“All paths lead to the same destination.” It’s a quote I’ve heard time and time again, but it is founded on false assumptions. While yes the ultimate destination is the end, the end can look vastly different to each individual on the same path.
This is vitally important to know when we start looking at our user’s journey and who in our target audience is on that journey.
Typical Behavior
When the conversation of user journeys comes up in conversation with clients it usually goes something like this…
“I want them to come onto the website, I want them to purchase the product, I want them to show up for the event and then we thank them for their attendance.”
Sounds simple right? I mean most days when we do things we don’t think about the micro-steps to get from point A to point Z.
If I want to make a sandwich for lunch I don’t think about the process of getting up from my chair or opening the fridge or even pulling a knife out of the drawer, because it all happens automatically with our thoughts. We know what we need to do to get to the end result. We just don’t actively think about it.
What is active thinking?
Active thinking is taking the time to think about each individual process. Opening the fridge, pulling open the drawer, picking up the knife, putting the turkey on the bread… These are all active movements that we passively do while maybe talking to ourselves about a project we are working on, or thinking about the pile of dishes we still have to clean. We have learned these behaviors so we do not have to actively think about them. This is what makes us multitaskers in some capacity.
But when it comes to the user flow, unlike many of my clients, I see these micro-movements. That is because when we look at our user journey we can start to see redundancy, fallacy, and faults that will allow us to improve and become more productive.
The user journey however doesn’t start with just an idea. As I stated, every journey is different. The way I make a sandwich is different from my husband’s or my best friends but we each get to enjoy that delicious meal when we sit down to lunch which is the end of the journey.
So how can we improve something if we know that users all take different paths to get to the same end?
3 Parts to getting started
We start with a beginning, an end, and an objective!
The objective is what we want the user to do. Register for an event, book a table at a restaurant, walk the dog, load the dishwasher, etc.
The beginning of the user journey starts with how someone comes to our website or product. For instance, it could be clicking on an email link or referral link, or even seeing a post on social media. Each of these pathways is the beginning of the user journey to the end objective.
The end of the journey is the user leaving our website with or without meeting our objectives.
But what happens in between all of this, is what we as marketers, employees, business owners, entrepreneurs, need to think about.
We need to think about when someone opens the fridge, how many times they open the fridge, do they have a favorite knife or plate, and what happens if they aren’t available or even if the cheese has gone moldy.
This is the part of the user journey that helps us move forward and find those holes in the process to completing the objective we have for our users.
So how do we start looking at these if we aren’t observant individuals? How can we get our team members to start thinking about this?
How to become observant
While flow charts are great, if someone doesn’t instinctively think this way, we have to retrain our brains.
I use a 3 step process to help individuals start becoming more observant in their own journeys. But first, you have to understand two things; every movement you make is a “process” and every “process” has a decision behind it.
Step 1: Write it down!
I usually start with asking someone about a mundane task they have to do every single day. This might be brushing their teeth, taking the dog for a walk, making their kids lunches.
Then I ask them to write down all the steps that they do for this process.
Let’s take the dog walking task as an example.
- Put sneakers on
- Check weather
- Put leash on
- Walk
- Come home
Step 2: Slow it down!
The example in step 1 is a pretty good example of how someone might see the task. But when we use the movement and decision process we start to see a big difference. So once we have our original list I ask the individual to start thinking about what movements they made and what made them make those movements.
- Decide to take dog for walk
- Get up from sofa
- Find sneakers
- Do I have socks on? If not I need socks
- Searches for socks
- Puts socks on
- Puts sneakers on
- Decides to check weather for comfort levels
- Checks weather app
- Decides to grab a jacket
- Opens closet door
- Gets jacket off of hanger
- Puts jacket on
- Closes closet door
- Grabs leash from hook
- Calls dog
- Waits for dog to come to front door
- Bends to leash dog
- Opens front door
- Walks out of house
- Closes front door
I think you see the difference, but without actually looking at the process on paper we naturally jump to the first list because it is easy to think about.
