Knowing your customers is an important part of creating a successful mobile app. With your potential customers in mind, you can build an app that is relevant and useful to them. You may spend a lot of your resources and time building an app with great features, but if it’s not personalized for your users, you may not see any positive results. If you want the users to care about your app, then you need to build it keeping them in mind.
When you map your user’s journey, you gain valuable insights that can help you create a better experience for your users. User journey shows you how the users interact with your app and convert. It shows all the touchpoints that helped users reach the final decision. In this article, we will discuss how to map user journeys for mobile apps.
What is a User Journey?
User journey, also known as customer journey, maps how the users interact with the app and take a desired action. It tracks the user’s journey from when they first discovered the app till, they downloaded it and converted. It shows every interaction the user has with the app. User journeys show visual timeline of customer interactions and are presented in the form of infographics. This helps teams better understand all the phases a user goes through while engaging with their app.
Why Do You Need a User Journey?
User journey can help business teams understand user behavior. When you break down a customer’s journey step by step, it can help you improve your overall app design, strategy, and retention.
Here are some ways in which user journey is useful.
Improve user experience
Getting to know how users interact with your app can help you improve their experience. You can track the user journey to understand how your app is solving user’s problems or helping them achieve their goals. If certain features of your app are valuable to them. Are your users finding the app easy to use and seamless? These things matter to help you create a better app for your users that they find valuable.
Target the right users
Sometimes businesses fail to understand their target users. This can be a major setback for your app success. Trying to target a wide range of audience without clearly understanding them is a waste of time. Researching the goals, challenges along with the user journey is a good way to better know your customers. This gives you clarity about who your customers are and how your app can help solve their problems.
Increase user retention
User journey shows you areas where you need to make improvements. If customers are leaving more often after downloading an app, then maybe the onboarding process is not smooth enough. Based on these analyses you can optimize these specific areas to improve user experience. Paying close attention to your users and making your app user-centric is a great way to increase user retention. When customer’s find your app useful in achieving their goals, they are going to stick to it.
Journey maps can be shared with different teams in the organizations so that they use these maps to create a user-centric app. This map is useful for all teams like product development, sales, and marketing. Teams can then have a clear vision about the type of users they are targeting. Then use these insights to build an app that resonates with the target users.
How to Create a User Journey Map?
Define objectives
Before getting started with mapping your user journey, first define your objectives. Figure out what exactly you need to track and how you want to improve your app. This can give your research a good direction. When you are researching a customer to create a user persona you need to be asking the right questions. Along with their demographics and psychographics what else do you need to know about them? Defining your objectives can help you get started in the right direction and find the answers you are looking for.
You can involve different teams to define objectives as each team has knowledge about various aspects of the app. Use these insights to plan your research and build user personas.
Create user personas
User personas are a fictional representation of your target users. These personas reflect the characteristics and attributes of your target customers. To create user personas, you first must research your target audience in-depth. You can ask for feedback from current customers on how their experience was with your app. Create surveys or questionnaires to ask these customers the right questions. You can ask them about how they came across their app, various touchpoints, goals, challenges and what influences their decisions.
Find out what the user’s need to meet their goals. If you want to build a valuable app your need to understand your audience. After collecting all insights put together a user persona. Give it a name and even a face for more clarity. User personas should be shared with all the different teams to build a successful app.
Check out this simple guide on how to build user personas for mobile apps.
Find out all the touch points
Touch points are all the places your customers interact with your business. Based on the research of your target market you need to find out all the touch points that your customers used. This is important to map user journeys because it gives you insights on all the actions your users take. There could be more, or fewer touch points involved. Touch points can include your website, social media channels, paid ads, email marketing and more.
You can also run a Google search about your business or app to see all the places they have been mentioned on the search results page.
Visualize the user’s journey
After the analysis of your target user, take into consideration how these users engage with your app. This is important to mapping user journeys. You can visualize the thoughts, emotions, and actions the user experiences when they come across your app, engage with it and convert. This helps you estimate if the users have any troubles effectively engaging with your app. Another journey map visualizes how customer’s use your app daily. How the features of your app help solve their problems every day. This way you map how your app fits into the user’s life.
Journey maps also visualize the actions and emotions of users interacting with your app in the future. Analyzing all these different scenarios can help you build a user journey that is accurate and identifies the behavior of your customers.
Put together your user journey
After gathering all the information, put together your user journey. Use visual elements to create journey maps. Infographics can also be used to make these maps more visually appealing and interesting. There are also various templates available which you can use to create journey maps. Each business will have journey maps that look different based on your app. Customize these templates based on your needs. Share your user journey maps with the different teams in your organization.
Create user journeys based on personas
One user journey will not work for several user personas. If you have more than one user persona then each persona will have its own user journey. Ensure that your user journey is not general but specific to each persona. Each persona has audiences with different needs and challenges. Hence, they need a separate user journey that is relevant to them.
Test the user journey yourself
Simply mapping the user journey based on research is not enough. You need to test this for yourself to get a first-hand experience. When you enact the user journey, you have more clarity about what your users go through. Whether it’s a positive or negative experience, you will know, and you can incorporate these findings to make improvements.
User journeys help you understand you’re the actions, needs, emotions, challenges, etc. your users go through when interacting with your app. To create user-centric apps you will need to map user journeys. The steps discussed above can help you get started to create a successful user journey for mobile apps. Focus on your target users to gain valuable insights that can help you make improvements to your app.
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