Our Process
Researchers from the Norman Nielsen Group define the User Journey Map concretely and straightforwardly – it is a visualization of the process a user goes through to achieve a goal using a website or an application.
User Journey is a tool used for understanding, capturing, and relating the most critical issues and problems related to:
- the designed and actual use of a digital product
- emotions, feelings, problems, and satisfactions caused by it
- moments, points causing the most significant issues, discomfort, or abandonment.
It can also be said that User Journey Map is a tool to find the common part between usability testing and data from analytical systems.
It provides an opportunity to capture the relationship between the digital product, the user, and the amount of revenue.
Do you want to create a User Journey?
User Journey Map – at the intersection of analytics and usability optimization
User Journey Map allows you to answer not only "where things go wrong" (usability testing) and "how often things go wrong" (analytics systems) but also "why things go wrong."
For this reason, we cannot equate the category of a website visit with a User Journey because a visit does not always have a concrete purpose (e.g., making a purchase or downloading a report).
Sometimes it is aimless surfing, closely related to TV zapping.
User Journey Map allows you to understand the assumed, designed, unusual, and unexpected ways to achieve goals.
The motivations behind these activities and the points at which interactions occur.
The points of interaction here are understood very broadly and multi-dimensionally. These include all interactions (clicks, reading descriptions, viewing galleries, using functionalities).
They involve indirect contact (e.g., via a form) and direct contact (e.g., by phone).
User Experience Journey Map – what is it?
The UX Journey Map brings designers, product owners, and business owners closer to the customer's perspective, capturing problematic elements for optimization.
Using this method, it is possible to reasonably define, design, track and optimize KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
This multi-layered method also makes it possible to point out the relationship between satisfaction, speed of goal achievement, as well as the frontend and backend layers.
User Journey visualization method – Journey Map UX Design
The User Journey Map is usually represented by a linear graphic, indicating, explaining, and describing various dimensions and aspects of the actions taken as well as their results.
The User Journey Map is created from the user's perspective, needs, expectations, and habits. It is intended to increase his commitment and satisfaction. The User Journey Map is a story that visualizes actions on a timeline.
It is created in many variants, but in most cases, it is a modification of the basic model, consisting of 5 elements.
The top layer includes a clearly defined user, a scenario of his journey, and the goals he intends to achieve.
The middle part of the map is composed of a timeline with the stages of the journey drawn on it, along with a description of the accompanying thoughts, problems, emotions, attitudes, and expectations.
The bottom part describes the possibilities and insights.
User's point of view on the User Journey
The user is considered in this model as a specific point of view. Different from the viewpoints of other categories of users, which we can distinguish through segmentation and data analysis.
Collected, for example, during observations, from analytical systems, interviews with customers, or employees of individual departments, particularly those who have direct contact with customers.
Usage scenario of UX Journey Map
It describes and explains the situation we want to explore and illustrate. It is the user's way to achieve his goal.
If he wants to open a bank account, as part of the scenario, we need to include all the actions he will take and all the sources of information he can use to make a decision.
Such scenarios can either be reconstructed based on data (in the case of products and services already on the market) or assumed, designed (in the case of those just being launched).
Stages of the journey
They illustrate and organize a sequence of events, actions, and accompanying reactions. They allow us to see the causes and mechanisms, to understand their recurring consequences.
In each stage, it is necessary to take a meticulous look at the changes in the user's thinking, feeling, and behavior.
At the same time, it is not a matter of enumerating them in detail but of creating a kind of "big picture" of a given stage.
Features of User Journey
The bottom part of the User Journey Map is about insights, reflections, and suggestions used to optimize actions.
It is worth remembering that user journey mapping is used to capture extreme reactions – positive and negative.
Indirect, nuanced reactions are not helpful in this context.
How is a User Journey Map created?
The usefulness of the map depends on the precision and reliability with which:
- we will obtain all analytical data
- we will define all the goals that users want and may want to pursue
- we will identify all possible points, and moments of interaction, along with their characteristics
- we identify all possible emotions, thoughts, attitudes, and reactions.
Advantages of the User Journey Map method (Journey Map Design)
Diagnosing, predicting, and optimizing. These are the three most important advantages of this method.
The User Journey Map allows you to identify points and the most inefficient elements of the process, which are characterized by the highest potential loss. As well as generating the most significant risks. Causing a decline in Conversion and Retention rates. Increasing Bounce Rate.
The User Journey Map (UX Journey Map) allows you to make more relevant and reasonable optimizations.
At the stage of designing a digital product, it allows to develop a common perspective for the whole team creating a product or service.
And most importantly, it avoids misguided, ineffective solutions and a source of pain for the user (Pains).