Step 3: Repeat it!
The task is to become more observant, we already noticed that our walk with the dog involves a lot more movements and decisions than we naturally would believe just by comparing steps 1 & 2. But to continue the behavior we have to repeat the behavior.
This time, use another task that you have to do. Maybe you use one of the examples we skipped over or a different one like loading the dishwasher or vacuuming.
Write down what you think happens, then write down your decisions and movements.
The more you repeat this, the stronger your behavior becomes. This will allow you over time to understand your user’s movements and the many different ways they can divert from the path to reach your objectives.
How do we focus on the user journey?
With the start and the end already established, we can focus on how they would get from point A to point Z.
Let’s take registering for an event as an example.
We all like going to events, whether it be concerts, meetings, amusement parks, conferences… We know that there is something to enjoy.
Basic thinking
So if we want our users to register for an event our start and end would be a user clicking onto our website via a link and leaving our website. The objective would be to have the user register for the event.
Now naturally we might think this is what happens…
But as you saw in my previous example, we now know there is so much more that happens.
Advanced Thinking
If you aren’t sure of the straightest pathway to your end objective, I highly recommend you open your browser and start the process with your own objective in mind.
When we do that we might start to see that our user journey starts to look more like this…
Remember when I said every movement is a process and every process has a decision? You might be questioning why there are more blue rectangles (processes) than grey triangles (decisions). That is because processes start with decisions, but they can be one of many steps in greater processes.
Sounds harder than it actually is, so let’s take a step back for a moment.
In the example we used earlier, walking the dog, we can take the decision of wanting to be comfortable on the walk and see that there are minimally 4 other processes that follow to become comfortable for the walk. Those 4 processes are all based around 1 decision, so yes there can be multiple processes per decision.
So for our example of registering for an event, we have to have the website page load then the user has to scroll to learn more. Then to make sure they are purchasing the right event they might click on additional information and want to read more on the topic. Once they are comfortable with the topic they will decide to purchase the tickets and register for the event.
But the purchasing process and registration process are two different things. They have to pay and then confirm information… Without going through the whole flow chart, you start to see that we have to wait for different parts of the journey to reach the next step closest to our objective.
However, there is more!
Observant Thinking
When we look at the last user flow we notice areas where a decision process might have more than one answer. This can start a different path on the journey to our objective that may or may not have favorable outcomes.
This is where marketers and business owners have to pay attention.
So when we start to look at the user’s options for answering the decisions it might start to look like this…
I know that is really small to see but to get it all in one image I had to shrink it down.
Ultimately you can see where there are diversions to our decision processes and user journey (yellow and red rounded rectangle). This might be that there is no additional information or a search option isn’t working properly, or the payment process is not available for their payment options.
Using our user journey for improvements
This is where we can start to develop our products and services to help improve the user journey!
For instance,, if there is no link to additional information, maybe the user decides to search your site to see what you have to offer on the topic.
But if there is no option on related content in an article, this can lead to a user getting frustrated and completely dropping off the objective leading to an end in the journey.
How can we fix this?
For this example, we can check to see if we have relevant keywords set in our search for topics, have links to additional information set up correctly on high priority pages, and provide related content offerings. These solutions would allow us to pull the user back onto the journey for a favorable outcome.
But without mapping these parts out, we don’t know where we can improve so we force our users through the fallacy and redundancy portions of the journey because we are unintentionally ignorant to the struggle.
Conclusion
Understanding the user journey is not a natural process for most individuals, but it can be learned. The steps laid out in this article allow us to learn how to become observant before moving forward with our users. This will also provide us with the ability to start questioning why we do things and how we can improve them.
By understanding the objective of the journey we can also determine where we need to improve the access to processes that keep users on the journey. So if we are missing links, we add them, but we won’t know that they are missing unless we start questioning.
Ultimately, the user journey has many paths to the same end, hopefully,, with a better understanding,, we can all improve the steps to get to the most desired outcome.
This article originally appears on www.melissakane.com
