Mapping the User Experience
Understanding a customer’s experience with your product is an essential part of user-focused product design. We often approach this task through journey mapping, a method that organizes and visualizes the steps users take with a product or service. Journey maps break high-level goals down into constituent parts, identify pain points, and find hidden unmet needs. When done well, they’re fantastic tools for innovation and prioritization in the product development cycle.
However, not all journeys are on the same scale and scope. One important delineation to make is between mapping a user journey and a user flow.
User journeys look at the big picture, across multiple tools and touch points. User Flows zoom in and map individual tasks.
While each on their own are powerful tools, together they provide a comprehensive and compelling story to guide your product decision making.
User Flows: Product-Specific Breakdowns
User flows are a granular, zoomed-in approach to product research. They take one specific objective and try to understand how users accomplish it on your platform.
Examples of user flow subjects might be:
- Purchasing an article of clothing
- Booking an appointment
- Changing a setting
- Signing up for a newsletter
User flows are a powerful tool for product teams to understand current friction points in their platform. Once mapped out, clear friction points can be addressed and feature gaps can be identified for future development.
Methods for User Flows
- Replay the action itself
The most direct way to map out a user flow is to actually watch it happen. Use Sprig’s Replay study to trigger a screen recording before and/or after a key moment in a user flow and watch how it actually unfolds.
Use this method to see if your planned flow is reflected in actual behavior, and to understand key usability issues within your current design.
- Task-triggered in-product surveys
Set up an in-product survey that triggers at what you believe a key moment is in a broader user goal. This could be the first step (e.g. clicking “sign up” to begin a sign-up flow) or a final step (clicking “pay now” in a purchasing flow). Then, ask questions related to this task, such as:
- What is your goal today?
- What does success mean for this goal?
- What steps do you need to take to consider this task “done”? Select all that apply.
- Rank the following features in how helpful they were in getting your job done.
- What do you wish you could do that you couldn’t?
Questions like these can help illuminate the intricacies of a task and help understand what’s missing in the flow.
While user flows are a great tool, relying on them exclusively can have some major shortcomings. User flows do a great job of capturing tactical information and spotting usability issues, but they don’t do much to illuminate the broader motivations of customers using your product.
User flows study users in your context, not theirs. Without that broader view, you’ll never fully understand their needs.
If you want your user flows to really come to life, pair them with a broader user journey map.
User Journeys: Your Users’ Full Context
User journey mapping is a high-level, holistic approach to generative research. It tracks a users’ complete journey through a task, including many points of interaction with your product, uses of other tools, and non-product-focused moments of decision making.
For example, imagine a ride-share company is trying to understand and improve the user experience of ordering a ride and meeting the rider.
A user flow might look at this as a product task, and track a users’ movement through individual pages and navigability. It explores how many people can complete the task, the time it takes, the intuitive ordering of individual tasks, etc.
A user journey approach will consider that this process actually started before the app was even open. It will explore where the rider is, who they are with, how stressed or in a hurry they are, and why they chose this app as opposed to another.
Contextualizing individual user flows in a broader user journey will:
- Create user-focused story in addition to product-focused recommendations
- Contextualize failure points emotionally, and brings in external context you might have missed (e.g. location, time of day, state of mind, collaboration with other tools)
- Illuminate less visible pain points, highlights moments of non-use as well as failed use
- Bring together siloed product decisions into a single narrative
Methods for Building User Journeys
There are a lot of different ways to start understanding your broader journey map:
- Take advantage of internal wisdom
Before speaking directly to users, talk to your product, customer success, and sales teams. Interview or survey them about what they believe the users’ experience with the platform is.
This will give you a place to start building participant studies, and reveal gaps in knowledge across teams.
- Add contextual questions to an in-platform study
If you’re already conducting in-platform usability testing, start adding a few optional contextual questions to your design, such as:
- What caused you to come on to the platform today?
- What goal were you hoping to accomplish?
- What are three words that describe your emotional state as you signed onto the platform today?
- What’s the next step in this process after you leave the platform?
- What other tools (if any) are you using to get this task done?
This will begin to contextualize your individual user flows into the broader journey your users are on, without adding extra projects to your timeline. Get more thought-starting prompts with Sprigs survey templates.
- Launch long-form surveys to explore user touch points
If you’ve completed user flow studies and understand individual touch points, surveys are a great way to add context and nuance to your findings while maintaining speed and scale.
Use Sprig’s Long-form Survey tool to ask questions about a user goal that wouldn’t fit in an in-platform survey. Get a sense of context and nuance around a known goal.
Ask questions like:
- When did you know it was time to do this task?
- What does success look like when you set out to do this task?
- Where are you when you complete this task?
- Walk me through all the steps in this task, from the second you think of doing it to the second it’s done.
- What tools do you use to complete this task, and how do they work together?
- What does “done” look like in this task?
- What does “failure” look like in this task?
- What major concerns do you have around completing this task?
- Think back to the last time you tried to accomplish this task. Tell us the story of how it came up, what you did, and how you felt while you were doing it.
- Run 1:1 Interviews
If you’re starting from scratch and want a truly bottom-up approach to user journeys, nothing beats long-form conversation. Sit down with users and have them walk you through their whole process from start to finish and map out similarities.
From there, you can use your findings to inform deeper dives into individual flows.
Together, user flows and user journeys give teams a complete picture, connecting everyday usability to the deeper motivations that drive great product experiences. For more concrete tips on leveraging research tools to build journey maps, check out our tactical Journey Mapping How-To.