Mapping your user’s journey will help you better understand their needs and pain points as well as allowing you to better optimize the experience you offer with your solution.
What is a user journey map?
A user journey map offers a visual representation of the user/patient’s experience and should cover a user’s entire interaction with the symptom checker that’s in your app or on your website.
Why is it important to design and understand the user journey?
Mapping the user’s journey will help you to better understand the needs and pain points they might be facing while using your solution.
It’s useful for:
- Fostering a user-centric approach. By focusing on how the users might think and feel while using your solution, as well as what goals they are trying to achieve, you will be prioritizing delivering a top-level experience;
- Uncovering blind spots. Dedicating some time to analyze how users are interacting with your solution will help uncover potential UX improvement opportunities.
Ultimately, these identified pain points and needs should be addressed and optimized by doing an analysis of your product’s user experience (UX). You can check out our UX support options by speaking with your dedicated Customer Success Manager.
Your website or app is made up of many different users and they all have their own journeys. Triage may be part of many but not necessarily all of them.
As you start mapping a user’s journey, you should consider including the following elements:
- User personas: the segment of users you are trying to understand. Keep this as concrete as possible. Example: 30 year-old women, mother of 2, living in Munich, searching for a medical consultation for her younger daughter
- Stages of the journey: the steps the user will take along the journey to reach their main goal. Examples: symptom checking, reviewing the outcomes of the symptom checker, booking an appointment, adding the appointment to their calendar
- User’s actions: the actions the user will take in each stage of the journey in order to reach their goal. Example: The user clicks the “Check your symptoms” button;
- User’s thoughts and emotions: the user’s feelings and thoughts as they move through the stages of the journey. Example: User is feeling frustrated because it is not clear how to book an appointment in his/her medical office of preference
- Opportunities: the touchpoints where there is a clear opportunity to improve the UX of your solution or to connect more efficiently with your user
- Action points: how you will address the identified opportunities.
Considering these elements, you should be able to then map a user journey easily by following the next steps:
- Defining the scope
Being clear on what you want to offer your users with your solution can help you gather more relevant insights. Example: Help users to triage their symptoms before booking an appointment to better assess their medical assistance needs.
- Building your user personas
Ideally you should draft different maps for each unique user segment. This is explained by the fact that not all of your users will have the same needs or the same way of going about meeting those needs. You should identify a user persona for each segment to allow you to then analyze the experience that particular persona has along their journey.
- Defining user goals, needs, and expectations
Reflect on what your users expect or what needs they may be facing to better understand their behaviors within the journey
- Listing all the touchpoints and channels involved
Touchpoints are the points of interaction between users and your various channels of contact.
Listing all of the touchpoints is important to make sure that you are considering all of the steps in the user’s journey.
- Map the journey
Visualize all of the collected information in a map. It can be as simple as a timeline or as complex as a storyboard that shows what happens in each phase. Choose the one that works best for your analysis.
- Validate and experience
Make sure you validate the map by moving through the user’s journey yourself and then discuss it with your team.
- Identify next steps
Mark all of the improvement opportunities and define an action plan to start tackling them.
We believe this kind of analysis is crucial to keep improving the user experience of your users over time and should be replicated whenever there are changes to the flow, design, or even your target audience.
By doing so, you will not only be working to improve your product adoption, but also investing in the further growth of your business.
IKO