Are you starting a website from scratch and don’t know how to build something that people want to use? That’s when user experience mapping can come into hand, as it helps you to sketch out the UX and forecast any friction before creating the actual website. This will also help you get a bigger picture and understand any friction points your customers may be facing before you start building or even designing.
Personas
We’ve talked about buyer personas before and how important they are for your marketing and social media strategy, but they can also come in handy when creating a design if you don’t have users or want to better the design with the personas in mind.
The user experience map shows the needs, expectations, wants and potential routes to a particular goal that our users may have. It’s a behavioral blueprint that defines how a customer interacts with your product. So, having a buyer persona that lets you understand your customer’s needs and pain points will help you to construct a narrative that’ll guide you while creating a design dedicated to your persona.
Why create a User Experience Map?
Having this map will help you to understand your customer's journey first hand. This means, understanding how they approach your product, their frustrations and their pain points. Listen to their experiences to fine-tune your products experience. Understanding your customer's journey will give multiple benefits like:
Having the big picture of how your customer interacts with your product
Optimizes the user experience by identifying the negative experiences
Identifies the costumer’s leak points and gives you the opportunity to bring them on board again
Creates a better customer journey
How to create a User Experience Map?
Personas: As we’ve mentioned in other posts, having a persona will help you understand who your customers are, what they need, and how they interact with your business and product. Most of the information needed to create a user experience map will come from the personas you create, so don’t skip this step!
Customer stages: This step will consist of visualizing the multi-steps your customer takes to get to your product. Here you should illustrate their motives or goals behind the journey. Each stage should represent your customer’s goal-oriented journey, not the process steps of your business.
Your customer’s goal could be ‘find a birthday gift’ and the activities to get there would be: research product, compare, cart, checkout. You should define the distinct steps right from the start all the way to buying your product.
Define your customer's interactions: A ‘touchpoint’ is any point your customer has contact with your business. For any customer to achieve a goal, they must go through multiple touchpoints. Some of them are signing up for a newsletter, creating an account, subscribing or buying a product. You will need to define a list of touchpoints, be as detailed as you can. It might be a long list but it will help you optimize your customer’s journey.
Testing: This might cost a little but it will help you get an accurate end-user insight for your website or product. It will help you to understand:
The goal of your user after landing on your page or trying your product
The feel of the site with your process in place
How they get to the touchpoints on your site?
Their emotions and expectations while interacting with the touchpoints
What friction did they come across?
How long it took them to reach their desired goal?
And a lot more.
Friction: After defining your personas, highlighting the customer stages and discussing it with your team, it's easier to locate the friction areas for customers. You and your team know your customer the best, still, these are a few generic questions that might help you to identify the friction:
Which are the possible points of frictions your customers may find while interacting with touchpoints?
Are they reading all the content before exiting the page?
Are they abandoning their goal because of the lack or excess of content?
Do you have enough content detail on the page that users may want to see?
Is the loading speed causing high bounce rate?
These are a few questions that might guide you but for the best results make sure to view your process through your customers’ lens.
The end goal of a user experience map is to view the journey from the customer’s perspective, note down frictions, and find ways to address it. This will help you to decide a set of actions to improve their experience.
While planning, you should follow your persona’s thought process and try to find ways to address the friction. Have your team work with different personas and solutions, discuss their results and all the possible ways to address the users/ customers friction with them. This way you will have a definite way of addressing the friction and be able to implement it on your user experience map. Now, use your persona and try to reach their goal from the beginning to the end, see if it works, if not address it, and start over until all the bugs are gone.
All this will help you optimize your user experience and drive ROI
It should be clearer that user experience mapping can help you to significantly improve your customers' journey even before you start to design your product. Think from your user’s perspective and visualize the friction you have experienced. Solving and addressing these issues will help you create an amazing product that your customers will love
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