This month I’m going to be talking about User Journeys: what they are used for and how to do create them.

User journeys – what are they?
It’s not hard to imagine what a user journey might look like if you hadn’t seen one before. We’re talking about how people using your site travel through it: the pages they land on, the decisions they take once there and the impact of those decisions on what happens next.

We’ve all experienced good journeys and bad ones online: some make a complicated process easy and painless, allowing you to sail through to the end with barely a thought, whilst others are infuriating and force you to re-enter details, send you off down blind alleys or simply fail to get you to where you wanted to be no matter how hard you try.

The difference between the two can often be something very simple. It might be something to do with semantics: calling something that we’re used to seeing every day something else, just to be ‘cute’. Or it might be that the logic of every possible outcome hasn’t been thought through properly. Maybe we’re forcing people to give us more information than is necessary. Often, the order with which we ask people information can be enough to send them running to the hills. 

A user journey is a step-by-step diagram that shows each part of the process through the site, using visual sign-posts to group things together and identify the danger areas where particular attention needs to be paid.

If you’re creating a new service or a new product, it really is only by plotting user journeys, that you can be confident that you’ve thought of everything and that your solution is the simplest one you can come up with.

Seven considerations for plotting a user journey
1. Use your Personas

Last month I wrote about creating Personas. This is definitely a good place to start: even if it’s only to work out how existing and potential customers will have different goals. The likelihood is that your Personas will be more complicated than this, you may have a variety of stakeholders who need to achieve different things.

2. One diagram per outcome
We think it’s easier to create a different diagram for each key goal or expected outcome. Within that diagram there might be multiple routes that people take, but essentially you’re looking for a single final outcome. An example might be getting someone to sign up for a free trial of a product (as in the image above from our recently launched Schedule App).

3. Show each step of the journey
Don’t leave anything to chance – we want to try and think through everything that a user might do and what decisions he or she will take.

4. Logical grouping of steps
Deciding whether to go for a free trial or subscribe to a service straight away: they are two different steps, but they should be grouped together to give the people working on the site a shorthand reference that these things are linked. In a user journey with 20 steps, the more you can arrange things logically, the easier it will be to use.

5. Pain points
Pain points are something we talk about a lot when it comes to the user experience. There are some things that will be a joy: choosing which colour of shirt they want. But there are other things that will potentially turn them off: logging in when they’ve forgotten their username, or entering their credit card details. Where there is a pain point – make the box red or stick a big warning sign next to it. This will remind everyone that this needs special consideration and thought. 

If things aren’t working well with an existing site, the pain points are probably the areas that need to be looked at first as they are most likely causing  the problems. It’s much better to spend your time making your pain points as simple as possible than introducing whizzy new functionality, however tedious that might seem.

6. Notes
Finally, make notes across the journey: assumptions, other considerations or 3^rd party functionality that may have an impact on what the user experiences.

7. Workshop
If you’re plotting user journeys as part of a workshop with all the stakeholders inputting their ideas, they can be sketched out in a down and dirty way, the use of Post-It notes on a wall work well for allowing people to consider all the steps and iterate.

Ultimately, it is always good to reproduce that working into an electronic format so it can be referenced by the designers and developers throughout the project.

Once we get into user testing, it’s always good to reference it against the user journey to check that the assumptions we made were correct and things like pain points have been effectively overcome.

We all get to that point, two or three years after launching our ecommerce website, sales growth isn't want it used to be, new customer acquisition is faltering, the site has lost its "magic". Yet we're all terribly busy maintaining it. How did this happen? How did our wonderful source of revenue become well, stagnant?

Don't fear Stagnation

Stagnation is a natural part of any system lifecycle. After the initial jump in growth you experience after implementing a new ecommerce offering, your ability to sustain it is limited. The features and quick wins that you achieved are already out there, you focus on ensuring the visitors are catered for and most of your effort goes into the day-to-day operations of running your site. Coming up with the Next Big Thing is increasingly hard. Frequently more money is pumped into Marketing, vastly increasing your cost per acquisition because your site simply isn't converting like it once was.

