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Definition of user journey mapping in UX
A user journey mapping visualizes how the user goes through your product to achieve the goal and pictures each step of the user journey. User journey mapping is also called customer journey mapping, used for marketing and sales funnels. In UX design, user journey mapping can help identify your product's interaction points, find friction, and improve the user experience.
Building the user journey map requires deep analysis of user research, including surveys and interviews. Once the use journey map is created, it allows you to make a customer-centric product.
Benefits of user journey mapping
The most significant benefit of creating a user journey map is that it gives a better perspective of product user experience and allows UX design to strategically approach the points that require improvement.
It also provides a better user emotional state of the product and sees where the users struggle with the product or service.
Essential components of user journey mapping
A user journey map can be different by the product or service.
There are common components for user journey mapping.
- Persona & Senario & Goal
A persona represents the end-user and target customer. Generally, persona includes demographics and the main tasks the end-user wants to achieve from the product.
Also, persona includes primary users’ employee status and main functions for enterprise products.
A scenario should include the entire user journey with the specific situation and motivation that the user works with the product or service. The goal section should consist of the goals the user wants to achieve throughout the journey.
- Journey phase & Touchpoint
Once the user persona is defined, describe the user actions that the user will take for each phase. This section is also called the experience map.
The user journey phase will vary based on the product, and generally, the SaaS product user journey would include five stages: Discover, Engagement, Evaluation, Purchasing/Onboarding, and Advocacy.
Each journey phase has different touchpoints too. For example, a discovery touchpoint in SaaS product would be a cold email, search ad campaign, or blog. An evaluation touchpoint would be a free trial, product demo, or payment options page. Understanding each touchpoint will help you create a better UX design and marketing strategy.
- Emotion
An emotional experience for each journey phase will also help you to define the UX problem and improve the better experience. In each phase, users have different pain points, and they might struggle with moving on next phase. User research can collect customer experience data to create a journey map, and marketing analysis can help you to develop emotional mapping based on user behavior.
- Narrative and Story
Based on all components, create a narrative story of how the user interacts and uses the product. This narrative should be based on qualitative data from user research and survey interviews. It is not imagination or assumption about the user behavior but based on a real user story. If there is any friction in the user journey phase, it requires additional user research. The storyboard will help you create a better narrative story in this section.
Conclusion
User Journey mapping can help the UX team understand the entire user flow of the product and motivation. It is helpful to define the users’ pain points and UX design friction in product development and improve the user experience based on a detailed experience map.
When creating a user journey map, user persona, scenario, and goals are the first things to define. It also requires deep user research, including surveys and interviews for emotional status for each journey path. A detailed user journey map will help to create a narrative story for the entire user journey.
