How Journey Maps Unlock The Keys To UX Success

Humans are empathic by nature. No wonder our brains light up with the 'feel good' hormone (oxytocin) whenever we are presented with a story we can resonate with. The sense of shared connection through communication increases trust and compassion.

People come together to weave and share stories, which gives a sense of unity. The purpose of a journey map in the business world is similar.

It is typically a visual representation of how a customer interacts or engages with a brand. Such a map can help brands create 2x effective campaigns that tug at customers’ heartstrings. Since the ultimate aim of journey mapping is to foster a stronger bond with customers, it is undoubtedly one of the key ways to unlock UX success.

How exactly? Growth Jockey has some insights to share.

Understanding a User Journey Map Closely

We like to understand a customer journey map like this – it is a visual depiction of the path taken by an individual customer with your brand. Every customer interacts and engages with a brand to achieve a specific goal – purchase, know more information about a product, etc.

When businesses create a new journey map, they are essentially walking in their customer's shoes. This helps brands understand a customer's experience throughout their journey. Unlike a product roadmap which allows a business to outline its plans for upgrades and new features through the course of a specific time period, customer mapping is all about the customer’s viewpoint.

So, how is this roadmap made? There are several ways to do so. Creating a journey map with a pencil and paper or even with a marker and a whiteboard is easy. However, the current business scenario is so dynamic that this depiction is best done using graphics – infographics, to be precise.

With plenty of fun visual elements, an infographic allows a brand to closely observe a customer's journey from onboarding to conversion and more.

Why is a Customer Journey Map Important?

Journey mapping allows brands to understand how customers view and experience their products by focusing the lens on the customer. For instance – Growth Jockey's team has often observed that brands are in a flurry to release new features and upgrades as they see fit.

However, their mistake is not taking their customers' expectations into account. A new feature may seem helpful from the brand's perspective but not so much from the users.

By that virtue, a customer journey map reminds us that customer expectations differ, and some may even clash with a business’ objectives. Moreover, it exposes areas that need to be optimised and improved. Engagement and retention increase naturally when consistent improvements are made upon customer research.

In fact, Emplifi’s research found that ‘previous experiences’ and ‘speed of delivery’ are the two main criteria for repeat purchases. All these reasons account for the benefits of journey mapping.

What are the Key Elements of a Successful User Journey Map?

We believe that a good customer journey map that follows them closely through their journey with a brand usually involves five fundamental elements, as follows –

1. Personas

We mentioned that a user journey map is about the customer and their journey. The question that arises next is, who exactly are these users? Indeed it is far-fetched to follow every customer along their journey mainly because many will connect through similar touchpoints.

Here’s where the importance of customer personas comes into play. These personas are fascinating because they give information about the general characteristics of a customer group. At the same time, they let you know specifics like psychographics and demographics that help understand customer needs.

Buyer personas are fantastic, and HubSpot found that they improve website effectiveness by two to five times!

2. Timeline

Every journey has a duration with a starting, middle, and ending point. Similarly, every brand must also create its journey mapping through a specific duration.

The end goal is the conversion, purchase, or downloading of the smartphone app. During this period, all customer and brand interactions are recorded.

3. Actions

This element of the roadmap involves understanding the customer's action at every stage of the journey.

For instance – they could click on a push notification or watch an onboarding video. Similarly, actions are tracked to understand what helps engaging with customers the most.

4. Feelings, Questions, and Expectations

This is a very crucial element of the customer journey map. Growth Jockey recommends developing the Y-axis of the graphic map into two sections – positive and negative emotional states.

Here, you must jot down the customer's emotional state at every interaction and stage. For instance – some brands may find that a pop-up was annoying or a product trial made the customer happy. Behavioural analytics allows brands to identify areas of improvement and make necessary changes.

5. Channels

For this element, brands must discover which channels customers use during each journey stage.

For instance – you might observe that a customer usually watches a tutorial on their desktop while they prefer communicating with a sales representative via Skype.

Essential Steps to Creating a Solid Customer Journey Map

Now that we’ve looked at the different elements of a customer roadmap journey, let’s look at the steps to create one for UX success

1. Audience Research

Growth Jockey's team starts with the client company's existing data. This would include website analytics tools, customer service teams, current customer reviews, and mobile analytics tools.

But we don't stop there. Furthermore, research is gathered from other areas, such as interviews and feedback, social media comments, user surveys, and group discussions.

The things to look for are the two extremes – what are some of the positives and negatives customers experience?

2. Building Customer Personas

Ideal customer profiles or personas are nothing other than fictitious representations of actual customer groups.

These personas will represent a user group's background, lifestyle, personality, and demographics. Growth Jockey suggests creating only four personas at the maximum, as this should suffice to understand different customer groups.

3. Identifying Each Persona’s Pain Points

The third step is to observe and identify each customer persona’s pain points. Once that is jotted down, it becomes easier to understand how your product or application can help resolve those pain points.

These pain points can vastly differ – financial, productivity, checkout, product cost, online research, etc.

4. Mapping the Touchpoints and the Timeline

The fourth step ideally involves identifying and mapping each touchpoint following the research phase.

We recommend that brands focus on the touchpoints and their timeline – what and the when. This starts with listing everything down – landing pages, banner ads, support chats, emails, in-app notifications, etc.

Then comes the time to add the emotions, feelings, and moods associated with each touchpoint.

5. Interactions Optimisation

We believe that more than simply knowing the different interaction points is required. This step should be followed by streamlining or optimising these interactions.

Growth Jockey encourages brands to ask questions like – how can we make the customer buying experience easier? How can potential roadblocks of lifetime customers be removed? How to best engage with them, so they continue to choose our brand in time to come?

6. Looking for Insights

Once the user journey has been mapped, the key to success is to draw valuable insights. This is when brands need to hunt down that 'Aha moment' which helps them improve user experience.

It is time to ask essential questions on improving the user experience, taking steps to push each user further down the sales funnel, and increasing conversions.

7. Revisions Based on the Insights

Growth Jockey understands that a customer’s journey is ever-evolving. Just like it does not stay constant, a brand’s mapping should not either. Your motives for investing in CX might change, or the ratio may differ.

For instance – a study] found that 42% of brands focus on CX for upselling and cross-selling opportunities, 33% wish to improve retention, and 32% solely fixate on customer satisfaction.

Based on the insights, it is time to keep refining the user journey and glean further new insights, and the process goes on till the UX is perfectly streamlined.

The Best is Yet to Come!

We always say that one should appreciate the power of a solid customer roadmap journey. Once you have gathered sufficient users, start building a roadmap for their buying journey. Start from the early days of growth itself.

Why is it important to start early?

• To understand every customer touchpoint.

• To ensure maximum customer satisfaction with your brand

• To uncover new business opportunities

The best is yet to come! So, begin building a new journey map today.

At Growth Jockey, we are dedicated to crafting personalised models that successfully tackle the key challenges encountered by our clients across diverse industries, enabling them to enhance the user journey. Regardless of your company's size, whether it's a small-scale enterprise or a large corporation, you can now leverage advanced technology to optimise the user journey. Take a decisive step towards unlocking the next level of growth for your brand by contacting us today!