User journey mapping visualises the customer experience as they interact with different aspects of your product,including the UI, UX flows, and overall digital experience. It allows teams to pinpoint pain points, understand user emotions and optimise touch points from initial awareness to conversion and retention. It acts as a bridge between ‘user research’ and strategy. It is a visualisation that can cover a customer’s whole relationship with a brand, including its brand identity design and other features.
User journey mapping uses personas to map what users do, think, and feel about all the aspects of a brand, right from the logo design to the packaging. That drives higher conversion rates and better experiences that are more personalised.
User Journey Map VS Customer Journey Map
A user journey map is different from a customer journey map. For example, consider a movie booking app. Designers can create a user journey to understand how users navigate the app interface, layouts, and interaction patterns to book a movie. The marketing team might create a customer journey map to look at the complete experience. For example, how movie-goers discover the app, why they chose it, how they interacted with support, and what drives their long term loyalty.
Key Elements of a User Journey Map
1) Actor or Persona
This is a detailed profile representing your target audience (whoever your corporate branding is meant to reach out to) based on demographics, behaviours and motivations. The actor is who the journey map is all about. Actors usually align with personas and their actions are rooted in data.
There should be one actor per map. Each would have different journeys. The marketer would have to build more than one map, each for the different user types.
2) Scenario and Objective
The context and purpose behind the user’s interaction with your app or service needs to be documented. Understanding what users want (their desired solutions, challenges and intended outcomes) shows how your product can best meet their requirements.
For example, one scenario could be switching TV plans to save money, and the expectations for it to find all the information that is needed to make a decision. Scenarios can be real or anticipated for products that are still being designed. Journey maps are best for scenarios that include a sequence of events, describe a process, or involve many channels.
3) The Journey Phases
This refers to the context and purpose behind the user’s interaction with your app or service. Each journey phase informs key UI decisions, such as content hierarchy, calls to action, and navigation design. There are five sections here, namely awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention. Each step provides the opportunity to either please the user, or create a negative experience. For example, imagine a new mother comes across a link shared by an influencer for your app for baby’s clothes and accessories.
Awareness – this is when they see the influencer’s video with a link to your app on social media. They are intrigued which is a positive experience.
Consideration – The user visits your website to preview the app. If they can’t find what they’re looking for easily, it could turn into a negative experience.
Decision – the user clicks on a link to the app store, reads your app’s reviews, and compares it to others. They might think your price is too high (a negative experience)
Purchase – The user buys from your app and completes the onboarding process. If this is smooth, it’s a positive experience. If not, the customer experience turns negative.
Retention – The user receives follow up emails featuring premium baby clothes and other offers. Depending on the user’s perception of these emails, the experience can range from good to bad.
4) Touchpoints
Touchpoints are every digital interaction point according to your brand strategy the user engages with the brand. These are direct or indirect interactions with a brand that help identify pain points, emotions, and opportunities for improvement.
Touchpoints can be mapped by identifying channels (there are both digital and physical touchpoints), highlighting emotions at each interaction, aligning each touchpoint with brand positioning, using research such as data from user interviews, and visualising all of this by displaying the sequence of events, actions, and thoughts.
5) User Actions, Mindset, or Emotions
This pertains to what the user is thinking, doing, and feeling at each stage to identify pain points and moments of delight. Track user emotions throughout their journey to understand their satisfaction levels and pain points. Document both positive reactions and negative reactions to build a holistic picture of the user experience.
Two Types of User Journey Maps
Current State User Journey Maps
This shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you an idea of what’s happening and illustrates how to enhance user experience. These pain points show where targeted improvements could improve user experience and build loyalty.
Future State Journey Maps
A future state journey map is like a vision board. It shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Draw out your best guesses about user behaviour on a perfect journey and then test them using usability testing. Once you’ve identified your guiding path, you can explore new features to optimize the user experience.
How To Create A User Journey Map
Step 1 – Define User Personas and Goals
Gather data such as demographics, psychographics, and shopping behaviour, and then create intricate customer personas representing your target audience. You can even gather data based on how customers are interacting with your visual identity, such as your logo and brand colours.
Step 2 – Identify Customer Touchpoints
When you follow brand guidelines, you make a distinct voice and image for your brand. In this, users encounter or interact with your product in many ways. These are called customer touchpoints.
Step 3 – Visualise journey phases
Create your user journey map by organising your insights into a comprehensive and actionable format. You can use diagrams, flow charts, and story boards to represent the journey visually.
Step 4 – Capture User Actions and Responses
At each stage of the journey, capture the user story. Document what they’re feeling, doing, and thinking.
Step 5 – Validate and Iterate
Show your product to users. Get honest feedback about what works, and what doesn’t. You can employ user testing, website metrics and surveys at this stage. Apply the user feedback to refine your map.
Start your user journey mapping with us at White Warbler. We’re experts in digital marketing and would love to be your partner in all things digital. Book a session with us today.