Crafting User Journeys for Online Customers

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).

Are you generating enough value for users net of the value to your company? Business value can only be created when you create so much value for users, that you can “tax” that value and take some for yourself as a business. If you don’t create any value for your users, then you can’t create value for your business. Ed Biden explains how to solve this in this week's guest post: Whilst there are many ways to understand what your users will value, two techniques in particular are incredibly valuable, especially if you’re working on a tight timeframe: 1. Jobs To Be Done 2. Customer Journey Mapping 𝟭. 𝗝𝗼𝗯𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲 (𝗝𝗧𝗕𝗗) “People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.”  – Clayton Christensen The core JTBD concept is that rather than buying a product for its features, customers “hire” a product to get a job done for them … and will ”fire” it for a better solution just as quickly. In practice, JTBD provides a series of lenses for understanding what your customers want, what progress looks like, and what they’ll pay for. This is a powerful way of understanding your users, because their needs are stable and it forces you to think from a user-centric point of view. This allows you to think about more radical solutions, and really focus on where you’re creating value. To use Jobs To Be Done to understand your customers, think through five key steps: 1. Use case – what is the outcome that people want? 2. Alternatives – what solutions are people using now? 3. Progress – where are people blocked? What does a better solution look like? 4. Value Proposition – why would they use your product over the alternatives? 5. Price – what would a customer pay for progress against this problem? 𝟮. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 Customer journey mapping is an effective way to visualize your customer’s experience as they try to reach one of their goals. In basic terms, a customer journey map breaks the user journey down into steps, and then for each step describes what touchpoints the customer has with your product, and how this makes them feel. The touch points are any interaction that the customer has with your company as they go through this flow: • Website and app screens • Notifications and emails • Customer service calls • Account management / sales touch points • Physically interacting with goods (e.g. Amazon), services (e.g. Airbnb) or hardware (e.g. Lime) Users’ feelings can be visualized by noting down: • What they like or feel good about at this step • What they dislike, find frustrating or confusing at this step • How they feel overall By mapping the customer’s subjective experience to the nuts and bolts of what’s going on, and then laying this out in a visual way, you can easily see where you can have the most impact, and align stakeholders on the critical problems to solve.

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