App User journey – How to analyze and optimize for a better user experience

What is a User Journey?

User journey is the series of steps the user may want to take to achieve a goal in an app or a website. Usually, the user hops on different pages, a number of CTAs and other elements before reaching the end goal. As a designer, it is important to make the user journey as easy as possible for them to achieve what they wanted in the app. It could be anything from making a purchase, replacing an order etc,.Most importantly, User journeys are always about the user perspectives.

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What is User journey mapping?

User journey mapping is the process of visualizing how an user travels through the app and reaches the goal. In most cases, it is not as simple as it sounds. When a lot of factors such as customer motivations, pain points, key touch points all put together, we get an understanding of the user’s journey inside the app.

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Before we jump right into analyzing the User journey and optimizing them, it is highly important to understand more about user journey mapping as it is not always a linear process. Most of the time, it is a seesaw with a lot of up and down processes.

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Why is User journey mapping important?

Basically when you map your user’s experience inside the app, you get answers for a lot of questions.

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1. What was the user’s first action inside the app?

2. Where did the user quit the app?

3. How long did it take for the user to reach the specific goal?

4. Is the app easy to use for a first time user?

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While there are so many more questions you get answers for with the help of customer journey mapping, here are the other things that validate my point for the importance of user journey mapping.

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• As the user journey involves the actions from entering the app to post purchase,it includes all the teams of the company. This helps in staying focused on a similar customer-centric approach across the teams.

• If you are able to picture the complete user journey, it is also possible to see the pain points and where they are experiencing the app. In that case, it is easy to optimize the user experience, eventually improving the customer satisfaction.

• When you know how your users are experiencing the app, it paves a way to understand a set of people who are achieving the specific goals. It helps in categorizing the target audience and aligning the marketing strategies accordingly.

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Steps in user journey mapping

Before starting to develop a user journey map, set yourself an objective.

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What is that I want to achieve with the user mapping?

This will help in driving all the aspects of the user journey map towards that goal.

Research and understand the customers.

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Try finding answers for questions like 

1. What is their goal with your app? 

2. What were the feedbacks from the different user segments?

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Saying that, create personas with the info. But keep it minimum.

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Now narrow down to one or two personas and try to figure out their pain points. Are they able to solve the problem they thought your app would solve. What are the points they are finding it difficult to proceed further and find out why. Next map all the touchpoints of the user.

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Touchpoints are the interactions the user has with your brand across all channels.Don’t ignore to include the timelines and their experience at each touchpoint.

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Optimize the touch points that are not well received by the user and now based on the goals you have set, Identify the touchpoints you want your map to show.  As you are the one designing the user journey, you should be aware of all the touchpoints that are diversified across different teams of the company and make sure all the resources are all in place to provide what a customer needs to achieve the goal.

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We have now understood the step-by-step process to set up a user journey map.

Let’s see how we can optimize the user journey map for a better user experience.

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How to analyze and optimize user journey?

Understand the pain points

As User journey mapping is all about visualizing your user journey inside the app, understand the pain points of the user and remove them. Though all the pain points can’t be removed, try improvising them for a better experience.

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Replicate the better ones

Yes there are points that users are not comfortable with. Likewise there are areas where they are mostly having a positive experience. Try to look for things that made them feel that way and replicate the same for other elements.

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Go Back and Forth

Instead of just looking into the map from the start to end, try going a step or two back and forth to understand the journey much better. Where they are coming from, how they are feeling after completing the end goal, which might help with understanding their experience better.

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No extra steps

You don’t want your customers to feel awful by circling back to reach the end goal. Cut-off all the unnecessary steps and give them a clear direction to where they want to go in the app.

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How to create funnels for every journey?

With UserExperior, you can create funnels for every journey of your users and understand why your user drops-off from the critical app journeys. With session recordings, you get to see where your users drop-off from the journey and their action points right before leaving the app.

This will help you optimize your user journey and improve conversion rates.

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User journey mapping is an important part of understanding and optimizing better user experiences especially in the early stages to make sure you grow a happy set of customer base right from the beginning. 

To know more in detail about user experience and how to optimize it, check this out.