Piece #6: Journey Maps

How to visualize problems and find solutions

May 28, 2020

This is the story of your customer. A research-backed journey of how your customers and users discover your product, how they interact with it, why they purchase from you, how you earn their trust, and how you develop a long-lasting relationship.

But most of all – most of all – this is the story of your customers’ intentions, thoughts, actions, mental and emotional states, worries, problems, needs, and expectations.

In this story, your customers are heroes. It’s all about them.

But you know what? You get to be their mentor. You are the one who knows the secret, the one who calmly and confidently guides them through difficulties, drama, and challenges. You are the one who makes sure their experience is silky smooth and they come out as winners.

Do you really need to map your customers’ story? Yes, you do.

It’s important for your business (a journey map is always created to support a specific business goal). And it’s even more important for your audience (a map is created to clearly define the current state of customer experience and find opportunities for improvement).

The customer journey is usually mapped out within different stages, steps, and actions. If you are creating a journey map to make a marketing funnel, stages will usually range between these:

Awareness – whether or not your customers and users are aware of the problem and your product
Consideration – the stage when users are researching your competitors and you, trying to find the best solution
Purchase – the phase when your users decide to buy from you
Engagement – the onboarding phase, the part when they get your product and start using it
Loyalty – if you did a good job and made your users happy with your product, they might as well be happy to buy from you again and again
Advocacy – keep on delighting your users with an extraordinary experience and they will become strong believers in your brand and start advocating for you wherever they get the chance

From a content marketing perspective, knowing at what point of the journey customers are, helps you create content that communicates the right message to the right people in every stage.

Having a defined map helps you:

Promote your product the right way
Onboard users with ease
Segment your audience properly
Engage users that come your way
Provide excellent user experience

Business + Customer Perspective

You should always keep your business goals in sight, but more importantly, you should execute upon them from the customer's perspective. Maps can help you shift a company's perspective from inside-out to outside-in, as stated in the comprehensive article from Nielsen Norman Group.

Nevertheless, the journey of your customers, clients, or users will depend heavily on the type of your business.

As a restaurant owner, you'll want to map out the journey that leads people into your restaurant and make sure they have diverse options for a delicious meal in a pleasant atmosphere, with your staff being at their service to meet all their needs and requirements.

As a SaaS founder, you'll want to map out the journey that leads people to your digital product, making them want to try it out in a free trial and upgrade to a paid plan that meets their needs, while your support team is always there to help them with all the questions and requirements.

As a business consultant, you'll want to map out the journey that leads people to choose you to help them grow and scale their business, while always being there for them to meet in person, hop on a chat, or book 1-on-1 sessions with you to support them on every step of their path to success.

Do you see the pattern here?

Your customers, clients, and users will have different journeys, but the purpose and goal of journey mapping are always the same.

The purpose of mapping is to define and visualize the way your users find, interact with, and use your products or services.

The goal of mapping is to help you gather data, gain insights, and find opportunities for improvement. It also helps you make informed decisions on how to meet your users exactly when they need it, where they need it, and how they need it.

The ultimate goal of journey mapping is to provide exceptional customer experience.

This is important for your overall business strategy. And it is one of the pillars of your content strategy. When you know at what stage your audience is, what their struggles, needs, and expectations are at every point of their journey, you can create the right content for the right people, at the right time, in the right format, at the right place.

Every customer has a story.

Our job is to map it out, make their challenges tangible, lament over solutions to their problems, and provide the best possible experience. Once we have a journey map, we can also look for possible frustration points, error possibilities, transition breaks. A map will help us to address them properly and even fix them before they happen.

As Jonathon Colman strongly advocates for (and I couldn't agree more), content strategists and content designers should have much more impact within product development teams. In his conversation with Steve Fisher from the Design & Content Conference, he explains that there is so much more to a content strategist's role than writing. That’s why his team at Intercom have equal roles for content designers and product designers, allowing the content team to engage deeply with problems, concepts, and development and become better at coming up with just the right words.

In that talk, Jonathon also mentions The Double Diamond Approach, which consists of four phases:

Discovering customer problems
Defining specific customer problems
Developing potential solutions to these customer problems
Delivering feasible and viable solutions to these customer problems

Diving deep into the problems and trying to find out the best possible solutions for customer problems and user needs is something we, as content professionals, should always do if we want to build a sustainable system for our content production and provide clear, useful, and valuable content every time.

So, for every UX writer out there (and every other professional writer for that matter), Susan Reoch has a set of questions always to ask before starting a project.

Incorporate these into your copy brief:
Who are the users we’re targeting?
What do we want them to do?
What actions have they already completed to end up here?
How are they feeling at this moment?
What do they need to know to take the next step?
What was the inspiration for this idea?
– Susan Reoch, a.k.a. Susan Reoch Copywriter

You can find these and other invaluable pieces of advice in The UX Writer's Guide from Susan, available for free until June 4.

Visualization + Storyboarding

You might've heard about this famous example. Back in 2012, when Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky was trying to figure out the next steps for the company, he came across the concept of storyboards while reading Walt Disney’s biography. He learned that storyboards are comic-book-like outlines that shape a (movie) narrative. So, what did he do? He hired Pixar’s animator Nick Sung to make their customer journey storyboards. The bottom line: this helped Airbnb to understand needs, pain points, and challenges of both guests and hosts, and use the insights to create a world-class experience.

