user journey websites

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot's free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you're creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don't have one, I would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics at the ready.

Don't have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot's Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started. 

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you've learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I would recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so if you group too many personas into one journey, your map won't accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it's best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don't worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there's no overlap.

This is essential in creating a UX journey map because it provides insight into your customers' actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they're quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels
• Email marketing
• Third-party review sites or mentions

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand, impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding -- you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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User journey website: understanding the importance of user journeys with design and functionality

Marie Jehanne

October 19, 2023 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Oct 18, 2023

Table of Contents

What is a user journey website?

Why is user journey essential in website design, user journey website: differentiating user journey and user flows, defining user flow.

The user journey is a key aspect in enhancing user experience and boosting the conversion rate on any online platform. It represents the sequence of interactions a user has with a website or app, beginning from the landing page and progressing through various stages to the final goal conversion, often represented visually. Grasping this journey is critical for website designers and developers to generate a more user-friendly interface that aligns with the needs and expectations of their audience. The user journey is a dynamic concept; it evolves as users interact with your website or app and their needs and expectations shift.

Hence, continuous monitoring and analysis of user behavior are essential to identify trends and patterns. This ongoing analysis, through website analytics, can help optimize the user journey, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing conversions.

Understanding the user journey can also help pinpoint potential barriers that may prevent users from achieving their goals. These could be technical issues, such as slow loading times or broken links, or they could be design-related, such as unclear website navigation or confusing layout. By identifying and addressing these issues, you can improve the user experience, reduce the bounce rate, and increase the likelihood of goal conversion.

A user journey is a visual representation of the process a user undergoes when interacting with a website or app. It maps out various stages of the user’s interaction, from the initial landing page through to the final goal conversion.

The user journey is typically depicted as a series of steps or stages, each representing a specific interaction or decision point. Each step in the user journey represents a decision point or interaction that the user has with your site or app.

These steps can include actions such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or responding to a call to action. The user journey also encapsulates the user’s emotional responses and perceptions at each stage, providing valuable insight into their overall user experience. The user journey website is not a linear process; it can involve multiple paths and decision points, depending on the user’s needs and goals. This complexity is why it’s essential to map out the user journey, as it allows you to understand the various paths that users may take and the decisions they may make along the way.

The user journey is a critical component of effective website design. It provides valuable insight into how users interact with your site, their needs and expectations, and where potential obstacles or barriers may exist.

This information can inform your design process, helping you to create a more intuitive and user-friendly user interface. A well-designed user journey can enhance user satisfaction and increase the conversion rate. By understanding the user’s needs and expectations at each stage of the journey, you can design your site to meet these needs and facilitate the user’s progress towards their goals. This can result in a more positive user experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased likelihood of goal conversion. The user journey also provides a framework for ongoing analysis and optimization.

By continually monitoring and analyzing user behavior through website analytics , you can identify trends and patterns that can inform your design process. This ongoing analysis can help you to optimize the user journey, addressing any issues or obstacles, improving the click-through rate, and enhancing the overall user experience.

Know what drives engagement and abandonment on your sites and mobile apps .

In the realm of User Experience (UX), a critical aspect of website navigation, the User Journey and User Flows are two distinct yet interconnected concepts. The User Journey is a comprehensive term encapsulating the series of steps a user undertakes when interacting with a digital product or service. This journey starts from the initial point of contact, traverses through various touchpoints, and culminates in a specific outcome.

It provides a holistic view of the user’s experience, which is instrumental in optimizing the conversion rate. User Flows, on the other hand, delve into the specifics. They focus on the path a user takes to complete a particular task within the product or service.

These are typically represented as flowcharts or diagrams and are used to map out the potential routes a user might take to achieve their goal. User Flows, in essence, are a subset of the User Journey website, detailing the step-by-step process involved in task completion. They play a significant role in reducing the bounce rate by ensuring a seamless user interface. Understanding the difference between User Journey and User Flows is crucial for effective UX design. It enables a more targeted approach to product development, focusing on enhancing the click-through rate and ensuring a user-friendly interface.

User Flow refers to the path a user follows to achieve a specific goal within a digital product or service. It’s a key component of UX design and website navigation, facilitating designers in visualizing the steps a user must undertake to complete a task. This process aids in streamlining the user interface and making it as intuitive as possible, thereby enhancing the conversion rate.

The creation of a User Flow commences with a clear understanding of the user’s goal. This goal could range from purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, to accessing a specific piece of information on a landing page. Once the goal is defined, the designer maps out the most logical and efficient path to its achievement, taking into account the user’s needs and potential obstacles. This process is crucial in reducing the bounce rate and improving customer satisfaction. User Flows are typically represented as flowcharts or diagrams, with each step in the process represented by a different node.

These nodes are connected by lines that represent the user’s movement from one step to the next. This visual representation, coupled with website analytics, allows designers to easily identify and rectify any potential issues or bottlenecks in the process, thereby improving the click-through rate and ensuring effective call to action.

