Use user flow maps to help improve your understanding of how your users work
To show user workflow research effectively, iterate on your customer journey maps with user flow maps
Customer journey maps are an effective way to present user workflow research, but only if you update them with user flow data.
To present user research effectively, you often must adapt how you communicate it.
I'm sure many of you have sat through boring presentations you hardly remembered, and lengthy user research reports are often helpful only as doorsteps.
However, I’ve recently found that updating your customer journey map with your data collection can be an effective presentation method. To understand this, let's first talk about what customer journey maps are.
Customer journeys elaborate on workflow research
A customer journey map visualizes a person's process to achieve a goal.
In its most basic form, it's a way to map out a series of actions to a timeline and add user thoughts and emotions to the process to create a narrative.
It's often a high-level overview of the process, which hides details to illustrate the overall flow of the steps. As a result, they are often created at an early stage, such as discovery, and just kept for reference.
However, you should sometimes update your journey map, as workflow research is often well-suited to this type of visualization.
Understanding workflow research
This is an oversimplification, but user research often wants to answer one of these four questions:
Can users complete specific tasks, or are there points they struggle with?
Is the product suitable for user needs, or are we missing things?
Does this new design perform better or worse than the existing design?
How do users work, and what steps do they take to complete something?
It's this last category that an updated Customer Journey map can help with.
For example, you might have a starting step (user login) and an end step (user buys subscription), but you have no idea what the user does in between. Your original customer journey map might be an expectation of what the user does in ideal circumstances, but you're trying to find out what users do.
Workflow research is often standard in organizations focusing on SaaS/B2B work, large applications (like medical chart software) with many potential steps, or organizations with a subscription model.
In these scenarios, we're trying to uncover the difference between what we expect users to do (i.e., the ideal path) and what users do. To help us refine our Customer Journey map, we can turn to one place: User flow maps.
User flow maps help you determine what users do
I'm a big proponent of Data-Informed UX Design, which is often about using existing data the organization already has to augment or improve your Design process.
One example of that is Analytics, which businesses already use to inform a lot of decisions. In this case, User flow maps provide data into what users actually do, which helps refine your workflow research.
In particular, they have one definite purpose: to see how many users select specific paths.
For example, using Google's Path Exploration tool (formerly User Flow Map), you can see that the 2nd most common action after viewing the page was to view our current promotion.
This can also show where users drop off, how different population segments can navigate, and other dimensions you might care about.
More advanced tools like Pendo allow you to map the entire customer journey and workflow with additional data (like % of users and amount of steps/time).
However, these user flow maps alone are not a replacement for customer journey maps: the main reason is that they cannot address the "Why" of these paths.
For example, if there is a significant drop-off from the Homepage to the Search results page, is it because:
Is the page loading slowly?
Is the user not seeing the results they're looking for?
The user needs help figuring out what search terms to use?
Do Users default to searching in a niche category rather than "All categories"?
Is the user browsing rather than searching?
Etc.
You won't be able to figure these things out solely by looking at these user flow maps. However, when you combine them with our existing customer journey map and the user research and testing you'll conduct with users, you can get a greater sense of what most of your users are doing and why.
Here's how to do that.
Build your customer journey map, then reinforce it with data
Before diving into User flow Maps and workflow research, ensure your original customer journey map is complete. Your research aims to validate how the user completes work against the data you collect, so you must first build a customer journey map.
Once you have that, the next step is to use that customer journey map as a reference when you look at Analytics. The reason why is that Data can be overwhelming when you don't know what you're looking for.
For example, imagine that you've mapped out a basic journey map, where the user goes from the home page to the top-level menu, selects the Product tab, and then clicks on "Product X." Based on reading stuff on the "Product X" page, they click to purchase a subscription.
If you were to go into the Analytics and check, is that what most people do? Or are most of them taking a different path? These are the types of things that are best suited to checking with analytics. Some things you might want to check include:
Where are users starting their journey (FYI, it's not always the home page)?
What are the most common paths users take to complete specific tasks?
If you have two potential options to get to a page (i.e., Search vs. navigation), which one do users use more?
Where do most users look before committing to a call-to-action (i.e., what do they browse before buying)?
Where are most users dropping off?
Etc.
Use your Analytics knowledge to ask better questions of your users
The purpose of asking these types of questions is not to know the answers right away when looking at the Analytics: it's to figure out what questions to ask when you talk with users.
Imagine if most users browse three specific pages (About Us, Product X, and Community) before purchasing. Then, you can ask your users about that when you interview them. As I said above, the purpose is to uncover the "Why."
Perhaps most users are looking for social proof (including who else is using this product) on the Community page, along with understanding if the founders are trustworthy on the About Us page, which is why they always check those pages.
This helps inform you if greater emphasis needs to be put on certain pages, along with your design recommendations.
Create a new modified customer journey map for comparison
The last thing to do is to create a copy of your customer journey map and modify it with your newfound knowledge. The main categories that are likely to change include:
Emotions: Were most users truly 'happy' or 'frustrated' when you expected them to be, or did the data show otherwise?
Thoughts: Why did users take the actions that they did? What changed between your expected journey and what the data shows?
Actions: Were there any odd customer journeys that completely deviated from the high-level process you expected?
That, in turn, will create an updated customer journey map for comparison.
Customer journey maps aren't just useful for discovery
One of the bad habits I've seen many organizations take around design artifacts is that they create them but never update or revisit them.
Customer journey maps are no exception to this. I can't recall how often I encountered an obsolete journey map due to a pivot or different focus several months ago.
At the same time, keeping your design artifacts updated every week is not always feasible. So workflow research offers a chance to revisit your customer journey map and validate it against your collected data.
This can provide your teams and organizations with a visualization that highlights the process a person goes through to achieve their goals currently. In addition, this updated reminder can help align your team with the data and help to understand roadblocks and pain points the users are currently facing.
If you are studying workflow with your user research, consider revisiting your customer journey map and augmenting it with data. It can offer you crucial insights into how your users work with your product.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer, Data-Informed Design Author, and Top Design Writer on Medium. His new free book, The Resilient UX Professional, provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.