However, when you realise your site has stagnated, this becomes a wonderful opportunity for change.

Featuritis

Featuritis is a symptom, rather than a cause of Stagnation. Featuritis is a term coined by Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger on User Experience, to describe what happens to software when new features are continually added.

Thanks Kathy for allowing re-use of your work

She describes the point of the Happy User Peak, the point when there is just enough functionality to please the user, without leaving them wanting more, or conversely, reaching for the instruction manual.

However, after the initial stage of growth, it's very easy to get into the mindset of adding new features, sections and functionality to your site to help maintain the growth you've achieved.

Without pragmatism, not just from you but your Board, and quite importantly, your Helpdesk, you can easily find yourself responding to users' demands through continuous developments. Multiple exotic payment options, unnecessary wishlist & comparison pages, complicated delivery options and "me too" social media integration are just a few of the ways to add complexity that can frustrate a large percentage of your audience.

Operational vs Strategic

After successfully running an ecommerce operation for a year or so, it's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day operational tasks. Content creation (certainly for smaller shops), catalogue management, helpdesk management, can all make you lose site of the vision of your ecommerce store.

Econsultancy, back in the day, created an incredibly useful map of the tasks that need to be undertaken to run an ecommerce store. Taking the ACRA model - Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Analytics - these can easily be carved into a series of remits for you and your team.

If you find yourself consistently working on the Operational side of the business, with no time to work on the Strategy & Planning, then we have a problem. Not only are you not keeping an analytical eye on your competitors, you are also unable to focus on your vision and drive innovation - a quick route to stagnation.

Don't be reactionary

So, you've sat down with your Board, and said "I think our site has stagnated". My aren't you brave! There's often a compelling urge to scrap everything and start again, to rebuild from scratch and let's do it better this time.

However this is not only costly, but unnecessary and dangerous. Within larger organisations a considerable amount has been invested in integration, certainly with fulfillment and CRM.

Remember when you conducted Stakeholder Interviews at the start of your project? Do it again with your Board. Find out what the current perceived failings are - these won't just be quantifiable like sales and average transaction value, but emotional failings as well. Once you know this, then you can work on how to improve it.

A platform's just a platform

I'm not sure if everyone will agree with me on this!

Ultimately, a platform is just a way of skipping over building a database, business logic and an API yourself. If you've chosen a platform, then you were probably sold on features, but the real issues such as cost, integration, administrative overhead and scalability were why you bought it.

But do your customers care one jot what platform you use? Does your platform choice directly affect the experience that they have? Of course not. Which is why in most cases, a few pragmatic steps is all that it takes to get you back on track.

1) Understand what matters

Why do people actually visit your website? Do you know? We'd love to think that they're there to Buy Buy Buy! but often that simply isn't the case. What's going through their minds? What's their motivation? Are you catering for this, not only in your site content but in your marketing?

If you'd like to read more about this, here's a post on user-psychology I wrote for Econsultancy.

Just as we measure Conversion Rate, we can also measure how often users are able to do what they came to your site to do - a "Task Completion Rate". Remember that not every visitor comes to your site to shop. Just as we do when we enclose a Checkout, when your visitor knows what they want to achieve, your site should get out of the way and let them do it.

There are a number of tools to let you measure Task Completion Rate - predominantly based around user surveys. The most popular is called 4Q from iPerceptions and takes the form of a pop-under survey.

You can then measure your Task Completion Rate amongst a sample of your visitors and see in which areas you can improve. You may of course, have a site that doesn't cater to your users' needs. They may be looking for a store finder, or an offers section, or something that isn't currently in your strategy. In which case...

2) Go back to your IA

During the information architecture process, you should have come up with 3-4 user personas, with needs and wants and clear goals and motivations. However, if your site is failing, then either a) the personas are incorrect (which can certainly happen when these aren't based on user research) or b) the personas aren't being catered for. Either way, when visitors use your site "in anger", they will become frustrated and leave.

