Show Notes
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. And I'm
Mike Parsons the CEO of
Qualitance. We are continuing to dive into my favorite frameworks and tools for product strategy and product design. And today we're talking about the user journey and at the heart of design thinking. Is the user journey. It's a challenging tool because it really is a forcing factor.
It makes you empathize with your user and it's not just at the start of their journey, but right through the middle and the end too. And this user journey is an essential tool for any designer, developer and entrepreneur. And the reason why it's so essential is after years and years of designing products and working on so many different projects, it is amazing to me how important literally projects I'm working on right now that often the key question [
00:01:00] is what does the real end to end the aid is out of the user journey.
Look like, how does it start? How do we keep it going? And how do we wrap it up with a bow on the top? So this user journey is essential to understand, and the tool of creating a user journey is a true art form and it looks real neat. But you know, there's a lot of work that goes into a good user journey.
And I think if you can make a great user journey. I mean, it's so powerful because it'll give you millions of ideas for what should be inside of your product. Inside of your product inside of your business, but it also gives you the chance to look at the full scope of what you need to bill. And it kind of comes at it totally from the user's point of view.
So it also is really making sure that you're in touch, how your user thinks, how they [
00:02:00] feel and how they behave. So let's dive in to use a journalist. If you're interested in more about user journeys and design thinking, head over to bottom-up dot IO, where we have a free master class on design thinking and user journeys, dig into that.
It's all free and you'll get not only a lots on user journey, but way, way more too. So when we think about a user journey, I want you to imagine. A line that runs from the left to the right-hand side of your screen. It's like a align with an arrow at the end. And what we do is we mark at the start middle and end of that different moments that make up the user's journey.
This is not just, oh, they're inside the app. And then they start doing this. What's interesting about a user journey is it really should start from the very, very first moment of the journey when they think to themselves, huh? [
00:03:00] I need a solution to this problem. Why should I go now? That is where you start and where you end is how they talk about it.
And share your product with others after a great experience. So that is the real scope of it. And sometimes those start to create loops and continuums of consistent return usage, which is really cool. But let's look at this as a linear process. Let's make it really simple. Let's start at a, and we're going to finish it Z, but what I really want to stress is it to really comprehend.
So you should be starting at that moment, which we might call awareness. So I will give some general best practice categories for each of the steps in a user journey. The one I'm going to give you is like a path to purchase. Paths to [
00:04:00] subscription, perhaps. Obviously if it's an existing user they already are aware of you, but let's pretend this customer doesn't even know us.
So it really does start with awareness. And so what this might bring up for you as a product, let's say you're a SAS service software as a, as a service, you have a website and you know, if people are thinking, how do I solve Getting my car serviced. Okay. Let's say that's their problem. And they're thinking about ways to get their car service.
Well, then the first thing they're going to do is either ask a friend or they're going to ask Google, which would lead you to think about, okay, what is the awareness of my service? When people go to do that, have they given people a reason to talk about me? Do I show up? On the right search queries inside of Google.
So this is really an awareness thing sometimes for bigger brands in highly competitive markets, like their [
00:05:00] general baseline of unaided awareness requires them to be pumping out a lot of messages to remain what we call top of mind. That's sort of. The world of big brands, but in this case, let's, let's focus on folks hit Google.
Do you show up? So let's say they come in through a blog post through your website that was listed well on Google because you optimize it for SEO and then they get some great content on your website. Now what's key. Here is the content is what they came for, but they might. Come for the content, but they might take some other things.
Maybe there's a free consultation. Maybe there is a download. Those things might have a reason to return to the website. In that point were really starting to shift from awareness into this very active form of consideration. Maybe you as a user in this journey, you're starting to create like a [
00:06:00] shortlist of three different options for servicing.
Yeah. Now there'll be some really important things here at this moment of truth. As we transition from consideration into purchase this is really, really important. So you've had the awareness, you've got them to your site for the first time you've introduced yourself. You've built the trust with the content you've made the barrier to the first transaction.
