To understand the importance of user journeys, it’s essential to get to know your users and the ‘journey’ they take when interacting with your business. You need to understand their journey from start to finish. It helps you identify what users believe is important and the negatives they come across.

You can create a user journey map by:

  • Identifying your goal when creating a user journey map, and the purpose of doing so
  • Know how to implement and use it effectively

Before you create a user journey map, you should keep both of the above front of mind.

What is a User journey Map?

These maps are compact visualisations of end-to-end user experiences. They can be in the form of an infographic, diagram, or illustration. They effectively illustrate all the touchpoints and places that users interact with your site whether offline or online.

The maps also help you examine your brand, products, services as well as the processes you offer through your user’s eyes. In short, a user journey map allows you to visualise your user’s journey when interacting with your website.

How To Create an Effective User journey Map

The design and best practices will vary on the type of business, service, or product you provide users. That said, it gives you greater freedom to be creative and to explore various ways of creating an effective user journey map that works to your benefit.

Firstly, you need to develop your ‘user personas’ while keeping front of mind that it is not enough to have just a single user persona. Your users will behave differently at the various stages they interact with your site.

Moreover, it’s best to establish who has been carrying out market research for a while and therefore is ready to make their purchase, and those who have just started out trying to solve a specific need.

Understand a User’s Specific Goals

Secondly, the next step after establishing your ‘user personas’ is to get to grips with what each person wants to achieve when they start out on a user journey.

You need to:

Consider a user’s ultimate goal at each stage of their journey bearing in mind that it will most likely change as their journey progresses. A good way of doing this is to:

  • First, identify which paths a visitor chooses to take when visiting your site. If they are a pre-existing user or a member, they will first login to your site. A visitor will typically browse the site, and much more. You need to establish a full list of their activities to identify all the touchpoints and each goal linked to every touchpoint
  • Second, you have to establish the goals of every user phase as clearly as possible on the map. This allows you to visualise if and how well your goals are being met and how well user questions are being answered

Mapping Out User Touchpoints

Touchpoints are any instances when your user comes into contact with say a product, brand, or service prior to or after they have made a purchase from you. It includes the times it happens either online or offline, via marketing, over the phone, or in person.

You may find that some of the touchpoints are more effective than others. One example being a negative check-in experience when checking into a hotel which ruins an entire stay at the hotel.

You need to factor in all the potential touchpoints that could improve a user’s experience. By doing this you will not miss vital opportunities of firstly, listening to a user, and secondly, improve things so they are kept happy.

Identifying User Pain Points

You need to identify all the user pain points and roadblocks a user encounters when interacting with your brand. Once they are identified, you have to correct the experience a user has.

Prioritising and Fixing Roadblocks

If your users constantly moan at how signing up to your site is a complicated process, you need to make it easier for them to do. Once you have identified any roadblocks that might exist, you can then push users down the ‘funnel’ which will bring them a step closer to making a purchase.

Updating and Improving

Once you have created your user journey map, you need to implement it. Moreover, you should update and improve it to meet your user’s evolving needs. Every six or so months, you should go over your map and tweak it as necessary to incorporate your user’s needs and any significant changes you make to any services, or products you provide.

 

 

 

Posted in Web development, Websites