Mapping Your Journey
When making a product or service, a key aspect of that process is the journey your user will go on. While everyone’s end goal is often of the same ilk, the journeys they take to get there can often be vastly different. The question is though, how can someone document those journeys in a way that’s actionable.
Journey Maps
One of the best ways to document these journeys is with the appropriately named “Journey Map”. As described by Nick Babich of Adobe, these maps can be extremely beneficial for product teams or whoever else may be trying to analyze how a service/product functions
A customer journey map (or user journey map) is a visualization of the process that a user goes through to accomplish a goal while using a product or service. Customer journey maps help envision the entire experience from the user’s standpoint, offering the product teams valuable insights that can help them optimize the user experience according to their needs.
A great example of what a Journey Map should contain from NNGroup.com
The biggest strength of the journey map is the full picture view it provides. You’ll be able to notice issues or strengths in almost any part of the process. While this may lead you to discover issues you didn’t know even existed, it can also give you a much clearer perspective on how a user may interact with a product.
For example, if you did a journey map about buying a car, one insight may be that the user enjoyed having a smaller, more focused selection of cars rather than venturing through a giant lot. This gives you both the insight that giant lots of cars may not always work for every customer, as well as that focusing the selection can cause the customer to make decisions quicker than normal
My own journey map
Similar to my previous research, I ended up creating my own journey map to get a better feel for the process. The journey I choose was the journey of buying a video game
My full journey map
While creating this map, one thing I realized is how much an experience or journey can be changed one just one part of the chain is broken. When buying a game, Skyler could know exactly what she wants, go to the store quickly with no traffic and be the only person in the store, eliminating almost every inconvenience she could face. Unfortunately, if the only copy of the game the store carries is one with a broken box and scratched up disc, then the whole experience has likely been ruined.
On the other hand, the map also shows that oftentimes the journey isn’t as bad as it may seem. There’s often annoyances, but when thinking about them more for the journey map, you begin to realize what makes something a small inconvenience, while another is a core part of the experience. For example, it can be very frustrating to have to rip off a bunch of different stickers and wrappers on a game box, ripping up the cover and having small pieces of adhesive stuck over the box. In reality though, the end goal is to play the game and while the cover may not be perfect, the game can still be played.
Obviously you want to be perfect and make sure no one has a bad time, but that’s just unrealistic. By utilizing tools such as journey maps though, you can create a clearer picture on what are simply inconveniences versus what’s destroying the whole experience
