Importance of Website User Journey

In ecommerce and online selling, people come and go. One of the daunting challenges marketers face is how to turn first-time users into long-term customers. This is where the relevance of coming up with a user journey comes in. It essentially helps you keep user motivation at the front of your mind and create UX flows that get users where they want to go. The lifeline of any type of business comes down to a few major KPIs: revenue, customer growth, and retention. Understanding customer journeys and experiences can help you achieve good results in your business’ KPI. User journey effectiveness is a key influence in the success of a website, especially an e-commerce site. What exactly is a user journey?

A user journey map is a tool that determines customers’ goals, needs, and struggles. It analyses customer’s motivation and behaviour in dealing with your products and services. A user journey is a timeline of user actions that describes the relationship between your brand and its customers. It’s a visual representation of a user’s interactions with your product from their point of view. This is the route a user  takes through your website to complete a desired task – which could be making a reservation, purchasing a product, subscribing to a magazine, entering a competition, downloading a brochure or making an enquiry.

It is then now safe to say that in developing a website, it is imperative to map out a customer’s journey because ultimately the benefits are two-way, for you as the business owner and the customer. According to Heroic, these are some of the questions to consider in formulating your customer journey: Why did they download and open the app in the first place?  How easy is the app to understand and use immediately? How long does it take them to accomplish what they came there to do? How well does the experience extend across multiple channels, and where do they run into gaps?

The answers to these questions are helpful in determining why users would want to engage business with you and which among the steps they find most valuable. From these responses, you can now proceed to crafting the ultimate user journey to convert the user to a long-term customer.

Taking customer journey mapping seriously not only gives you a clearer understanding of how people use your product but as mentioned earlier, you, as a business owner, benefits from it too.

  1. Getting the user journey right is vital to maximise your customer conversions. With user journey mapping, you can make granular but pivotal tweaks that help users accomplish their goals easier and faster, come back to do it again, and build habits around your product—all from your onboarding UX. 
  1. Increases feature adaptation. For example, you might find that you need to remove a step from your onboarding UX flow, change the copy in a lead-nurturing email, or add tooltips to help users learn something—all based on the actions your users take. And observing how different users interact with your product lays a foundation for providing personalised customer experiences. It also fosters a customer-centric approach to product building, which ultimately leads to better customer relationships.
  2. Encourages collaboration among team members. Your marketing department can provide insight into how users behave during the awareness stage of the user journey. The sales team can fill you in on how users think about downloading and purchasing your app. And the good folks in support will give you the details about the hurdles customers encounter with your product.
  1. Enables better KPI tracking.Planning the user journey (along with supporting architecture and wireframes) is one of the fundamental building blocks of a web design project.When the process of designing a website begins, two mistakes are commonly made. Either the decision is taken to keep old site content and layout and make it look somehow ‘better’ – for example, more colourful or reflective of an organisation’s new brand identity.
  1. Build stronger customer experiences. You might find that you need to remove a step from your onboarding UX flow, change the copy in a lead-nurturing email, or add tooltips to help users learn something—all based on the actions your users take. Observing how different users interact with your product lays a foundation for providing personalised customer experiences. It also fosters a customer-centric approach to product building, which ultimately leads to better customer relationships.

Creating a customer journey map for your website and using a visual representation of it as a reference point empowers you to adopt an evidence-based approach to your redesign project.

At NGNY, we can help you develop intuitive designs that deliver a streamlined experience and ensure users get what they need every time they visit your website.

ABOUT NGNY:
For those of you that are discovering Ngakkan Nyaagu (NGNY) for the first time, we are an Indigenous Digital Agency. NGNY is a 100% Aboriginal owned business and has been operating for 5 years. We have been engaged to deliver website, mobile app, graphic design and hosting services for Indigenous organisations and businesses, non-Indigenous organisations, businesses, government and enterprise. We are Supply Nation Certified, NSW Indigenous Chamber of Commerce (NSWICC) registered and B-Corporation Certified. We have gained a wealth of knowledge and experience along the way and have a lot to share with Indigenous businesses and the buyers of their products and services. (ngny.com.au)