How can Journey maps help your business?
What if you could validate your business idea before building it? What if you could see the other side of your ecommerce site, your client’s side? During the Ecommerce Day, Inés Carriquiry, UX Designer talked about something related to this. A Journey map is a tool that allows us to see a person’s complete experience with a product, service, or brand. It is normally used to visualize the steps the person goes through until they complete a certain task — i.e. purchase a product on an online store or contact customer service to file a claim on a purchased product. It is really useful to put oneself in the client or user’s position to fully understand their need, context, and behavioural drivers, among other variables.
Developing journey maps consists of a straightforward process that is based on investigation. Research is both quantitative, in everything referring to data and conversions to detect possible usability problems, and qualitative in order to understand why those problems exist. We interview users as well as business stakeholders and base on that to create user personas. It can be done at any moment: for a future situation, thinking how you want your client to navigate your site for instance, or for a present situation, for example to evaluate today’s reality — i.e. where are users facing difficulties trying to perform a specific action — and find ways to solve problems. For future use of the tool, layers are added according to what is needed: how does the user feel in each step, what channels is he interacting with, what is he thinking and feeling during the process, etc. Journey maps can be high-level, as the one described in Carriquiry’s talk, or they can be detailed focusing on each step and how to address an unwanted situation with your customer. Even though there are many ways to develop user personas, we focus on behaviour as well as jobs to be done and not so much on the person’s characteristics, since this will give us actionable insights on how we can assess their needs better.
From the Design area we encourage clients to come with ideas that we can validate, go along the validation process together and help you through it. One of the ways to develop journey maps is to co-create it with the client: we have meetings and activities together in which there are members of the company that know about the experience we aim to map. For instance: if we are mapping a sale’s process, we include salespeople with marketing and commercial roles, and we elaborate the map together. We take advantage of the knowledge of different areas of the company and base on that to carry out the journey map. Sometimes people reckon it is something really complex and that it takes a lot of time. However, it can be done this way, together and then everything is based on the hypothesis we developed and actions are taken: prototypes are built, A/B testing is performed on the Ecommerce site, and KPIs are measured, among other activities.
Journey maps are helpful to achieve a better understanding as well as a more personalized view of clients. It is an instrument that shows the person’s complete experience, which is important to take into account considering that when creating digital products we tend to focus on a screen or a task and forget everything around that: how does the person use the feature, where do they come from, and what is their final objective. The important aspect this tool offers is the possibility to see the side of the people, which entrepreneurs or business owners constantly aim to take into account and face challenges as it is not something easy to visualize. Ecommerce is generally focused on sales and numbers; this tool provides a different focus: the people behind customers and users. It can be useful whether you have an established business with its corresponding Ecommerce site and aim to evaluate which point of the buying process you could ameliorate or whether you have a business idea or project and wish to validate it before carrying it out. If you wish to know more about journey maps you can see and listen to the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcmZ0yjzWcI&feature=youtu.be