A user journey can be used to show how a user can interact with your app or website and the different screens they’ll see as they use different features of your product. No two users will ever use a product in exactly the same way, so by exploring several different user personas you can see how different people will use the product.

Why it’s important to map journeys

There are several key benefits to mapping user journeys.

Defining users and user segmentation

Users are defined or segmented by looking for usage patterns in your app. Observing users in the middle of activity and understanding how they are feeling about their experience and how they are reacting to it allows you to provide content that the users want.  Defining users and user segmentation is great for increasing the efficiency of mobile marketing campaigns – you’ll be able to push the right content to the right users.

A great example of apps that use user segmentation are media apps like music players – the music that the user is interested in is suggested to them based on what they frequently listen to. The same can be said for video and photo apps too. Instagram for example suggests photos and videos that may interest the user on the home page of the app.

Make your UI more intuitive for the user

By mapping user journeys you can see exactly what users are looking at in your app and also where they are clicking. If there is content that you want them to see or use but they aren’t seeing or using it, it could be assumed that perhaps the interface of the app does not make it easy for the user to find this content. Everybody has a different opinion on what makes a good user interface because design is subjective – some people may love one interface and hate another and vice-versa. By working with your users you can help improve the user interface of your app and then in turn make a better user experience for them.

Create smoother user experiences

In addition to the point above, you can see where users get lost in your app and then think about how to guide them to help them use the app more productively or efficiently. If it takes too long to achieve a goal or it takes too many taps or button presses, then you know the steps you need to take in order to simplify the journey to this goal.

One way to get users to use all of the available features of your app is to motivate them to do so. You could use an incentivised campaign to do this which would involve offering the user something valuable or worthwhile if they used a certain part of your app, or you can use a push campaign which are ways of informing customers about the proper methods of using the app, thus hopefully improving their user experience.

How to map a user journey

There are several prerequisites that you need to have in place before you can begin to map a user journey.

Consider using a framework to help plan the journey

Like frameworks in design, a user journey framework provides guidelines to helping you create the best user journey possible by listing the data that you should try and record from your users.

A simple user journey framework looks like this:

• Actions: record what the user is doing at each stage of the journey and also record what they are doing to move onto the next stage (e.g. which buttons are they clicking or tapping to move onto the next page in the app?)
• Motivations: what keeps the customer motivated to use the app? Why does the customer care about the using the app and how do they feel when they use the app?
• Emotional responses: what kind of emotional response does each stage of the app generate? Does the customer’s emotional response deter them from continuing to use the app or does it motivate them to continue using it?
• Questions: record any uncertainties or concerns that prevent the customer from wishing to move onto the next stage of the app.
• Barriers: are there any obstacles that prevent the customer from moving onto the next step? Is there a structural barrier or an economic barrier or a physical barrier? Finding out what stops customers progressing with using your app will help you to provide a smoother experience for the user in the future.
• Touchpoints and interactions: this is explained later, but record how the customer interacts with your brand. Do they click on an advert, make an in-app purchase or share the app with their friends on social media?

This framework is often used in surveys, interviews and focus groups as well as observations and analytics recordings. There are other techniques that should be considered too, such as asking customers to record a diary of how they used the app, what they did, how it made them feel and so on. This helps to keep the customer at the centre stage of the user testing and will help you to further understand how you can continue to improve the user experience of the app.

You need to have a well-researched user

You’ll find that a certain type of ‘loyal user’ keeps coming back to use your app if you record relevant user data and analyse it correctly, however you should also find that there are some slightly more ‘random’ users that use the app too that don’t necessarily fit in with the ‘loyal user’. You need to create several different user personas which will in turn allow you to test for multiple hypotheses and allow you to create a user journey that is not applicable only to one type of user.

You need to have clear goals in your product

You need to have some kind of goal that the user needs to achieve by using your app. It could be using your app to edit a photo, post a message on a social media platform, plan a weekend away or even something like add an event to a calendar. By setting clear goals you can then see exactly how many taps or clicks it takes for the user to accomplish this goal and it also allows you to see how they go about doing it. Are they finding it easy to figure out how to accomplish the goal or are they getting lost, stuck or confused?

You need to have some ‘in-app events’

These can be things like pressing a share button to share the app via social media or making in-app purchases or using features of the app that might enhance the user’s experience with the app. During your testing you can see if the user took advantage of any of these additional features – did they share the app? Did they make an in-app purchase? By taking these measurements you’ll be able to understand the points in the app that users have trouble keeping their attention focused and to continue their session.

Then you can start to identify customer behaviours

Once you have the prerequisites covered, the first step is to identify the behaviour of the customers across the mobile experience. Look at what kind of journeys new customers are having and trace every step of their journey to help you understand what it is like as a new user to use your app for the very first time. Surveys just give generic results, but by looking at a real user is doing you will get a much more realistic and accurate representation of what the user experience is like.

Understand the goals of the customer

You’ve set your goals, but have you considered the goals of the customer? They’re usually driven by a common goal which is often quite broad at the beginning but quite specific at the end. Let’s take posting a photo on Instagram as an example – to begin with the user wants to upload a photo to Instagram – that’s what most users want to do. But by the end one user might also want to get a like from a specific user, another user might want to tag specific people in their photo, another might want to share an Instagram post from another user via direct messages – the starting goal was the same, but the end goals were all different.

Identify engagement with users

Points of engagement in an app are often called ‘touchpoints’ and they usually revolve around marketing. Start identifying touchpoints by defining all of your marketing and sales activities and consider what kind of user behaviour each strategy is meant to encourage. Then list each touchpoint below the behaviour it is intended to create. This will allow you to improve engagement with your users based explicitly on their behaviours and what kind of behaviours you want to create in the experience of using your app.

Collate your findings and be prepared to make adjustments

When you have completed the user journey map it’s important to keep on gathering data and understanding how users move through their journey. You should set up recurring reports and information gathering methods to create data for the user journey. If you do this you’ll be able to continually monitor the user journey which will help you continue to find gaps in customer experiences which you can improve.

To start with you’ll have data like the devices that are being used, how long they’ve been using the app for, how often they use it and any kind of demographic data. In the future you’ll need to gather more information than this by asking the users for more explicit data to create a more detailed user persona. Once you have a detailed user persona it will be easier to associate user data with their behaviour and the actions that they do which will help pave the way for the development of your app going forwards and help make defining that strategy easier.

Bibliography

Taş, Y. (2017). Benefits Of Mapping A Mobile App Customer Journey. [online] Appsamurai.com. Available at: https://appsamurai.com/benefits-of-mapping-a-mobile-customer-journey/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

Şensoy, K. (2017). App User Segmentation: Best Practices & Examples. [online] Appsamurai.com. Available at: https://appsamurai.com/app-user-segmentation-best-practices-examples/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

Home, H., Clients, F. and Strategy, T. (2017). The Importance of the Mobile Customer Journey for App Strategy – Hiring | Upwork. [online] Hiring | Upwork. Available at: https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-clients/mobile-customer-journey/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].