Strategy Driven Design for Web Success

What you need to know.

Have you ever wondered how the really successful websites become so successful? It isn’t all down to luck (though a little helps) and it isn’t about having the prettiest website. It is down to careful design driven by strategy. But how do you develop a strategy driven design that is going to create effective design? Read on to discover more about Customer Journey Maps.

What is a Customer Journey Map

The first step towards a strategy driven website solution is to create a customer journey map. A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s relationship with a company from initial touchpoints, through to final results (also known as a buyer journey or user journey). And while on the surface this may seem simple and straight forward, all these touchpoint can create increasingly complex customer journey’s. The method of mapping your customer journey involves empathising with your customer whilst analysing your business processes. The customer journey should cover the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post purchase and cover the customer’s awareness of an existing pain point to becoming a product or service user.

Its also a good process to follow to help your business gain insight into your customer and the pain points they may encounter with your buying process and in turn will allow you to better optimise and personalise their experience.

The process of a Customer Journey Map

The ultimate goal is to gather data to help draw insight that will help you understand how your customers experience their journey around your website and identify the potential issues along that process. It’s also important to note that not all customer journeys are linear, they often happen in more of a back and forth, cyclical journey.

What do you include in your customer journey:

1. The buying process

To determine this you need to pull data from multiple sources using behaviour analytic tools such as;

• Traditional analytic like Google Analytics
• Session replay tools such as CrazyEgg
• Heatmap tools like Hotjar or Inspectlet
• Feedback from real customers

This way you can accurately predict your customers path around your site.

2. Emotion

Without emotion, customer journey maps are essentially process maps and lack a story.

So why is emotion sometimes overlooked in the journey mapping process? In the business-to-business world, it is often neglected because organisations under-estimate the importance of emotion and emotions drive most of human behaviour – even if we are not aware of it. While this fact is taken for granted by B2C marketers, it is often overlooked in B2B settings. Whether your customers are individual consumers or businesses, you will retain more of your customers and gain more new ones if the experience you deliver results in positive emotions.

3. Pain Points

And where there is negative emotion there’s a pain point. Adding these to your Customer’s journey can help you identity at what point they are experiencing the negative emotion and determine what action needs to be taken to avoid this in the future.

4. User action

What does the customer do at each stage of the journey? This is the point at which you need to explore what the customer is doing and how they behave.

5. Solutions

This is where you take all that information gathered and you work out potential ways to improve the customer journey so that they encounter fewer pain points in their future journey.

Once you have mapped out the customer journey should be armed with details of your customer touchpoints (an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business), customer persona, empathy map (visualising user attitudes and behaviours in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users), moments of truth and journey map. This gives you a strong basis to generate ideas and explore the website user journey in greater detail.

The website user journey is the path a visitor takes through your website. Analysing how users interact with your website will help you to understand what is important to your visitors and potentially how they react to language, visuals, layouts and content.

Why create the user journey map?

The website user journey is the path a visitor takes through your website. Analysing how users interact with your website will help you to understand what is important to your visitors and potentially how they react to language, visuals, layouts and content.

The user journey map will help give you a visual representation of the customer’s experience and the visualisation may cover the entire process or just a select experience while interacting within the site. The job of the UX designer is to make your product or service intuitive, functional and of course an enjoyable process. There are different types of journey maps, such as;

UX journey map – this focuses on user experience of a specific product through a website or app. This type of map helps you gain insight into how a customer interacts with you.

Sales journey map – this follows the buyer’s journey and can be looked at through several phases; awareness, consideration and decision. Understanding the emotional state of the customer will help unlock the right approach for your customer to interact with your brand and improve communication channels to maximise sales.

Customer Experience journey map – offering a high-level view of the customer brand relationship across a period of time.

Current-state customer journey maps focus on the current customer interactions.

Day in the Life– visualising the actions, emotions and thoughts of your customer as they experience them in their daily life. Giving you insight into their pain points.

Future-state customer journey maps to help motivate innovation by imagining new customer experiences.

Benefits of the customer journey map

Hopefully by now you can see the positives of creating a customer journey. Mapping out the user journey can be done over one visit or over a much longer period to study how web visitors are using your website. After all, solving any problems are going to help improve your long-term success for you product or service.

1. Refocus your company with an inbound perspective

2. Helps create new target base

3. Proactive customer service

4. Improved customer retention rate

5. Help create a customer-focused mentality

Understanding the user’s emotional state and the information they need to process to reach a decision to buy/commit will drive useful insight when it comes to content strategy, functional scope and user experience (UX) design.

When you understand your customer and their experience of your website, you can begin to make the necessary design adjustments in line with best practises.