics tool, you can feed the required data to these tools to generate an accurate user journey map. We have mentioned some user journey map creation tools for your ease.
1. Miro
It is an online whiteboard especially preferred by the teams working remotely. The team can use this whiteboard to share their thoughts visible to every team member in real-time. You can even create the board from scratch or use its pre-built templates to save your time. The pre-built templates come with proven workflows. It is just like using sticky notes digitally. You can use this tool with Hotjar heatmaps to gather better analytics. You can integrate it with other advanced tools for advanced functionality. It uses enterprise-grade data protection to keep your data safe.
2. UXPressia
It is a tool for creating a map for your customer’s journey. Its benefits are beyond the whiteboard and help you create consistently good-looking customer journey maps. It comes with an interactive interface with easy options. It lets you include the potential touchpoints and customize the map with the relevant information you want to include in your maps.
You can simply use this tool when you want a clean design shared among multiple stakeholders. Also, this tool helps you to collaborate with customers in real-time. It lets you create impact maps to understand your customer’s experience better. It comes with pre-built templates with transparent workflows for your maps.
3. Smaply
If you have complex data that will result in a complex customer journey map, you can go for smaply. It will help you reduce the complexity of your map and make it understandable. You can use it to determine the usage of different channels and the backstage process. You can use it to create a repository of valuable customer insights using images, pdfs, audio, or video files. Compiling all the information together, you can create a simplified customer journey. It works better for complex customer journeys. It lets you identify the customer’s pain points and understand what changes are required to eliminate them.
4. Gliffy
If you are looking for a simple online diagram solution, Gliffy is the right option for creating a user journey map. It is a simple tool that lets you create simple user journey maps. It is a fantastic collaborative tool that lets the entire team connect and share their thoughts. Also, you can use it for creating large user journey maps. It comes with easy drag and drops shapes available in its library. Not only this, you can integrate this tool with the Google drive to share it easily with other team members. It can store the past versions of the user journey maps, so you can track the changes that have been done in the past and revert to what version you want.
Conclusion
Understanding the user’s journey is essential for creating a better version of your website. Customers are the base for your website’s success, so analyzing their actions throughout their journey makes sense. With proper user journey maps, you can get valuable insights into the customer’s changing behavior. It helps the team to think from the customer’s perspective and understand what they think of their product and how they interact with them.
There are several benefits of using the user journey map within a business but make sure that you have your goals defined to move forward in the right direction. You can use several ways to gather the relevant information on your customers to compile it into an overview for better understanding. Various user journey map creation tools are available to eliminate manual work. But we have explained a few of them that the companies widely use. So consider the customer’s journey as a part of your testing process to make the required changes to improve the overall experience of your website as per your customers.
My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.