Once you have catalogued the objectives and motivations of your user personas, you need to see how well your site fits these. If you don't feel that the site fits, or your personas are wrong, then you should conduct a new round of user research. I always recommend doing this in the user's homes, so you can see the environment in which they interact with you, and the discussion becomes more of a "chat" than a survey, but this isn't always possible.

3) Simplification

Once you have a newly defined set of goals and objectives, you can simplify your site design to cater to these. John Maeda has a wonderful book called the Laws of Simplicity in which he states 10 (well, 9) laws that you can apply to any design or process to make it simpler. For example, whilst you can't remove elements that some users may find useful, you can Hide or Shrink them in the design. You can use this process to not only rationalise your product taxonomy, but also rationalise your language.

A case in point here, on a site I once worked on we had 12 different methods of getting help, none of which were labelled "Help".

4) Take time out

Pause, breathe and have a sit down.

As I said before, when you hit this point, it's very easy to run around, firing & hiring agencies and switching platforms in an urge to have something new. You can do this, sure, but it's not very Strategic is it? You need to take a little time out.

5) Visit some aliens

Go and visit another ecommerce operation, that has nothing to do with your business. You'll see that they have the same processes as any other business, a helpdesk, customer returns, a CRM strategy - but by doing this you can not only gather ideas, but share skills and see how their success can be adapted for you use.

6) Think strategically

Work out what makes you money. Start from "we receive money from our customers by" and work backwards from there. Look at your net margin, and what's actually driving value. See how you can align this with your customer's objectives, simplifying the process and creating an engaging experience, and you're onto a winner.

2010 is certainly not the first to be touted as the ‘Year of the Mobile Web’ but with the recent launch of the Nexus One and the likely war that will be waged between Google and Apple, it may be the first to actually go some way towards fulfilling its billing.

Currently, 1 in 7 minutes of media consumed in the UK is via a mobile device of some description. That number is set to rise with the end of the iPhone/O2 exclusivity deal, the addition of the Nexus One to the market and the inevitable clamouring amongst the remaining handset manufacturers to catch up. Mobile specific content is no longer a differentiator for companies; it is fast becoming a necessity as users move away from their PCs.

As we become more proficient at sifting through the mass of information at our fingertips and with the evolving development of the semantic web, we are starting to browse for information less and scan for it more. The ‘Smartphoners’ are the biggest ‘scanners’ of us all as they hunt out that quick hit of data; be it social updates, news, directions or very specific information. More and more user journeys follow the pattern of;

search engine > top listed page > back to search engine > another top listed page

As a result, as smartphone market share increases, bounce rate percentages across the land will inevitably rise as users who aren’t finding what they need quickly head off in search of it elsewhere.

The challenge we will face as designers, developers, UXers and strategists is how to overcome this behaviour and capture a user’s interest before they head off into the virtual sunset. The type of thinking that we need to do as creators of content for the mobile web is no different to that which we need to do for the desktop web; there is just less margin for error.

Think in pixels - Information Architecture needs to reflect the hardware that the audience use and this will increasingly mean a screen resolution of 480 x 320. This means cut down copy, reduce layers of navigation and think about content weighting – what are the most important of all the important things you are trying to say? What about font size? Can you read 10pt Verdana easily on an iPhone? Do those beautiful, detailed icons mean anything to the guy scanning your site on his Palm Pre from a train?

Clarity of message – Keep it short, and to the point.

Take SEM by the balls– It is unlikely that a mobile user will get past the first 1 or 2 pages of Google results so to be in with a chance of getting that click-through you need to be running intelligent PPC campaigns (Google mobile still makes room for sponsored links both on its mobile site and iPhone application), have outstanding SEO or go niche – ideally a combination of the 3. Interestingly, Google's mobile search also has room for a couple of real time results so all the more reason to engage with your audience on the social web.

It’s all in the content – I know we always bang on about this, but it is with good reason. Why are your users coming to your site and how do they generally find you? Look at your analytics; what are they looking for and how can you better deliver this information? Smartphone users are less inclined to browse and if they aren’t quickly seeing what they are looking for you may as well wave them goodbye.

