What is a user journey map?
A user journey is a timeline of user actions that describes the relationship between your brand and its customers. It’s a visualization of a user’s interactions with your website, from their point of view.
User journey mapping creates a timeline of all touch points between a customer and your brand, including all channels they happen in.
These user journey maps help your company gain insight into how users experience your website, based on their unique motivations and goals.
For example, you might find that you need to remove a step from your on boarding UX flow, change the copy in a lead nurturing email, or add tool-tips to help users learn something—all based on the actions your users take. This fosters a more customer-centric approach, which ultimately leads to better customer relationships.
Mapping out your users’ experiences allows you to understand several important factors that shape the overall impression they will walk away with. Some questions you might ask about your users’ journey could include:
- Why did they click on the button or link in the first place?
- How easy is the website to understand and use immediately?
- How long it does it take them to accomplish what they came there to do?
- How well does their experience extend across multiple channels, and where do they experience gaps?
The answers to these questions can help you better understand what motivates your users and what they’re most likely to find helpful. You can then use this information to create an experience that really hooks them on your website.
Great user journeys are based on research
User research is critical to understanding the experience of users. There are many different ways in which you can collect and systemize feedback. In fact, you’re probably already getting a lot of feedback if you have a website that’s up and running.
At this stage, it is critical to learn about the motivation of you users—what problem are they looking to solve when they come to your website? Different user segments will probably have different reasons to use your website, so you can start by developing hypotheses about what drives each user.
Your research should focus on the following aspects of the user experience
- Context: What is going on in your user’s day when they engage with your website? Are they in a rush? Worried? Planning an adventure?
- Motivation: What drives your user to interact with your website? What are they hoping to get out of it? Why are they using your website instead of a competitor’s—or nothing at all?
- Mental Models: How does your user conceive of the problem space that your website addresses? What concepts and connections come naturally to them, and what do they need to be taught?
- Pain Points: What are the challenges users are facing? Is your website helping them solve these or aggravating them? Are there any obstacles they have to using your website?
To conclude
User Journey Maps help you figure out how the user will interact with the solution.
It is worth to create it during the design process. The complementary deliverable will ensure that the final solution will have better UX.
If you need any help with your website get in touch with CreateWP.