Crafting Effective User Journeys in Retail

Your research findings are useless if they don't drive decisions. After watching countless brilliant insights disappear into the void, I developed 5 practical templates I use to transform research into action: 1. Decision-Driven Journey Map Standard journey maps look nice but often collect dust. My Decision-Driven Journey Map directly connects user pain points to specific product decisions with clear ownership. Key components: - User journey stages with actions - Pain points with severity ratings (1-5) - Required product decisions for each pain - Decision owner assignment - Implementation timeline This structure creates immediate accountability and turns abstract user problems into concrete action items. 2. Stakeholder Belief Audit Workshop Many product decisions happen based on untested assumptions. This workshop template helps you document and systematically test stakeholder beliefs about users. The four-step process: - Document stakeholder beliefs + confidence level - Prioritize which beliefs to test (impact vs. confidence) - Select appropriate testing methods - Create an action plan with owners and timelines When stakeholders participate in this process, they're far more likely to act on the results. 3. Insight-Action Workshop Guide Research without decisions is just expensive trivia. This workshop template provides a structured 90-minute framework to turn insights into product decisions. Workshop flow: - Research recap (15min) - Insight mapping (15min) - Decision matrix (15min) - Action planning (30min) - Wrap-up and commitments (15min) The decision matrix helps prioritize actions based on user value and implementation effort, ensuring resources are allocated effectively. 4. Five-Minute Video Insights Stakeholders rarely read full research reports. These bite-sized video templates drive decisions better than documents by making insights impossible to ignore. Video structure: - 30 sec: Key finding - 3 min: Supporting user clips - 1 min: Implications - 30 sec: Recommended next steps Pro tip: Create a library of these videos organized by product area for easy reference during planning sessions. 5. Progressive Disclosure Testing Protocol Standard usability testing tries to cover too much. This protocol focuses on how users process information over time to reveal deeper UX issues. Testing phases: - First 5-second impression - Initial scanning behavior - First meaningful action - Information discovery pattern - Task completion approach This approach reveals how users actually build mental models of your product, leading to more impactful interface decisions. Stop letting your hard-earned research insights collect dust. I’m dropping the first 3 templates below, & I’d love to hear which decision-making hurdle is currently blocking your research from making an impact! (The data in the templates is just an example, let me know in the comments or message me if you’d like the blank versions).

One of the most impactful practices I’ve come across recently is something Stripe’s Katie Dill calls “walking the store.” In the comments, I've provided a link to her 2023 appearance on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in which they covered this practice in detail. Think of walking the store as a performance review for your product. At a scheduled interval, a team dedicates time to experience the product like a customer and record their findings. Here are the specific steps: 1. Identify the critical user journeys in your product. For example, account setup, billing/conversion, and inviting new teammates are all common user journeys. 2. Make sure a team is responsible for maintaining the quality of each critical user journey. 3. Create a process for each team to walk the store, keeping a “friction log” of anything that feels confusing, cumbersome, or inconsistent along the way. Since quality can be subjective, each team should score key aspects of the experience and create reports to document insights. 4. Calibrate across teams: To ensure consistency in scoring and measurement, teams calibrate their findings across all user journeys. Ideally, this process should occur before planning the next big cycle of work so that any improvements can be implemented quickly. This practice may seem tedious at first, but I'm always blown away by what I find. A couple of weeks ago, I went through the account setup process for the first time in a while and found twenty-two things we could improve. Another member of our customer support team (Disha Mungra 👏) recently evaluated our billing experience and provided tons of insightful feedback for the team. As products grow and become more sophisticated, it’s easy to lose sight of these critical journeys in favor of shiny new features. But ultimately, trust is built (or lost) in the details of those everyday user journeys. Have you tried something similar? I’d love to hear how you approach product quality in your company.

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch