User Journey Mapping

User Personas and how they use the same product differently!

User Personas help us target specific segments of Users. In order to know, if users are having a good time or a tough time knowing/buying/using/servicing the product, one needs to map their journey in the context of the product.

Definition: It is a visual representation of the Individual User Persona’s most prominent interaction flows with the product. There is a significance of averaging this experience over no. of interactions, over a period of time in different situations, moods, needs, and mediums.

In a way, knowing the users through user persona or empathy maps help pivot the user journey map around the target user’s thoughts, actions, expectations, and behavior. sometimes, Users don’t know/say what they actually want/do.

Key Elements of a User Journey map are:

• The User’s Persona — helps identify and understand the predictable/unpredictable steps in the User’s journey
• The user’s Goals: at various steps of his journey
• Process: The steps/methods involved in the journey
• Experience: What Users would perceive as a good experience as well as what bad experience he would expect not to have
• TouchPoints: The various touch points enabling a user to sail through in this journey
• Pain Points: what users acknowledge as the major pains/limitations of the experience and what your product should prioritize to solve to get traction.
• Idea: What would be the best-perceived solution for the User.

User Journey mapping helps with useful insights while providing the larger holistic picture of the User experience from their own perspective.

The opportunities unlocked by this info is how product brand can influence the entire acquisition-experience-repeat cycle of Awareness- (gain more specific) Information to garner Interest- Convert Interest into Desire (irresistible and action-oriented) — (resulting into)Acquisition of the product — usages and discovery experience (pleasant, indifferent, painful over the period of time) — repeat/upscale the investment.

While it may appear that UJM is relevant only for software-based products, it is not so.

It applies to any product which requires User action to deliver.

Let’s say how a User persona uses a Microwave oven, Washing Machine, dishwasher, Music system. automobile or a bike.

What different modes they use, what is the sequence of actions, does making any button bigger and more rugged helps the User.

Similarly, are there certain features almost never discovered/used by the Persona? If so, would they value us trimming it out of the product for a cheaper price? These insights help product designers come up with an intuitively and functionally better and sometimes decluttered/trimmed down version/variants of the current product.