Now, you might not be able to onboard Pixar’s expert on your team, but that doesn’t mean that you can't do some storyboarding yourself. You don’t have to be a cartoonist or sketch artist, either. Take me for example. I’m terrible at drawing (my drawing skills haven’t evolved since I was 12), but I do love doodling out stories in pictures. It’s useful and it’s fun.

All you need is a pen and a piece of paper. Take a large paper, or stand in front of a whiteboard, and start sketching out your user journey quadrant by quadrant.

Who is the user (persona)? Where are they at the moment? What device are they using? Are they alone? What do they want to accomplish? Are they facing some obstacles? Which ones? How do they feel about it? Is that a deal-breaker? What will they do next? Where do they look for a solution? What kind of options do they try out? Have they already discovered your product? Will they have an Aha! moment once they do discover it? What happens next? Are they still delighted by your product? Do they move effortlessly through your website? Or, is there something awkward? Confusing? If they accidentally make a mistake, can they fix it easily? Are they feeling excited about buying from you? Do they want to shout out from the rooftops and tell all their friends about it? How will they get the product? Do they have to wait? For how long? What happens next? And then what?

There are so many other questions you could answer within your storyboard scenarios. It depends on the reason behind the particular map you are creating.

If you are still not convinced you could draw a storyboard, you can always make a map in the shape of a diagram. Diagrams are an excellent tool for visualizing the journey your users and customers go through. It’s a great way to map interactions, connections, and transitions. Diagrams will also make it easier to see both details and the big picture. Of course, you can do it within a good ol’ table, as well.

Remember: your journey map shouldn't be a made-up story. It should be strongly backed by both quantitative and qualitative research and discovery.

Read on

From Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) comes this comprehensive article on the importance of the discovery phase within a product development process. Learn how to approach discovery to understand users, problems, opportunities, and create a shared vision of goals within your organization.

For the Why and the How of journey mapping + a free template with an example included, go through the Columbia Road's post on why and how to create a customer journey map.

“A journey map is a great way to plan for the experience of users and how they’ll engage with your content.” Learn more in this piece about crafting content experiences by Erin Schroeder for the UX Collective publication.

For implementing a technique of storytelling into your business copywriting process, you can follow this simple and straightforward story template from Jason Vana. Find out how to include customer struggles, needs, and expectations to craft an intuitive and engaging copy.

Tools & Templates

Modular online tool Smaply lets you create customer journey maps together with your team. You can use it to clarify stages, categories, and steps. You can also add storyboards, images, and files to accompany your map. Plus, you can map out emotional journeys, dramatic arcs, and use channel lane, backstage lane, and file lane to organize it all together.

Go with the User Flow Diagrams from FlowMapp if you want a tool for planning and improving the user experience for your website or an app. The earlier in the product development process you use it the better.

Another one you might want to try out is Overflow, a tool that lets you create, present, and get feedback on user flow diagrams. You can use existing designs and connectors to create interactive flow diagrams and make a rapid prototype.

Whimsical is a collaborative digital tool for visual communication. You can create journey maps with it, and you get to choose from flow charts, mind maps, sticky notes, and wireframes. It's fast, it's fun, and it's stylish.

There are many other tools for journey mapping out there. Check out the overview of Top 20 tools that will help you create customer journey maps, depending on your business type and preference. They are split between three types – journey mapping and visualization tools, customer experience software, and collaboration software.

Listen & Watch

If you are not sure how to do the research and talk to customers to gain data about their problems and challenges, watch this Tutorial Tuesdays webinar by Copyhackers. Here, Joanna Wiebe welcomes Hannah Shamji to talk about mastering customer interviews. Learn how to run the interview, what kind of questions to ask, and why.

What to do with all the data from those customer interviews? Use it to write captivating content that perfectly resonates with your customers. In this Tutorial Tuesdays webinar, Nikki Albaz explains all about organizing and using voice-of-customer (VoC) data in your copy with some excellent examples and exercises.

If interested in this topic, here’s another Tutorial Tuesdays for you (please remember that there are no affiliate links in this newsletter whatsoever; everything I share and recommend here is solely based on its quality and relevance). So, don’t miss out on another insightful webinar with Hannah Shamji. She talks about creating VoC outlines, plus there’s a free template from Hannah to download.

If you are a content marketer, CRM manager, or an eCommerce professional, this webinar from BlueVenn on the BrightTALK platform will help you see the ways you can intervene in the customer journey by personalizing the experience with relevant suggestions and continuous learning of the customer’s desires and choices.

While on the BrightTALK platform, join Scott Abel, founder and CEO of The Content Wrangler, and Noz Urbina, content strategist, content designer, and founder of the OmnichannelX conference, to learn why customer journeys are such an important part of content design.

This one is for all the SaaS founders out there. Listen to Jane Portman, co-founder of Userlist, in this Awkward Silences podcast episode to find out how her team uses sales demos as an opportunity to connect with their customers, learn all about their pain points, and build a better product upon those insights.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject matter. Have you tried a storyboarding technique before? How did it go? What challenges have you faced while journey mapping? Do you know of other useful tools, templates, and resources you could recommend? Share your insights in the comments below. I’m looking forward to learning more from y’all.

Have a lovely weekend ahead,
Nadja

Content Puzzle

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