Why choose journey mapping?
Providing a holistic view of the customer experience, journey mapping successfully uncovers moments of frustration and delight through investigating a series of user interactions.
Journey maps are effective for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise and that creates a shared vision. The maps can also become a strong basis for effective decision making.
"When successful, they reveal opportunities to address customer pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and ultimately bring a much-improved overall experience for users."
Our journey mapping service offering
At Dapth, we regard journey mapping as foundational to a successful digital project and believe that it should be the first step.
We’ll work with you to map out your customer’s typical journey taken towards conversion, as well as the reasons why they may not be converting. Journey mapping is relevant regardless of industry or organisational size, including:
- Retail
- Manufacturing
- Environment
- Government
- Non-for-profits
And many more.
Benefits of journey mapping
The benefits of journey mapping include:
- Addressing pain points successfully
- Identifying existing strengths, building empathy, and challenging assumptions
- Uncovering opportunities to address user needs
- Communicating research findings
- A shared vision - it becomes everyone’s responsibility to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint
- Easier to turn business insights into long-term improvement strategies
- Identifying and prioritising opportunities for improvement by highlighting customer pain points and current UX strengths
- Creating a future-state vision by mapping the ideal customer experience across touchpoints
- Socialising research into customers’ experiences by highlighting quotes and stories from the field
- Summarising research findings into a polished deliverable
Alternatives to journey mapping
There are alternatives to journey mapping. Whilst it’s a valuable technique, there are alternative approaches to consider that achieve similar goals, including:
- Service blueprinting - this method focuses on not only user’s journey but also internal processes and systems and supports the user experience. It helps identify touchpoints, actions, and potential pain points in a more comprehensive way.
- Experience mapping – like user journey mapping, experience mapping also visualises the user interactions, emotions, and touchpoints. It often includes a broader context, incorporating various scenarios and user personas.
- Customer personas and empathy maps – instead of mapping out the entire journey, you can create detailed customer personas and empathy maps. These tools help you understand your user’s motivations, behaviours, pain points and goals.
- User flow diagrams – focus on the sequence of steps a user takes to accomplish a specific task. They provide a clear visual representation of the path that users follow through a website / application.
- Storyboarding – storyboards use illustrations or visuals to depict a user’s journey to clarify the emotional aspects and interactions in different scenarios.
- Contextual inquiry – involves observing users in their natural environment while they interact with a product or service. It provides deep insights into their behaviours and pain points.
In a typical user journey map, the buying process, emotions, user actions, user research and solutions are generally included.
Actions are the actual behaviours and steps taken by users. This component is not meant to be a granular step-by-step log of every discrete interaction. It is a narrative of the steps the user takes during that phase.
What is the problem you are trying to solve with a journey map? There are many types of journey maps.
What do we intend to design for? Keep in mind User/customer goals, single-touchpoint experience, single-channel experience and cross-channel experience/s.
What are we hoping to achieve? Understanding current state, improving current state, developing a customer-centric roadmap, developing an innovative new offering.
A journey map provides a framework holding everything together, allowing you to view the human context (i.e. user journey) with functional desires over your timeline.
Journey mapping has become the ‘put a bird on it’ of customer insights and business solutions. Businesses are abstracting their customers so frequently and so haphazardly that a real ‘bird’ coming into their shop can throw them into a state of panic.
Do scope by setting goals and prioritising, before and during mapping
Don’t lose sight of the story by layering in information just because, or over-generalising research
Don’t lose sight of people (don’t get lost in the weeds, map in a silo, and forget to include key players
Don’t forget about the scope of the project
Do create guidelines for making journey maps
Do focus by having a message, and communicating critical information
Do remain grounded by staying connected to both research and project goals to inspire action
What is the next step?
We have extensive journey mapping expertise across a range of industries.
Are you ready for the digital revolution?
Talk to us and see how we can transform your digital projects to the next level.
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