Using Experience Maps to plot your Customer Journeys

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Understanding your users This is a continuation from the article ‘Digging deeper to understand your users‘, I urge to read this to gain a better understanding on the UX process and concepts within this post. Please note; for client confidentially sensitive parts of all imagery has been pixellated. All work is copyrighted © spindlelegs 2017 […]

Understanding your users

This is a continuation from the article ‘Digging deeper to understand your users‘, I urge to read this to gain a better understanding on the UX process and concepts within this post.

Please note; for client confidentially sensitive parts of all imagery has been pixellated. All work is copyrighted © spindlelegs 2017

Following the article linked above to users and proto-personas, you should now really begin to understand the who, what and why of your users. That understanding should lead to some common themes that have organically risen to the service . Those themes can be classified as needs, problems or goals, and using your service design skills you should be able to take those then into what is call experience mapping

Generic heat map showing all needs, problems and goals.
Generic heat map, or Experience Maps showing user needs, problems and goals.

“Experience mapping is a strategic process of communicating complex customer interactions. This activity builds knowledge and consensus across your organisation, and the map helps build seamless customer experiences.”

Courtesy of ‘Mapping’ a persona lifecycle

Applying mapping techniques to our personas

Pivoting the traditional application of an experience map with this financial services client the needs, problems or goals were categorised first across a customer lifecycle. and then to one typical task.

Typical Institutional task
Investor type #1 persona given task “I want to quickly get to the details of a fund”
Investor type #3 persona
Investor type #2 persona given task “Easily justify that a fund is performing”
Investor type #3 persona given task “Guide me and make me feel in control when investing”
Persona-type 4 task;
Investor type #4 persona given task “Provide easily accessible information to re-assure my position”

The combined heat map

To discover the most important to the less important needs, problems or goals we combined the results of our four persona groups into one experience map.

Combined heat map highlighting the priority needs, problems and goals of all our user types.
Combined heat map highlighting the priority needs, problems and goals of all our user types.

Priority touch points

This highlighted 5 or 6 of the most important needs, problems and goals which not only provided valuable insight but led into a more specific grouping exercise – how our audience behaved within each section of the customer lifecycle.

User needs by lifecycle

By further analysing the results we were also able to understand what the most important needs, problems or goals our users experienced at each stage of the lifecycle. Here I have only shown on one persona group.

Next steps

Next task is to map those priority touch-points through to actual content. But for that, see how we managed stakeholder expectations and optimised our resources to roll-out a Content Audit and Inventory in record time.

Please note; for client confidentially sensitive parts of all imagery has been pixellated. All work is copyrighted © spindlelegs 2017

Get in touch

This is but part of a selec­tion of design articles spindlelegs gen­er­ated for the creative community out there. Please con­tact us fur­ther to dis­cuss if your brand really wants to ben­e­fit from this new immer­sive expe­ri­ence here: [email protected]

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