How To Simplify User Journeys

by Startacus Admin

A user journey is the process a customer goes through to reach their end goal on your website. A poor user journey can dramatically affect key factors such as conversion rates or form sign ups. By making sure the pathway to your sites main goal is easy and clear to follow, you are allowing your customers to convert quicker and easier. 

If you can pinpoint the customer’s main goal at the beginning of the site design, you’ll have a better chance of creating a seamless user journey, that is sure to boost conversions.    

What can interrupt the user journey?

Poor UX and UI design can play a huge part in interrupting user journey. If your website has a poor and complex design, you are increasing the chance of users getting confused and leaving your site.

Some of the most common UX and UI design faults are: hard to fill out booking or contact forms or complicated checkout/payment processes. To ensure you don’t lose valuable users from your website, make their user journey as simple as possible. Don’t over complicate the design of your site and keep design and usability at an equal balance.


5 Key things to remember when designing your user journey

Work from the customer's POV

As we mentioned in the previous point, working from your users point of view can help highlight some key downfalls in your user journey. Designing a site that your customers will love to use will mean that your site serves your business better in the long run.

It can also help to think of your website as a store front and imagine your ideal customers visiting. How would you want them to move around? How do you see them getting from the front door to the cash register? Visualising the user journey in this way can again help you to see things from your customers POV.

Think about what the customers end goal will be

What are the customers visiting your site for? Are they coming to buy a product or service? Are they coming to enquire or book a service?

Once you have clearly identified what your customers end goal will be, you can work backwards and create touch points throughout your user journey to help them reach their goal.

Think about every possible stage that a customer will go through

After identifying the goal your customers are trying to reach, you’ll have a better idea of how to get them there. A user journey requires touch points, different stages along the journey that help the customers reach their goal.

Touchpoints could be things like CTAs on a landing page, or even a newsletter sign up that will add your customer to an outreach list, which will then send them email marketing campaigns to encourage them to convert. 

Test and experiment with different touch points

User journeys can often be a case of trial and error, which means a great deal of testing needs to be done so as to get it perfect. Experimenting with different touch points and using A/B testing can help you identify what works and what doesn’t.

It’s advised that A/B testing is done continuously, as user behaviour can fluctuate over time. Especially if you have an ecommerce site with rotating stock, or you consistently offer new services.

Monitor user behaviours

To make sure you’re putting your testing to good use, it’s important you use a tool like Google Analytics to monitor your testing. Keep an eye on your user behaviour and use that data to make changes to your user journey and UX design.

Article written by USIO

USIO are a UX and UI design agency based in London, that help create seamless user experience. Their aim is to help your website improve customer engagement and user retention, to help boost conversions and revenue streams. 

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Published on: 19th December 2016