The smartphone world is the antidote to the big budget, FWA world of 27” iMacs and megabytes of Flash. It is all about simplification of your message and real emphasis on what audiences want. It is a world where vanity must make way for clarity of message and ultimately one that requires us as an agency to really earn our fees in the field of usability, audience expertise and successful user conversion.

Here are a few of the current heroes from the world of the mobile web;

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ - easy to use and the right mix of content. Most importantly it doesn't feel like a stripped back version of the full site and of course there is the iPlayer.
• http://touch.facebook.com/ - Everything from the full site, cut up into bite-sized pieces.
• http://mobile.flightstats.com/go/Mobile/home.do - a simple site that helps you find crucial information when you need it.
• http://onetrip.org/ - more of a web app than a site but worth mentioning as they have consciously gone minimal with no GFX to speed up mobile load time.
• http://m.google.com/ - everything you can do on the Google you can do here from searching to mail.

Have you ever seen an ad on the tube and continued to think about it once you've got out of the station? What is it that is likely to make you carry on thinking about an advert? And are we more likely to retain the message if we've been exposed to it longer?

We've just created a small site with our client, CBS Outdoor to demonstrate the concept of "dwell time +" in advertising on London Underground.

The concept is that for the large 48 sheets on the Underground, the "dwell time", ie the time that spend looking at the ads whilst waiting for their train is such that people are able to get more engagement with the ad itself. This is an experiment to see if dwell time can be enhanced by giving people a thought-provoking question to consider.

The posters are around for 4 weeks, with an online response mechanism for people to react to what they have seen on the Underground.

www.timetoconsider.co.uk

Last time, we looked at how the Social Media omnipresence is changing consumers' behaviour and concluded that marketers need to change their mindset and techniques to shift from traditional marketing to more of a conversation: a real dialogue with their audience.

It seems to us that most marketers and web users are talking at crossed purposes these days. Marketers are still broadcasting interruptive one-way messages, speaking loudly to target audiences and controlling the message. The video above is a good example of the traditional marketing model, reaching out to a large volume of consumers through messages without listening directly to the needs of the customer.

But forget about your monologue if you don't want to be abandoned. Instead let's create a dialogue between your clients and you. Dell finally managed to do this and have significantly improved their customer service, you should be able to as well!

Web users have fully adopted social media tools that enable them to create, share, discuss, and participate online. This results in empowered users who can say anything they like about brands: the good (Zappos) and the very bad (Taco Bell).

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about these conversations happening online, on blog comments, on customer reviews, on feedback platforms... They are taking place with or without you and travel even faster and further than you think.

So what should you do? Don't ignore what people are saying about your brand, a bad customer experience leads to a bad reputation which loses you money! Furthermore, if you're not part of the conversation, other people, competitors, are.

The best communicators start as the best listeners (Brian Solis – Social Media Manifesto). It is no longer what you say about yourselves, but what they say about you! So LISTEN to what people are saying then analyse what is being said and why. Only then should you ENGAGE and PARTICIPATE.

Some tips:

• Think like a customer and talk to them with a real voice.
  Don't make them feel small!
• Be transparent and honest: if you are wrong, it's ok to admit it.
  Honesty is rewarded and it will bring back customer trust.
• Provide your customer with tools that they are happy to use and help them accomplish what they want (suggestion platforms, voting system, blogs, comments, video sharing...)
• Create opportunities to make them feel owners of the brand. They can become your strongest advocates!
• Think of Social Media as a long-term strategy not a one-off communication campaign.
• Remember this is a two-way communication so be prepared to relinquish some control.

If you engage people by building relationships, you can expect your customer service to improve significantly. In addition to helpful feedback on what you currently offer its also a great source of fresh ideas, free R&D!

According to a recent study published by Opinion Research Corporation for Cone, consumers are enthusiastic about companies involved on social media platforms as it opens new channels to interact with the brand. So what are you waiting for? Start now before it's too late!

The kind people of Google have graphed our searches to show us our Zeitgeist, it quite intresting reading