Does your company need to better understand what your users goals are in order to help you make smarter business decisions? Well, your in luck.  Today we’re going to go over user journey maps which is a tool used by marketing professionals to bring insight towards overall user experiences. User experiences are very important to understand as they will tell you what your users’s wants, needs, and goals are and help you identify your companies sore spots.

To create a user journey map, you will first need to identify who your personas are.  Your personas are the people (users) who interact with your company or website and are your potential paying customers.  By identifying your personas, you will gain a basic understanding towards what your users potential behaviours and goals may be.  Next, create a list of every stage that your users go through when interacting with your company and use real data to back up your findings.  For instance, what is the step-by-step process that your users take when interacting with your products or services and what experiences do they encounter when trying to reach their goals. Some stages that your team may need to think about are:

1. The brand discovery stage; how did your users come across your company

2. The research phase; what research are your users conducting based on your products or services

3. The consideration phase; at what point do your customers consider choosing your company over someone else.

4. The purchasing phase, when do your users decide to become one of your customers.  

After identifying all the stages your users will go through (the more the better), you will then be able to clearly identify what their goals are.  Note, when your identifying your users goals, remember that these are your customers goals, not yours; Do not make these bias towards what you want the outcomes to be.  Once you have all of your data gathered, you can start putting all the information together in some sort of visual form.  Since there are no real templates to follow, in terms of visual structure, you will have to get a bit creative and figure out what will work best for you and your company.  Lastly, review your findings.  Analyse what your users journeys are and how your company is accommodating them.  By doing this, you will be able to see what your company needs to do in order to satisfy your customers and keep them coming back for the long term.