Importance of User Journey Mapping for a Websites Success
User journey mapping in website design is the tool to describe how site visitors interact with the website. It plays an important role in user experience since it impacts your website and brand impression. Let’s see how user journey can make your website success.
Here are what you need to know about user journey
- What is User Journey?
- Why User Journey Is Crucial to Your Website
- How to Create Your User Journey
- What Make Good User Journey?
- Conclusion
What Is User Journey?
User journey is every single steps of how the users interact with your website from starting point to finishing point. It is the path that the user take on the website to get to their goals. User journey are not only the steps or path that the site visitors take, it is also the feelings and emotions in each stage of using your websites and products over time as well.
User journey are used to enhance the performance of the website in website design. The company models the user journey in order to serve customers’ needs in every steps so the customers can have the great experience on their website.
Why User Journey Mapping is Crucial for Your Website
Enhance user experience
The most well known benefit of user journey mapping is that it provide better user experience. The site visitors will explore your website flowingly and experience less irritations from the website. Without any difficulty faced, your brands will receive positive feedbacks. The customers tend to recommend your products to others and they will keep coming back to support your brands.
Make your brand user-centric.
User journey mapping is an excellent tools for user experience, it make the brands and websites become more user-centric. User-centric approach is when we think and design everything based on the users to give them the best things. The customers will feel important like they are treasured from the brands.
Help you gain more customers.
Creating user journey may help increase your customers. With the websites that are easy to work with and provide good experiences, the site visitors will believe in your brands and eventually become the customers.
Meet your goals and customers’ goals equally
User journey mapping help the brands balance customers’ needs with brands’ intentions. User journey will make the brand know what the customers need to see in each stage and what they can present in each stage to showcase other things they have to offer.
Know your customers better
Making the user journey help you connect with the customers better. After all the user research, you will know more about your customers. Not only the user experience, but it also can be use in developing future products as well.
Targeting specific customers
While analyzing the customers, you will learn about customers’ pain points.You can specify the target customer groups that will be interest in your products or services and how it can solves customers’ problems. Then, you can market your brands for those specific customers. Make your brand known by more people.
How to Create Your User Journey
To create a user journey, the first thing you need to consider are the users. Now, at the designing stage you might not have a real users, so you need to create a user persona. To do this, you need to do a research on potential users to gather the information. Then you will set up a character and what is their goal of using your website. Put in effort in user research so that you have enough information to create a user persona without any assumption.
The user persona is a character that brands create based on potential or real customers. When creating user persona, you need to identify the characteristic, the activities they do, the goals or what they need, and what is the obstacles that prevent them from achieving those goals.
Now that your user persona is solid. You will now look at the current user journey. See how hard or easy it is for the user to complete their goal on the website. Record every flaws and difficulties that might happen in each steps.
Once you know all the situation of your current user journey. You can start user journey mapping process to create an updated version of user journey. Try to make the easiest and the most simple user journal to create the foundation idea for the new user journey. Here are the example of user journey map.
After that, you will then refine your user journey mapping. Take users feeling, intentions, and needs to consideration while perfecting the user journey mapping. There is a tool called Empathy Map that will help you understand how the users feel better. It will help you identify what the customers see or hear and how would they feel after they experience each elements on the websites.
Another important step is to have your team and other people help test the websites and comment about user journey mapping. It might help you see any room for improvement that you couldn’t see before.
What Make Good User Journey?
A good user journey is the one that are produced with care. There are many step into user journey mapping and in each step, there are things for the brands to carefully monitor. Here are some important factors to make an effective user journey for your brands.
User Research
Thorough users research will help build a strong user journey. It means you study the customers deeply and know their problem enough to guide them better with user journey.
Customers Emotions
Considering customers’ feeling in each steps is good for user journey mapping. It helps to not let the customers feel bad while using your websites which will result badly in the end. Plan what they will see or hear from your websites and how will they react, then find solution to try and keep customers’ emotions lifted up.
Consistence
Good user journey should be consistant. The consistency of great user journey should be there at the starting point to the end. Make sure that every touchpoints can meet users’expectations. Touchpoints are users interactions with your websites and products.
Attention to Detail
When creating a user persona, pay attention to details. Include as many details as you can. Make sure those details are realistic. The more details you have for the user persona, the better user journey map you will get. The conditions of each detail will frame the user journey map to the fullest potential and your websites will create a good experience for both users and customers.
There are many more factors that can help enhance your websites’ performance, take a look at other blogs from Viva One Digital for more interesting contents and tips for your website design.
Conclusion
User journey mapping brings lots of benefits to the brands and websites. It will make your customers happy which is the best thing that your brands can offer to them. It will build a reliable image for your brands and help you brands grow bigger and bigger. Start the user journey mapping process and don’t forget to consider all the thing that make a good user journey.