Very low boom in they come. Purchasing or at least some form of transaction registration, so on and so forth, then it really becomes okay, you're now becoming maybe you're in a trial or maybe you've even booked your car for a service. So then it's all about all those magic touch points that you want your user to.
To map the confirmation. Oh, that's great. Yeah. They've confirmed me. They even confirmed via text, which is great, which makes me super confident. They sent me a reminder the day before they sent me the address. So I can just click it in Google maps. For example, these are all things that you want to capture in your user [
00:07:00] journey and where you can start to see here is we've gone from awareness into consideration and you have to do that work to build the trust.
Then maybe they need to look at three articles before they moved towards purchase. So the user journey starts with awareness, goes into consideration and this path to purchase. This is the really essential bit. It's what we often call the moment of truth. This is where they buy something from you. And it's really critical.
This is really an emotional thing to making them feel confident, being super fast and transparent are all the characteristics of a great product experience. Okay, so you purchase your product. Obviously knowing when you can take hold of your product or your, of your take out of your product or your service sometimes it's instant or done online.
If you've got to take your car in for service, that's all part of it too, making that experience while you wait. Great. The delivery, the big moment that the reveal, the big reveal of Wila This [
00:08:00] is also a great moment that you can map on your user journeys, but also for other sorts of experiences, like let's say I'm I've bought a subscription to a service, an online service maybe there's a community forum or an FAQ knowledge base where people share experiences.
That can be a really great way to build your user journey. You might even have whole user journeys just around the support. Maybe there's like three. Primary tasks that people tend to do in service. Then that's what you map out and you use a journey. Lastly, let's assume that, you know, it's been a great experience.
People are engaged paying one time, a subscription, doesn't matter, then it's all about advocacy and you use a journey. You got to give them a reason to become advocates and. This is the most cost-effective way to grow your business is if your existing customers are your biggest fans, your biggest [
00:09:00] promoters.
So you need to map that. And again, I've given you this sort of broad five step user journey, awareness, consideration, purchase retention, advocacy. This is sort of a very little User journey. What you could see is you might even choose to break down a number of these into their own user journeys, particularly for more complex products and services that certainly a go to.
So this is the journey we started with awareness. We ended in advocacy that's the aid is ed mapping. This and those critical moments is really important. So now I want to go to a little bit more of an advanced. I want you to imagine we have those five main sections, five steps, awareness, consideration, purchase retention, advocacy.
You might call them slightly different things. They might vary first-time customers versus return customers. But the BA the main thinking remains the same. Here, if you [
00:10:00] want to take it to the next level, if you really want to have this deep empathy for your users, what you can map on the, these events that happen throughout this year user journey, and you might have 15, 20 or so really major events it's in your product or service is you.
Don't just name the event. Here's what you can do is you can actually break it down into three parts. Every event has an action from the user. It has what the user is thinking. And thirdly, it can have what the user is feeling. Now, this is fantastic. This is really good stuff, because this is where you are totally compelled to understanding and empathizing with your user.
And if you can map that well, that's great. That's good for a start, but what you will also find is mapping the, the thinking the actions and the feeling of your customer is something that it's not like a set and forget these things change over time because your [
00:11:00] product, your service changes over time.
The mood, the social context of any given product will change over time. So it should be returned to constantly this. Is the absolute key thing. If you can do these maps well and accurately, then what this is a proxy for is you get it, you understand your customer. And frankly, if you understand your customer, it's sorta becomes a lot easier to build solutions to their problem.
Otherwise, it's just a lottery. You're just guessing. And we don't want to be in the guessing business. The business we want to be in is building products that matter. So I hope you've enjoyed this little journey into the user journey. It's a proxy for the bigger practice of design thinking, and you can find out everything you need to know about design thinking.
A bottom-up dot IO. We have a bunch of free courses there. Go there, just grab it all. It's all open source. Download it, use it convince your [
00:12:00] colleagues to have more empathy for their customers to do great user journeys. Okay. That's it. For the bottom up skills podcast. That's a wrap.