User Journey

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's possible to reasonably define, design, track, and optimize KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

This multi-layered method also allows you to identify the relationship between satisfaction, speed of goal achievement, and the front-end and back-end layers.

What is the difference between user journeys and customer journeys?

You might have noticed that the terms user journey and customer journey are used interchangeably. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. All customers of your websites will be users, but not all users will be customers. The difference between these terms boils down to the difference in purpose and goals.

Customer journey maps focus on mapping the customer's steps from realizing the need to buy to purchasing a product. They also help you examine the offered customer experience and identify areas for improvement.

A customer journey usually involves a financial goal, whereas a user journey doesn't need to involve any purchase. People can visit your website to gain information or to learn something.

User journey maps are commonly used in the UX design process and focus on users as a whole.

Regardless of the terms used, customer journey mapping and user journeys are invaluable tools for optimizing and improving processes.

Why do you need a user journey map?

A user journey map lets you look at your product and services from a user's perspective. It helps your team develop more user-friendly, intuitive, and functional products.

User journey mapping will ensure you maintain a user-centric approach to the design process. It will help you understand how users think and feel when using your services. Furthermore, it will allow you to identify pain points and challenges users may encounter during their journey.

Creating user journeys gives your team a shared vision for the company's products. They can become helpful reference points for your design and development team and stakeholders. Thanks to them, the entire team will be able to understand user needs and expectations, which will result in uniform design.

Following a user's journey and seeing the elements users interact with may also help you identify gaps in user experience and discover functions that need fixing or improvement.

Elements of user and customer journey maps

What elements should you pay attention to when creating your own user journey map? When you look at a user or customer journey map template and compare it with others, you will notice they have a few shared elements.

Naturally, once you are more adept at creating user journeys, you can freely customize templates according to your needs and products.

Common elements of user journey maps:

• Persona: Creating a persona will help you understand how your users behave and discover their goals. You can also create user segments to divide your customer base into manageable groups.
• Scenario: Scenarios let you map out interactions occurring between a system and a user.
• User journey stages: Dividing a user journey into stages allows you to see what actions and steps users take at a given point in their journeys.
• User actions: Define what users can do at a particular stage of a journey. Creating a user flow can help you discover precise interactions between users and a product.
• User emotions and thoughts: Understanding your users' feelings and thoughts helps you tailor the user experience to their needs and increase customer loyalty.
• Opportunities: A user journey map enables you to see opportunities for improvement, offer a better user experience, and show new ways to connect with customers.
• Internal ownership: You should choose a team member or a couple of people who will be responsible for implementing changes.

Types of user journey maps

The type of a user journey map depends primarily on the goals you aim to achieve. However, there are a few main ones that can be described.

UX journey map

A UX journey map helps you identify areas for improvement and design a better user experience. When using this type of map, you will usually concentrate on the UX offered on your websites, applications, and e-commerce stores. The main goal of creating a UX journey map is to provide user-friendly and easy-to-use products.

Sales journey map

A sales journey map examines the buyer's journey, which usually consists of the awareness stage, consideration stage, decision-making stage, retention stage, and customer loyalty stage. Your team can use this map to identify how users encounter your store, how they behave after they arrive on a website, and what their pain points are.

Customer experience journey map

A customer experience journey map works similarly to a UX journey map because both concentrate on studying the customer/user experience. To obtain a better image of how this experience looks in your store, your team can use the current state map and future state map to visualize it better.

The current state map focuses on how your customers experience your business in the present moment. It helps you pinpoint the challenges they encounter along the journey.

In turn, the future state map predicts what users will think and feel in the future. This map is particularly helpful when introducing new products because it allows you to make predictions based on customers' current behaviors and emotions.

A user journey map: At the intersection of analytics and usability optimization

A 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, you can't equate a website visit with a user journey because a visit doesn't always have a specific purpose (e.g., making a purchase or downloading a report).

Sometimes, it's aimless browsing, closely related to TV zapping.

A user journey map lets you understand the assumed, designed, unusual, and unexpected ways to achieve goals.

The motivations behind these activities and the points at which interactions occur.

The interaction points 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 journey visualization method: Journey map UX design

A user journey map is usually represented by a linear graphic, which indicates, explains, and describes various dimensions and aspects of the actions taken and their results.

It's created in many variants, but in most cases, they're a modification of the basic model consisting of 5 elements.

The top layer includes a clearly defined user, a scenario of their journey, and the goals they intend 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.

Users' point of view on a user journey

In this model, a user is considered to have a specific point of view, different from the viewpoints of other categories of users, which can be distinguished through segmentation and data analysis.

Data that is collected, for example, during user research, observations, from analytical systems, interviews with customers, or employees of individual departments, particularly those with direct contact with customers.

Usage scenario of UX journey map

A scenario describes and explains the situation you want to explore and illustrate. It's the user's way to achieve their goal.

If they want to open a bank account, as part of the scenario, you need to include all the actions they will take and all the sources of information they 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 or designed (in the case of those being launched).

Stages of a journey

Journey stages illustrate and organize a sequence of events, actions, and accompanying reactions. They allow you to understand the causes and mechanisms of their recurring consequences.

It's necessary to meticulously examine the changes in the user's thinking, feeling, and behavior at each stage.

At the same time, it isn't a matter of enumerating them in detail but of creating a kind of "big picture" of a given stage.

Capabilities of a user journey

The bottom part of the user journey map contains insights, reflections, and suggestions for optimizing actions.

It's worth remembering that user journey mapping is used to capture extreme reactions — positive and negative.

Indirect and nuanced reactions aren't helpful in this context.

How is a user journey map created?

The usefulness of a map depends on the precision and reliability with which you will:

• Obtain all analytical data
• Define all the goals that users want and may want to pursue
• Determine all possible points and moments of interaction, along with their characteristics
• Identify all possible emotions, thoughts, attitudes, and reactions.  

Advantages of a user journey map (journey map design)

Diagnosing, predicting, and optimizing. These are the three most important advantages of this method.

A user journey map (UX journey map) allows you to make more relevant and reasonable optimizations.

At the design stage of a digital product, a user journey map enables you to develop a shared perspective for the whole team creating a product or service.

Most importantly, it lets you avoid misguided and ineffective solutions that are a source of pain for the user (pain points).