UX Design: User Journey Map
How people actually use apps is a fundamental question that every designer should answer. In order to answer this question, designers need to understand the essence of the whole experience from the user's perspective. User journey mapping is an excellent exercise that can shed light on that. User journey map is a visualization of an user's relationships with a app over time. While user journey maps come in all shapes and formats, commonly it's represented as a timeline of all touch points between a user and an app. This timeline contains information about all channels that users use to interact with an app. User journey map is an excellent tool for UX designers because it visualizes how a user interacts with an app and allows designers to see a product from the user's point of view.
Before creating a user journey map, it's important to review the goals of our app. This knowledge will help us align business and user goals. Choosing a scope of the user journey map can vary from the high-level map which shows end-to-end experience to a more detailed map that focuses on one particular interaction.
A user journey map is always focused on the experience of one main character, the user who experiences the journey. User persona should always be created based on information we have about our target audience. That's why we always start with user research. Having solid information about our users will prevent us from making false assumptions. Gather and analyze information about the target audience. Interview potential users. Conduct and analyze contextual surveys. Define the scenario and user expectations. The scenario should describe the situation that the journey map addresses. It's also important to define what expectations a user has about the interaction.
Create a list of touchpoints which are user actions and interactions with the app. It's important to identify all main touchpoints and all channels associated with each touchpoint. What problem are users looking to solve when they decide to use our app? Different user segments will have different reasons. For each user journey it's important to understand what users are using our app for, what actions are the users taking, and what are the challenges the user is facing.
Put together all the information we have and draw a journey with step-by-step interaction. Each step demonstrates an experience that the user has with an app or another person. A tool called storyboard can help us show how users can interact with a product. Using storyboard, we can show visually what happens during each step. Apps we design need to mirror the state of mind of our users. When we consider a user's emotional state, it can help us connect with users on a human level. It's important to add an emotional lane to the user journey map. By visualizing the emotions of the experience we can show the areas of experience that require refinement.