Before you can help customers or optimize their experience, you first must understand what that experience entails. To ensure customers have the best possible experience, it’s crucial to create user journey maps. In the process of mapping user experiences, you’ll be surprised by the value and opportunities that arise just from the exercise of creating the map itself.
Why Do User Journey Mapping?
Something I routinely hear from UX professionals is that they have a difficult time gaining buy-in for user-focused initiatives, such as journey mapping. But journey mapping can uncover truths and lead to outcomes that have a direct impact on your company’s bottom-line, and it’s our job to help others understand this.
When we prioritize understanding the user, it elevates the customer experience. You will build authority, trust, and loyalty in the long-term. You’ll naturally create brand ambassadors because customers love engaging with a brand that understands them and solves their needs. You’ll also remove roadblocks for users and help them complete tasks in the short-term, potentially leading to immediate additional revenue or saved customer service costs.
Creating user journey maps fosters better internal communication, collaboration and team alignment. You’re forced to acknowledge and discuss challenges, objectives, what you know, and what assumptions you’re making — openly and without judgment or blame. Journey maps help you get on the same page, assign ownership, and show how every individual role directly impacts the customer experience, which is critical for forward momentum, problem-solving, and job satisfaction.
Business Impact of User Journey Mapping
- Elevates customer experience
- Builds authority, trust, loyalty
- Removes roadblocks for users
- Additional revenue
- Saves customer service cost
Team Impact of User Journey Mapping
- Better internal communication + collaboration
- Alignment on challenges + objectives
- Discovery of unknowns
- Increased ownership
- Shows how individuals impact CX
When you create journey maps, your team will have “ah-ha” moments where you surface opportunities. You’re able to zoom out of your day-to-day work and focus on the overall customer experience. You’re encouraged to discuss customer thoughts and emotions, rather than only function or immediate monetary return. In other words, you’re able to unlock tools and modes of thinking for long-term strategy and solutions, rather than solely short-term gains.
Creating Your First Customer Journey Map
Share Your Goals
Talk to your team about your intention to create a customer journey map and why, using the previous section as a guide. Emphasize the benefits and potential monetary gain and efficiencies. Get buy-in on doing one in the first place.
Rather than pulling a group together at first, meet with important stakeholders one-on-one. Business stakeholders may include marketing managers or directors, channel leaders or specialists, data analysts, or sales leaders. You may also consult with creative directors, designers, and other creative folks to gain buy-in and support.
It’s important to seek alignment and collaboration throughout this process because creating journey maps is difficult, and it’s easy to lose momentum or interest along the way. Every stakeholder you meet with will have a unique perspective to help you see the bigger picture as you seek to improve overall customer experience.
Let people know you want their input and involvement — that this isn’t something you’re going to do in a secret UX clubhouse, away from the rest of the team. You need their insights and input. If you do the work to show the value, you should have UX champions on your side, just as excited as you are to begin the journey mapping process.
Start Simple
User journey maps will look different depending on the purpose. You can create something that’s complicated and sprawling, showing a user’s journey across multiple devices and channels over time. But for your first user journey map, start with a simple path — one you already know well.
If possible, choose a path that’s limited to one or two channels and partner with business stakeholders to choose one that can make an impact. Maybe you choose a path that generates a ton of revenue. Or maybe you choose a webpage that you thought would perform better than it does. The important thing is that you bite off a small chunk and that you’re aligned with others who you need on board with you.
Gather Internal Data
Start with what you know about your customers and can prove with internal data or resources. Elicit resources and feedback from team members. If you’re creating a user pathway for a website, look at Google Analytics data, such as click-through rate, bounce rate, and event tracking. If you use Mouseflow or other heatmapping tools, those would be helpful resources. You can also talk to your sales team, listen to phone calls, talk to your customer service team, look at chat logs — anything that gives you a better picture of how users are behaving throughout your chosen pathway.
When you’re gathering internal information before creating your user map, you want to have an idea of how much information is “good enough.” Start with info that’s readily available rather than diving straight into user research mode. In the world of UX, there are different approaches and opinions here, but that’s my two cents. Do enough research to have an idea of your primary profile, and move forward. Otherwise, you can risk getting bogged down in this stage without much to show for it.
Your first try doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s more important to have something, and then you have a document to test against. If we all acknowledge that a user journey map is a starting point and not an end product, then that takes a lot of anxiety out of the process and allows it to develop quickly. This way, you can prove the value of the user journey map and put it to work before worrying about the finer details.
Write a User Profile
Once you feel you have enough information on user behavior, take a stab at defining your primary user. You and your team should continually acknowledge that a first draft of a user profile may still include assumptions, biases, and best guesses. Every piece of your profile probably won’t be supported by data or research. That’s okay!
For the primary user profile, you need to know the main objective of the user. What are they trying to accomplish by contacting your company and why? At this point, anything on top of that — such as known obstacles they’re encountering, concerns they have, and emotions they’re feeling — is a cherry on top. Dive in. Get a user profile done, so you can get going on your user journey map. It won’t be perfect, and that’s okay. You can revise later after you do more research.
Create the Journey Map Together
After you’ve defined a user profile and you’ve decided on a user pathway with stakeholders, put a meeting on your calendar with your team to create it. You’ll need at least two hours.
In your team meeting, review the user profile and brainstorm expectations the user will have in this specific journey. Your user profile and their broad goals and expectations will go at the top of your journey map. Remember, there should be a clear, singular objective, such as, “User needs a mobile credit card reader for their small business.”
Next, have all the steps outlined that the user is taking on this pathway, and have everyone go through the steps and put themselves in the user’s shoes as much as possible.
For example, your steps could be:
- User Googles “best mobile credit card readers”
- User lands on review article for best credit card readers
- User scans/reads article
- User clicks “buy now” button for a Square credit card reader
I recommend putting these steps side-by-side at the top of a white board or a large piece of butcher paper.
As everyone goes through the user pathway, have them write notes on how they felt, thoughts they had, and when their expectations didn’t match reality. I recommend having them write each one on a sticky note, and each person can place their sticky notes under the headings you placed on your whiteboard or butcher paper. Then you can come back together as a group and discuss your experiences, decide on what were the common denominators between the experiences, and what should stay on the map.
The bottom of your journey map is for opportunities, solutions, questions, or places that need further research. This is where you put your “ah-ha” moments, which will naturally arise during your discussion of the experience. In fact, it will be difficult to keep your discussion user-focused before this point. Everything above this section should be about the user’s experience. This “opportunities” section should be the only section on the map that’s talking about the business side and what the business can do to improve CX.
Test and Revise
Once you’ve surfaced opportunities, you’ll naturally surface unknowns and opportunities to test. The strategy for prioritization should be agreed upon by all business stakeholders. You may decide to prioritize according to things like potential revenue, a time needed and resources required, difficulty level, or other factors.
You should continually test against your user journey and surface what assumptions may be wrong. Everything on your map should be in question until it’s validated or invalidated by user research. Hopefully, if you’ve set your expectations correctly with your team, then when you have parts of your journey map invalidated, it won’t be a surprise or seen as a failure. It’s a win, and should be treated as such! You’re finding out more about your users, you’re learning, and you’re ultimately improving the customer experience.
Every team, role, and the department is different. Take my approach and make it your own. Discuss it with your teammates and colleagues. Adopt an approach that will work best for you and your team. The most important thing is to dive in.
