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4 Steps to Create the Ideal User Journey Map
Guides

4 Steps to Create the Ideal User Journey Map

Written by | Nov 01, 2023

November 1, 2023

4 Steps to Create the Ideal User Journey Map

Have you ever used a platform or app and thought that the experience wasn’t very intuitive?

The sign-up process was difficult or you just couldn’t find the “back” button. Or maybe the whole experience shut down and logged you out while you were trying to complete a purchase.

Now imagine that your product might have these types of issues and you don’t know where these issues are in the overall user journey.

That’s why defining a solid user journey is so important. User journey maps can help you build a comprehensive visual picture of all these interactions and ensure that interactions with your product are seamless and even delightful to the user.

This article describes how you can create a user journey map for your product and the tools necessary to get user feedback on the product experience.  

What is a user journey map?

A user journey is a user-centric view of how, where, and when people discover and then interact with your product.

It also visualizes how users get interested in and consider your product a viable option against your competitors.

A user journey map includes: user objectives, needs, and challenges as they seek to overcome a pain point in their daily or professional lives. To help you develop your journey map, we describe a 4-step process below.

1. Define User Personas

The first step is defining your user persona, which is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.

The persona can be created in several different ways including by talking to current users of the product and then segmenting them by demographic or behavioral data.  

A persona should have the following:

  • Who is the person (eg. a product manager at B2B company)
  • What is their main goal? (eg. to build exceptional products for businesses)
  • What is their main barrier to achieving their goals (eg. not enough time for collaboration)

2. Gather Research on Users

Next, product teams should start by collecting information about the target persona.

Steps to gathering user research include:

  • Start qualitative and quantitative research to understand your target audience better: Examples of this include customer interviews or launching in-product surveys to better understand user thoughts and feedback.
  • Use your existing customer base to understand what helped them discover and engage with your product.
  • Combine product adoption data, revenue data and behavioral data to understand how your users are engaging with the product and what features they like. For example, you can use a tool like Mixpanel to get data points on user behaviors and then a tool like Salesforce can provide revenue data.

3. Map the User Journey

Now you have the personas and the insights that showcase the interactions of these personas with your product. You need to focus on three aspects of these personas to map your user journey map.

  1. Where did they discover your product
  2. What interactions did they have with your product
  3. How did it make them feel

Steps to mapping the user journey

  1. Outline Touchpoints: Identify all the touchpoints where users interact with your product or service. Touchpoints can include your website, mobile app, customer support, social media, and physical locations if applicable.
  2. Create User Flow Diagrams: Create a visual representation of the user's journey. Start with a simple flowchart or diagram that illustrates the user's path from the initial interaction to their ultimate goal.
  3. Define User Actions: Break down each step in the user flow and define the specific actions users take at each stage. For example, on an e-commerce website, actions might include searching for a product, adding it to the cart, and making a purchase.
  4. Identify Existing Pain Points and Opportunities: Analyze the user journey you've created to identify pain points, obstacles, and areas where users may drop off or become frustrated. You can again leverage product analytics and sales data to understand the points where your users may be experiencing difficulties.
  5. Emotional Mapping: Consider the emotional aspects of the user journey. Note how users may feel at each stage – whether they are happy, frustrated, confused, or delighted.

4. Validate the User Journey with Insights

Congratulations! You now have the initial user journey map. Now you have the opportunity to gain important insights from each touchpoint:  

  1. Deploy in-product surveys at each touchpoint to understand the effectiveness of that touchpoint.
  2. Incorporate the feedback from these surveys into your user journey map so that you can discuss ongoing improvements with your leadership during your monthly product reviews.
  3. Prioritize product changes and new features based on survey responses and discussions with leadership. For example, you may receive feedback such as: “form doesn’t work,” or “can’t complete purchase.” You’ll want to immediately address these problems to improve the overall user journey.

Optimize the User Experience with Sprig AI

Staying on top of every customer interaction with your product and brand can be overwhelming. Sprig’s GPT-powered AI analysis makes it easy to analyze all of the user feedback and turn that feedback into product recommendations.  

Sprig AI dives into each and every survey response to find the most common themes in the user feedback and instantly summarizes them, so you can easily take action.

You can also ask Sprig AI to answer any custom questions about your survey data, and it will analyze responses across all of your survey questions to find the answer. Sprig AI can even look across multiple questions to identify correlations between how users answered one question from another.

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