5 Common pitfalls when doing core user journey maps
Avoid these common mistakes to make your user journey maps a success.
Core User Journeys are all about storytelling, the better the story so your CUJ. It’s about understanding your product or services from the point of view of your users. Organizations have embraced CUJs not only to improve their existing products and service but also for expanding their portfolio by looking out for new opportunities in a market segment.
To improve the user experience of products and services it becomes necessary to evaluate all the existing touchpoints at every stage of a user journey. If required, new touchpoints should be introduced to make the entire journey more seamless across multiple channels, and to look out for new opportunities, we may have to make a lot of new CUJs, these journeys can be started out by mapping out interactions a user makes at different times of a day and later figuring out the gaps where a new product or service can be introduced to solve a hidden problem that they are not aware of.
Many times these problems are visible in the form of workarounds introduced by users in their day-to-day activities like keeping a handwritten note inside their smartphone case instead of using the built-in notes app, then there are times when these problems are hidden deep inside a poorly designed product, and users may blame themselves for the slips and mistakes they make. Don Norman in his book “The Design of Everyday Things” has dedicated an entire chapter explaining how poorly designed products lead to slips, mistakes & errors. According to him, most of the time these errors are not a user’s fault, it is because of poor design and designers should be blamed for not paying much emphasis on the Human-Centered Design process.
Making CUJ’s seems like a complex yet achievable task. We gather some data points and then analyze them on a whiteboard using colorful post-its. These post-its are then grouped and re-grouped to form the horizontal and vertical components of a user journey. Voila! We have a CUJ.
Well! This is what we can call a shortcut CUJ, these may answer all the required questions during the product design phase but may fail when the product goes into the hands of an actual user.
But this is how the CUJs are made! Right? We do the research, collect data and use it to create a user journey map.
Absolutely Positive! But there are certain processes that we can follow to avoid some invisible pitfalls that may result in inefficient User Journeys.
Here are 5 common pitfalls that can be avoided to make user journey maps a success.
1. Mixing data with assumptions.
User Journey Maps shouldn’t be based on assumptions. Introductions of any assumptions may not actually resonate with the actual needs and emotions of a user. The map should be based on hard data points like surveys, interviews, focus groups, data from CRM, performing web and mobile analytics, and examining other third parties sources within the same context.
2. Reflexive data analysis and synthesis.
Apart from being data-driven, emphasis should be paid to the methodologies by which the data has to be collected. The data must be a result of deep rigorous research and should be both qualitative and quantitative. All of this data can be useful but it can’t be delivered in an uncontrolled way. Based on the context of CUJ proper planning is necessary to make sure the collected data points are interpreted carefully. It is a must to have expertise in guiding all the stakeholders through explorations of the data and revealing the key finding at all touchpoints.
3. Not involving stakeholders from major touchpoints.
The biggest mistake a designer can make is not involving direct stakeholders responsible for major touchpoints across the CUJ. Stakeholders should include people from product management, product engineering, marketing, branding, IT, someone from the customer support team, and obviously from the product design team. Without the involvement of people from all disciples, addressing the user pain points becomes superficial and this approach further helps in getting broader insights on why a particular pain point is there and how it can be solved. Involving stakeholders from multiple disciplines helps us understand a point from everyone’s perspective.
For eg: A user is not able to upload a paricular file onto their profile, on one hand, the customer support team may say that it’s the file that is causing the problem but on the other hand, a person from IT may diagnose it as some kind of server/hosting problem.
4. Not specifying best practices for defining CUJ inputs and outputs.
User journey maps generally have multiple horizontal tracks that are used to capture and describe the user interaction with a product or service. These descriptions are generally related to what a user is doing, thinking, or feeling for a given touchpoint in the journey. Some maps use additional information like user's quotes, their expectations and moment of truths, etc. There isn’t a single well-defined template that fits all kinds of use cases and business scenarios.
Since there are multiple ways to define the user journey, a good map should be aligned to specific business goals, contexts, and stakeholders' expectations, therefore to make these alignments it becomes necessary to follow methodologies and practices that can be used across different teams for defining and analyzing a map. This way it can make sure that a user journey is interpretable by stakeholders and the insights from the map can be shared and reused across multiple verticals. Having a common understanding of the CUJ process also helps in saving a good amount of precious time and resources.
5. Ignoring cascading effects when introducing new changes.
User Journey Maps are never finished, it evolves continuously from the moment a product or a service gets conceptualized. Products, especially software products are improved over time using progressive iterations, over a long period these changes are applied across different touchpoints to address user’s pain points and the new version is released with a set of additional improvements and features. Any given touchpoint in the user journey is linked to the touchpoints before and after in terms of the user’s understanding and expectations. For this reason, introducing a new change at a given touchpoint often backfire because it leads to cascading effect in other parts of the user journey.
To address this, any fixing and change in one touchpoint of a user journey should be validated with other parts of the journey and monitoring should be planned to make sure new changes are not producing any unusual effect in the entire journey of a user.
Wrapup:
I got inspired to write this article because I found User Journey Maps a very powerful tool at any stage of the design and development of a product. I believe for a product be it software or physical, a CUJ map not only helps to deliver a great experience but also acts as a platform for stakeholders to have a common vision and perspective. This way entire project team, as well as stakeholders, can increase their productivity by working in a conflict-free collaborative environment that delivers far better experiences to end-users.
I hope you found this article helpful, please feel free to drop any feedback in the comment box.
