Mapping the User Journey with UX Best Practices
A user journey map is a visual representation of the path that users take as they interact with your product or service. A user journey map can help you understand where users have gotten stuck, where they’re likely to drop off and what motivates them to keep using your product. The idea behind creating a user journey map is to plan ahead for how potential users will use the product, then make sure those use cases are addressed in the design and development process.
Part of creating a positive user experience (UX) is understanding the journey that your user takes as they interact with your product. The process of moving from awareness to action is called the user journey, and it’s a crucial part of understanding how users interact with your product or service.
The UX Designer will work closely with the Product Manager and other stakeholders to understand what the goals are for each stage in this journey, who uses those products and services, why they’re using them, and how they’ll feel when they’ve reached their goal. This information can then be used to create personas—models based on real people—which can help inform how you design for all types of users during each phase of their experience.
The five stages of the user journey occur in this order: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention and Revenue.
The awareness stage includes anything that brings new users to your product or service. For example, if you’re a SaaS company and want to increase your revenue numbers by 10%, you should focus on increasing awareness of your product through SEO or other digital marketing strategies.
At this point in the process (awareness), it is important to understand how consumers perceive your brand before you can move forward into acquisition strategies that will help them find you on Google.
The acquisition stage includes all the activities that lead to a user interacting with your product or service. This can include things like SEO, paid search advertising and social media marketing. The activation stage is when users interact with your product for the first time and form an opinion about it. For example, if you’re a SaaS company and want to increase your revenue numbers by 10%, you should focus on optimizing activation efforts like onboarding processes that encourage users to continue using your product after their first visit.
The retention stage includes all the activities that keep your users engaged with your product over time. For example, if you’re a SaaS company and want to increase your revenue numbers by 10%, you should focus on improving user retention through things like email automation campaigns or customer support tools.
To build a good user journey map, it’s important to stay focused on what’s right for the people who will use your product. The best way to do this is by getting feedback from real users.
The UX team at Google created an excellent tool called the “User Journey Map” that you can use as a guide for building your own map. It includes templates and instructions so you know exactly how to get started, no matter what type of product you’re working on.
A great user experience will help retain users and motivate them to spend money on your product or service. The goals of a great user experience are to:
- Make sure your users are happy. You want to make sure they’re engaged with your product and motivated to spend money on it, but most importantly, you want them to be retained as customers.
- Keep things simple and intuitive. A good user experience will guide the user along every step of their journey—from figuring out what kind of purchase they want to make, all the way through making that purchase—without getting bogged down in unnecessary details or too many steps.
- Use design elements like color psychology and typography carefully when presenting information about your products/services so that the content is easily readable by all types of users.
With this information in hand, you can now make informed decisions about how best to design your product or service. UX is all about understanding the people who will use your product and considering how they might interact with it. A good user experience can help retain users and motivate them to spend money on your product or service.
How We Can Help
Commerx can help your company with user experience for your product.