Stephanie Walter - User Journey Mapping

Copyright 2022 SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-925836-49-3

• Author: Stphanie Walter
• Series Editor: Oliver Lindberg
• Product Manager: Simon Mackie
• Technical Editor: Jim Kalbach
• English Editor: Ralph Mason
• Cover Designer: Alex Walker

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Stphanie is a User Researcher and Designer who focuses on building user-centered, inclusive and accessible products and services. She spent the last 11+ years helping her clients in different industries (banking, financial, automotive, healthcare, press, travel, etc.) deliver successful projects to their audience, all the way from strategy to the final product.

This book is for anyone who wants to get insight into the use of user journey maps: what they are, how to create them, and how to use them. No prior experience is required.

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Imagine you want to buy a gift for your friend online. You might start by looking for some inspiration. What does this person like? You might use search engines, but maybe also inspiration boards. Or maybe some of those top ten gifts for X articles that are popular, especially around Xmas. You finally arrive on a website that offers the kind of things that inspire you. You go through categories, maybe use the search. You find the right gift, you go through the checkout process. The experience was good and quite simple. You buy it. Then you wait. And it never arrives. After a couple of days you try to contact the shop. It takes them more than a few days to answer. Eventually, after a lot of back and forth with them by email and over the phone, they find out what was going wrong. They agree to send you another one. But sadly, it doesnt arrive on time for the birthday. You might have had a decentmaybe even goodexperience on the website. But how about the overall experience?

When building websites and services, designers need to understand that whole experience. And to do that, we have one very powerful tool: user journey maps. A user journey map is a visual document that will show the whole experience of a user in a chronological way. It documents user goals, phases in the journey, tasks, pain points, sometimes feelings. It helps teams build products by showing a global view. This brings stakeholders and teams together on the same page. It helps brainstorm opportunities to improve the product and solve those pain points. And it lists touch points and channels, which helps break down different gaps you might have in your organization. In my example here, maybe there were organizational issues between the team building the site and the support team, which led to the support being late.

Lets start our journey of discovering user journey maps with a big overview. In this first chapter, well focus on what user journeys are and what to include in them. Well see an example of how a user journey map was used on one of my previous projects. Finally, well see some of the benefits of such a tool, but also things you need to be careful about.

A user journey map helps document and visualize the step-by-step experience someone has with a product or service, from the beginning to the end. It lists the different actions users take to accomplish their goal.

Those actions are arranged in chronological order, often presented as a timeline. The beginning of the journey is on the left, and the end on the right, with all the steps in between. It helps designers (and stakeholders) get a global overview of the whole journey.

The following image shows an example of the Miro customer journey map template.

To build a user journey map, you need data. So youll