EP 013
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Full Transcript
I love mapping—my projects, travels, and days. I enjoy planning the steps and stops, but most of all, I love leaving room for surprises. When I do, those surprises often lead me down paths I never imagined. And in design, embracing the unexpected can be just as powerful.
Hi, this is Sandy, and I’m A Design Mentor. This is where I share my thoughts on how design changed the way I think and do, and why I think design is simply a part of life.
In the last episode, we talked about users, about how it’s important to understand how and why users choose to interact with a product. Today, let's think about why users choose to NOT interacting with a product through a user journey.
First, what is a journey? Simply put, it’s moving from one place to another. A use journey is the same—it’s how someone moves through a product to reach their goal. Hold on, what does this even mean? Let’s think about an example. Imagine you need a new pair of scissors. You think about buying them, you visit an online store to buy one , and you eventually receive them and get to use them. That’s a pretty straightforward and linear user journey. The starting point is your need. The destination point is you fulfilling the need. The online store is the product that helps you complete your journey.
Now, let's switch roles. You’re the designer of this online store. You carefully think through how to curate, categorize, and display the products on the pages, how to lay out the information for each product so it’s easy to read, how to structure the checkout process so it works seamlessly, and you launch the store. After one month, you notice 100 out of the 150 visitors abandoned their carts and never completed checkouts. You start to panic, what is going on? I bet it would be great if you could see what stopped them, right?
We need to understand how these users are moving through the store by mapping out all of their steps, so we could find the issue. But how to do we do this? There are usually three things we need.
The first thing is to identify the main groups of your users. Remember in the last episode we talked about how Sarah mainly shops at supermarket A, but Carrie would only shop there half of the time? There are also groups of users for your online shop. For the sake of this example, let's say you have two groups, new and returning users.
The second thing is to pinpoint all of the touch points. What are touch points? In this example, whenever your users click or type on the website, whenever an action from them is required through the process, it’s a touch point. So this could be the adding to cart button, the navigation menu for the website, or the checkout flow.
The third thing is the user’s feeling at each touchpoint. Depending on how the interaction pans out, if the interaction meets the user's needs, they could feel delighted, normal or frustrated.
And with all three of these things identified, we can try to map out a simple user journey.
Let’s name a new users who just discovered the shop Jesse. And let's walk through one possible scenario that Jesse encounters.
Jesse needs a new fountain pen. She finds your online store through a quick search and is thrilled to see the exact model she wants at a fair price. Excited, she clicks into the product detail page and quickly adds the pen to her cart. Ready to check out, she clicks the checkout button—only to hit an unexpected roadblock. She must create a user profile to complete her purchase. This is her first time on the site, and she just wants to buy the pen quickly. If she enjoys the product and shopping experience, she might return for future purchases. But right now, the mandatory sign-up feels unnecessary. Frustrated, she closes the browser and looks for another store that lets her check out as a guest.
Now before you get angry at Jesse, let’s switch roles again, have you encountered this type of experience in the past? Have you ever left a store because something frustrated you? Maybe it wasn’t the user profile creation, maybe it had to do with how difficult it was to track shipping, or maybe the photos didn’t show enough product details, or perhaps the customer service was not responsive at all, there could be many reasons. That frustration Jesse feels—the blocker that stops her journey, shows us that it’s an area of improvement.
Potentially, if we take away the mandatory step to create a user profile before checking out, we could at least get a portion of the 100 users who never completed checkout to think again.
This is just one example of tweaking the checkout flow. Users take many different paths within a product. When we launch something, it’s always the best version we can create at the time. But as time passes, with the changing user needs, we refine, tweak, and improve. There are endless possibilities for a product to evolve, and what we can do is to give the product the chance to continue be its best self over and over again. User journeys are there to light up our paths through all the design evolutions.
If you own an iPhone, think about the improvements between the very first iPhone and the version you own now. What are the changes that really enhanced your user experience?
If you own a Nintendo console, think about the changes that’s coming for the Switch 2, what are some incremental improvements that are making you really excited?
Without identifying the users, seeing their frustrations, noticing the blockers through their journeys, these improvements wouldn’t have happened.
Just like in design, blockers happen in real life. But could they be opportunities for redesigns? Before I understood the concept of design iterations, I used to get really frustrated at every imperfection on my personal map. But now I know, setbacks are opportunities to pivot and grow, roadblocks are actually rest stops to think, and detours are to showcase what else was possible. This is why when I map, I’d always bake in some room for surprises and happy accidents.
I’m curious, when you hit a roadblock, do you stop—or find a new path? Has a detour ever led you somewhere unexpected for the better?
Next time, let’s demystify the term Value Proposition.
If you’d like to hear more, please subscribe, and turn on your notifications, I am beyond excited to go on this journey with you.
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