In conclusion, User Flow is an indispensable tool in UX design. By mapping out the user’s path to goal achievement, designers can ensure a smooth and efficient user experience, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and ultimately, the success of the product.

Stay updated

and never miss an insight!

Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!

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How user journey mapping can elevate the user experience

User journey maps illustrate the flow of a user’s interaction with a site. Discover what they are and how to create them.

Illustration by Anita Goldstein.

Lillian Xiao

Part of designing a great user experience is understanding how people interact with a company, its products, and its services. A user journey map tells the story of these relationships. It allows you to explore these interactions in a structured way, and in the process, uncover new opportunities for improving the overall experience for site visitors.

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll discover what user journey mapping is in web design , how to create your own and what such maps usually include. In addition, we’ll also review some of the variations closely related to user journey maps.

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map illustrates the interactions visitors have with a product or service over time. It outlines the various touchpoints and channels where people come in contact with a company. It also maps out the actions that they take, plus the thoughts and emotions they have along the way, visualizing all of these elements in an understandable and actionable manner.

User journey mapping can be used in a variety of ways. You can use it to visualize an entire end-to-end experience, or to better understand a specific, smaller interaction within a larger experience. You can create user journey maps for an existing product, or to explore future concepts and designs.

As a tool of discovery, user journey mapping allows you to analyze your users’ experience in a systematic and structured way. At each step of the journey, you can identify any gaps in the experience and brainstorm opportunities for improvement.

As a tool of collaboration, user journey mapping can help facilitate conversation and co-creation across teams. At the core of these collaborative efforts, a user journey map can serve as a shared vision, or even a plan of action, to help guide companies in making user-centered decisions.

How to create a user journey map

Before we jump in, there are a few things to keep in mind about user journey maps:

Design: There is no single way to create a user journey map. You can sketch it on paper, use sticky notes on a whiteboard, organize it in a spreadsheet, or create it using your favorite design tool. Choose the format that makes the most sense for you or your team.

Research-backed tools: User journey maps are based on existing research and data from your users. You can start by gathering any design artifacts that your team or organization has already created, such as user intent, storyboards, or user research reports. For areas where you don’t have any data yet, you can start with an informed estimate and validate later with additional research.

Collaboration: One of the most valuable aspects of user journey mapping is the conversation and collaboration that happens during the process. Make sure to invite important stakeholders to take part, whose expertise and buy-in are required for helping turn the newfound insights into concrete projects.

Now let’s look at the steps for creating a user journey map:

1. Determine user intent

User intent tells you what the user is looking to do. Is their intent informational, ie., looking for information like event details? Is their intent transactional, as in, they plan to make a purchase? Having a clear understanding of user intent helps provide a strong, clear narrative for your user journey map and will ultimately improve user experience by helping them easily reach their end goal.

Take a delivery app, for instance. If you’re designing a food delivery app, you could create a user journey map for delivery customers, and a separate one for delivery couriers.

2. Determine a scenario

Once you’ve landed on the user intent, select the scenario you want to map out. User scenarios describe a specific goal that a user wants to accomplish, the motivation behind that goal, and the steps they would take to achieve that goal.

An example scenario might be: Jody wants to schedule a cake delivery for her friend’s birthday. She expects that she’ll be able to choose a cake design, add a custom message, select the delivery time, and receive real-time updates about the preparation and delivery status.

3. Define the stages of your scenario

Based on the scenario that you’ve chosen, define the high-level stages of your user journey. The stages can be as broad or as specific as you like. Their purpose is to help you organize the rest of the information on your map.

The stages of your food delivery app might be: awareness, browse, order, wait, receive, consume and share.

4. Map user actions, thoughts, and emotions

For each stage of your user journey, list the actions that your user takes, and the thoughts and emotions that they have along the way. The thoughts can be any questions that they’re asking, or any hopes and fears they might have. The emotions are anything that they might be feeling, and can be labeled with words, smiley faces or a line that signals the emotional ups and downs of the experience. You can also supplement these descriptions with quotes and statistics from your research.

For users of your food delivery app who are in the Browse stage, their actions might include scanning menus, looking at pictures and checking out restaurant reviews. They might be thinking of trying out a new restaurant, which leads them to wonder what a certain restaurant’s popular dishes are. They might be feeling excited as they browse the photos, or concerned that the menu doesn’t have a lot of options for their dietary preferences.

5. Specify touchpoints and channels

Next, list out which of your users’ actions brings them in contact with the company, its products, or its services? These are the touchpoints, or the physical and digital interaction that your user has with your company. You can also include the channels through which these interactions occur.

With our food delivery app example, a touchpoint might be the customer receiving updates about the status of a food delivery. These updates could be delivered through a number of channels, like text message, phone call, or through a home voice assistant.

6. Identify the opportunities for improvement

Now that you’ve mapped out your user journey, are there any areas where the experience can be improved? Maybe you’ve noticed empty states , 404 pages , or design elements that are surprising, inconsistent, or redundant. These can be great jumping off points for brainstorming a better experience for your users.

