Guide to User Journey Mapping

Larby Amirouche is a trendsetter and a well-respected digital marketing expert in the digital marketing landscape. He has been in the industry for many years which proves his wisdom and knowledge regarding certain aspects of DM is vital for startups and entrepreneurs.

One of the underrated aspects of building a website is journey mapping. Journey Mapping is a visualization of an individual’s relationships with a product/brand over time and across various channels. While journey mapping comes in many forms and formats, commonly it’s represented as a timeline of all interaction between a user and a brand. This timeline holds information about all channels that users use to interact with a brand.

Key Components of a Journey Map

Actor

The actor is the user who experiences the journey. The actor is what the map is for — a point of view for the website. Actors usually align with personas and their actions in the map are from data. Provide one point of view per map in order to build a concise, clear narrative. The actor is also where feedback and reviews comes from, which is important in the betterment and progression of the website

Scenario & Expectations

The scenario describes the instances that the journey map addresses and is incorporated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations. Scenarios can be real for existing products and services or anticipated for the products that are yet in the design phase.

Journey maps are best for situations that involve a sequence of events such as shopping or taking a trip, describe a process thus involving a set of transitions over time or might involve multiple funnels.

Journey Phases

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario.

• For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be discovered, try, buy, use, seek support.
• For big (or luxury) purchases (like test driving and buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
• For a business-to-business scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.

Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions

These are behaviors, thoughts, and feelings the user experienced throughout the journey and that are mapped within each of the journey phases. Actions are the actual behaviors and steps taken by users. This aspect is not meant to be a step-by-step log of every interaction. Rather, it is a narrative of the steps the user takes during that certain phase. Mindsets is about the users’ thoughts, queries, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey. Ideally, these are customer details from research.

Emotions are plotted as a single line across the journey phases, signaling the positive and negative sides of the experience. It is a contextual layer of emotion that tells us where the user is happy or sad with the overall experience.

Opportunities

Opportunities along with additional context such as ownership and metrics are insights gained from mapping. They speak to how the user experience can be optimized for users. Ideas, insights, and opportunities help the brand draw information from the mapped journey.

Larby Amirouche always considers these key points to be very important to truly understand key mapping. Knowing what the users experience on navigating the website is vital in knowing what parts and aspects of the page or website should be improved for better UX which can be the reason to gain more traffic and profit.

Originally Posted: https://medium.com/larby-amirouche/larby-amirouche-guide-to-user-journey-mapping-11a57da2ea99