If you have five members on your team, you probably have five well-intentioned ideas of what features users need or what should be prioritized during a redesign. Often these opinions are the result of missing information or failing to see the bigger picture. Understanding what your users need from your product or service at different moments in time is important—but complicated. That’s why user journey mapping is so helpful. User journeys break down a complex series of interrelated actions and feelings into a visual format that is comprehensive but also digestible and easy to share. Because of this, teams are able to get actionable insights into how to improve the product at different stages of the journey without losing sight of the overall experience.

In order to create a user journey, your team must first develop personas. Personas are developed based on research with actual or representative users. They are developed to ensure your team has a mutually agreed-upon understanding of who you are designing for. They have the added benefit of helping your team avoid designing for themselves. Your digital product will have unique personas for groups of users who have unique behaviors, motivations, and goals. A user journey visually maps a persona’s experience with a digital product, relating to a specific goal. A user journey can describe a persona’s experience with the the current product or an ideal experience that the team has yet to create.

User journeys are created using a variety of user experience research methods, the most common of which include:

Analyzing analytics to uncover common pathways to a goal.
Direct interaction or observation of the people who use or would use your product.

We do not recommend solely relying on analytics to create user journeys. The “what” is just as important as the “how” and you’ll only get that data by observing or talking to users. By triangulating data from direct and indirect user research methods, your team can uncover shared behavior patterns, preferences, and feelings. These often change throughout the user’s experience with the product, service, or organization. At Voice+Code, we often create create user journeys that plot important stages of their interactions across the top of the page, creating column names for each one. We then add three rows: Touchpoints, the Persona’s Perspective, and Insights and Recommendations—all of which are specific to that moment in time.

We recommend your user journey include:

Persona’s name.
The goal that persona is trying to achieve.
Your corresponding organizational goal.
Different stages of interaction with the digital product, which can sometimes include a variety of online/offline touchpoints.
Persona’s perspective throughout the journey.
Potential roadblocks that would prevent the persona from accomplishing their goal.
Insights and recommendations for improving the user journey.

An example of a persona and a user journey

User journeys can zoom in on a very specific interaction. For example, if you are investigating the use of a specific feature. They can also zoom out to develop a birds-eye view of the how different touchpoints affect the overall experience. For example, we’ve done user/customer journeys for nonprofits that illustrate how a potential donor finds out about an organization, decides to give for the first time, becomes more engaged with the organization, and so on. This journey involves online and offline interactions that relate to each other, which is helpful to map out at a high level as we think about the nonprofit’s UX strategy.

Like all user research artifacts, user journeys are living documents. They can and should be updated over time. After a user journey exercise, your team may also decide to zoom in or out of the user journey you created. The best thing about user journeys is that they take something complex—how a user interact with your organization or product—and makes it easy for technical and nontechnical stakeholders to understand and make more informed decisions about the UX strategy.

What Are User Journeys and How Can They Help Your Website or App?