User Journey Maps to Improve Products and Services
User journey maps let businesses visualize the entire customer experience from initial contact into a long-term relationship with a product/service.
Whether you’re focusing on User Experience, Design Thinking, or Service Design, or a combination of the three, it’s important to understand the user journey. Whether you’re trying to understand the current journey in order to optimize, or designing one from zero for a new project, you’ve got to map it. This is where user journey maps become a valuable tool.
User journey mapping is a powerful, business-oriented way to tackle user experience. It’s powerful because it lets you envision the whole experience from the beginning to the end of engagement. Customer journey maps let businesses visualize, graphically, the entire customer experience from initial contact into a long-term relationship with a product or service. It is important to know what they must build or optimize from a customer’s point of view.
At Each Stage, You Should Map The User’s:
- Actions
- Feelings
- Thoughts
- Needs
- Engagement with the system
They also allow businesses to identify gaps between a customer and a service. Gaps will eventually become user pains and identifying them early allow your business to tackle them before they become problems. By starting your projects with this map, you’ll be more organized and gain more user incites than without.
Takeaway Tips
User journey maps give you:
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- A detailed visualization of a user’s navigation
- A map so you can analyze all the points where/when a user engages with a system or process
- A way to detect gaps and user pains
- A jump start on solving those problems