Understanding your users is key to delivering a seamless experience on your website or in your app. One of the most powerful tools for gaining this insight is mapping each user journey.
A user journey map will provide you with a visual representation of the steps a user takes when interacting with your website or app. This will help you see things from their perspective. With this information, you can identify pain points, opportunities, and areas for improvement within your UX (user experience) and website design.
In this guide, we’ll break down the process of creating effective user journey maps, ensuring your website design delivers an intuitive, user-centric experience.
A user journey map is a visualisation that outlines the path a customer takes to complete a task. A user journey begins at discovery and takes you all the way through to conversion or ongoing engagement. It highlights not only the actions a user takes, but their emotions, pain points, and motivations at each step. A user journey helps you understand the entire user experience of your app or website design and allows you to make data-driven decisions for improvements.
On websites there are typically two user journeys:
User journey maps provide clarity on how users interact with your app, website and brand across multiple touch points. They help you:
For your team, mapping your user journeys can also help you create a shared-vision for the business and foster a user-centric mentality. This outlook will help you on the road to achieving your business goals.
Before you start, it’s essential to clarify what you want to achieve. Ask yourself:
Your objectives should guide your journey map’s focus, whether it’s onboarding, checkout, or customer support experiences.
To create an accurate journey map, you need a deep understanding of your users. A great way of doing this is to develop user personas. A user persona is a semi fictional person who is most likely to use your product or service, and access your website. Use both qualitative and quantitative research methods to develop yours, such as:
Then, create these personas. Each persona should have:
Developing a user persona is inherently empathic. It puts your marketing team and/or UX designers in the shoes of the user themselves. The more data you have behind each of your user personas, the more precise your user journey maps will be.
Related Read: How to Create a User Persona
Touch points are the various ways users interact with your brand’s website or app. List every possible touch point your users might engage with on your website or app and categorise them by stages, such as:
By listing these touch points, you can ensure you’re delivering a seamless experience through your website/app.
For each touchpoint, document the following:
Understanding both emotional and practical experiences your users have on your website or app will help you identify accurate areas for improvement.
Now it’s time to visualise the user journey. Your map should clearly show:
There’s no one-size-fits-all template, so feel free to tailor the map based on your objectives.
We recently developed user journeys for our client Exotics Care Online; the UK’s first online veterinary service exclusively for exotics animals. This was a brand new company; this was their first ever website! So, we went through the process of identifying the main user persona of this new brand. This was “Clara Thorne”, a UK-based exotic pet owner.
We identified “Clara’s” user persona. This included their goals and needs, their challenges, emotions and pain points, and thus the touch points that should appear on the website to help them achieve their goals. This then led us to creating a sitemap that made sense to “Clara’s” user needs.
With your journey map in hand, review the entire flow to identify areas for enhancement. Questions to ask include:
Your map should guide actionable improvements that lead to a smoother, more satisfying user experience across your website design and/or app.
User journeys can evolve as your business grows, your product/service line expands and customer needs shift. After implementing changes, it’s crucial to test them.
Gather direct feedback from users, utilise tools like heatmaps, analyse performance metrics, and revisit the user journey map periodically. This way you can ensure it still reflects the most current user experience.
When developing user journeys, there are some best practices to keep in mind.
Creating a user journey map is a powerful way to understand and enhance your website users experience. By taking a step-by-step approach — gathering data, identifying user personas, mapping touchpoints, and visualising the journey — you’ll uncover actionable insights that can transform your website’s usability.
Investing time in this process helps you create a user-centric product or service, driving higher user satisfaction, loyalty, and in turn, success. Start building your user journey maps today, and allow them to help you deliver more meaningful, impactful experiences across your website and app.
If you think your website could do with an expert eye regarding its user journeys, personas and design, contact the KIJO team today.