While building a product it is easy to develop a tunnel vision. Companies spend a lot of time thinking about every single process and every little feature running under the hood. But the interface of the user is different for your product. They have no reason to care for your product or service until you show them what it can do for them. Turning first-time users into long-term customers require a very good understanding of what your users want and where are they coming from. This is where user journey maps come into the picture.
Creating a user journey map can help a company to keep its user motivation at the front of the mind, create the best customer experience, and get users where they want to go. By using a user journey map, it is convenient for companies to make granular but pivotal tweaks that can help users accomplish their goals faster and easier, come back to do it again, and build habits around your product or service, all from your onboarding user experience. But in order to understand how people actually use your product or service, it is important that you first understand the essence of the whole experience from the perspective of the user and a user journey map can shed light on that.
At Quantzig we understand the difference that a user journey map can create for any business. And to help companies excel in the competitive landscape, our team of experts has designed a step-by-step guide to building user journey maps that can assist companies to get into the minds of their customers and analyze their pain and needs to provide better customer experience and improve ROI.
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What is a User Journey Map?
A user journey map is a timeline of user actions that explains the relationship between your brand and its customers. It is a visualization of the interactions of a user with your product or service from their point of view. Customer journey mapping tools help in creating a timeline of all touchpoints between a customer and your organization. The user journey map helps your company to gain insight into how customers experience your product, based on their unique goals and motivations. Mapping out the experiences of your users enables you to understand several important factors that shape the overall impression they will walk away with.
Steps to Build a User Journey Map
Before creating a user journey map, it is very important that you review the goals of your business or service. This insight can help you align user and business goals.
Step #1: Define the Behavioral Stage
Your customers might go through different stages while navigating your site and this depends on your business type. These different stages provide a detailed insight into the changing behaviors of the customers. Companies through qualitative and quantitative research will have a fair idea of the process that the customers go through right from the first touchpoint to the eventual process of purchasing and subsequent interactions. This will result in the creation of a useful user journey map.
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Step #2: Create a User Persona
A user journey map is always focused on a user persona who experiences the journey. Therefore, to build a rigid user journey map, it is important that you create a user persona based on the information you have about your target audience. User persona should always be created based on the information you have about your target audience. That’s why you should always start with user research. Having solid information about your users will prevent you from making wrong assumptions.
Collect and analyze the available information about your target audience:
- Interview your potential users
- Administer contextual inquiry
- Analyze the user surveys results
Step #3: Define Different Scenarios and User Expectations
The scenario explains the situation that the user journey map addresses. It can be both real or anticipated. For a better user journey map, it is also important to define what expectations a user persona has about the interaction.
Step #4: Create a List of Touchpoints
Touchpoints are user interactions and actions with the product or business. It is important to examine all major touchpoints and all channels associated with each touchpoint to create an effective user journey map.
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Step #5: Consider User Intentions
For any business to create an effective user journey map, it is important to understand the factors that motivate the user to interact with their product or service. Additionally, it is also crucial to analyze what solutions are users looking for in a specific product or service. Different user segments will have different reasons and different goals to accomplish.
Step #6: Sketch the Journey
Now in this step, you need to put together all the accumulated information and sketch out a user journey map in a step-by-step format. You can start by making a unique and general user journey map. The information you gather allows you to create a timeline of user interactions with your product and brand. This timeline can include things like:
- Touchpoints of user
- Benchmark actions and accomplishments
- Scheduled notifications
Step #7: Validate and Refine User Journey
The user journey map should result in truthful narratives and not fairy tales. Even when a customer journey is based on user research, it’s important to validate it. You need to use the information from usability testing sessions. Customer journey analytics can tell you that your journey resembles a real use case. The last but not the least is to gather and analyze the information about your users regularly to make your user journey map give you optimum results.