At this stage, you might also want to identify any next steps, such as scheduling a separate brainstorming session, or assigning a person or team to look further into a specific part of the journey.

Finally, even though a user journey map should be created based on user research, it’s still important to verify that the information on it is truly accurate. One way to do this is to show the map to a few customers and ask them if anything is missing or seems out of sequence [Related: Learn how to make the most of styled horizontal menus .]

What to include in a user journey map

Most user journey maps are made up of a few main components. Remember, user journey maps come in all shapes and sizes, so feel free to adapt these elements to fit your needs, and in a way that makes sense to you and your team.

The lens: The top section of the user journey map details the user’s point of view, which might include reference to a persona or user intent, the scenario, and any goals and expectations that the user has for this scenario.

The experience: The heart of the user journey map is the experience, which includes the stages of their journey. Listed under each stage are the user’s actions, thoughts and emotions, and the touchpoints and channels that facilitate their interactions with your company.

The insights: The bottom section of the user journey map lists insights, recommendations and opportunities for improvement. It can also mention the people, teams, or departments who will be responsible for carrying these efforts forward.

[Related: How to adapt to a cookie-free future ]

4 variations of user journey maps

There are several frameworks that are closely related to user journey mapping. These can be used in combination with your user journey map or on their own, depending on your needs.

Empathy map

An empathy map helps us organize and visualize a user’s mindset, as a way to build empathy for our end users. They’re often used to help categorize user research notes during the discovery phase.

An empathy map has different sections (e.g., Think, Feel, See, Say, Do, or Hear) where you can organize research findings.

Unlike a user journey map, an empathy map is not laid out in sequential order. However, it does focus on a single user’s perspective. Empathy maps are great for organizing insights prior to, or as a supplement to, user journey mapping.

Experience map

An experience map visualizes a general human experience over time (like buying a home, or the stages of sleep). Experience maps serve as a baseline for understanding such experiences, and they help designers identify areas which can be improved with a product or service.

An experience map is visualized in stages, much like a user journey map. It can also include information like actions, thoughts and emotions. The main difference is that the experience map is not tied to any particular user, product, or company, since its purpose is to outline a broader human experience.

User story map

A user story map consists of user stories and tasks to visualize an entire system. A user story map helps with planning and implementation of such systems, and allows designers and development teams to create a shared understanding of what they’re building.

A user story map includes high-level descriptions of a feature, which can be described as user story (for example, as a real estate agent, I might want to create beautiful marketing assets quickly, so that I can spend more time interacting with clients).

Listed vertically under each feature are more detailed tasks and functionality that must be built into each feature (such as: choose template, import listing information, import photos, export file, and so on). The most important features are prioritized toward the top, while lower-priority features are labeled for future releases.

Similar to a user journey map, a user story map outlines sequential steps. However, a user story map takes the perspective of the product and the functionality it requires. One way to create a user story map is to take the steps from your journey map and add to them the concrete features and functionality that would be required to help users carry out these actions successfully.

Service blueprint

A service blueprint maps the steps that an organization needs to take internally to support a customer journey. This is different than a wireframe . Rather than focusing on the end user, a service blueprint is focused on the employees, resources, and processes that are required to deliver a service. It helps companies gain a fuller understanding of the services they need to deliver at each stage of a user journey.

A service blueprint typically outlines the touchpoints and actions that are visible to the customer, those that happen behind the scenes (which the customer doesn’t see), and the resources and processes needed to support these interactions. A service blueprint can also point out any codependencies, time, regulations, emotions, or metrics that are relevant to the service.

Similar to user journey maps, a service blueprint outlines steps in a sequential order. However, service blueprints take the perspective of a business, describing what’s needed to provide a certain level of service. One way to create a service blueprint is to take the steps from your journey map, and add the details for how a business would function in order to make each step a success for the user.

Some parting words

User journey mapping is a great exercise for developing a deep understanding of your customer’s experience with a company, its products and its services. Through its visual and storytelling format, you can get a keen sense for your user’s experience, while diving into the minute details of each step and each interaction. When done well, user journey maps are valuable tools for uncovering unique opportunities for improving the experience of your product or service for users.

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User Onboarding

A Beginner’s Guide to User Journey Mapping in Your Web App

March 23, 2021

Psst! 4,000+ Companies can't be wrong. You can teach your users anything with Nickelled.

Are you struggling to find out how you can improve your app to suit your user’s needs? A user journey map is a timeline of actions that the user took. It describes the relationship between your brand and the customer and provides a visual representation of how the user interacted with your app.

Although user journey maps can come in all shapes and formats, it is still commonly represented as a timeline consisting of information on all the channels your users went through to interact with your app.

This week, we’ll look at the benefits of a User Journey Map and how you can create one from scratch.

Benefits of user journey mapping for your business

• Assess company’s performance with alignment to business goals.

Journey maps are created to support a known business goal. This goal can be to resolve aninternal or external issue. For example, an internal issue could be to address the lack of ownership over certain parts of the customer experience. Whereas an external issue example could be to learn about your user’s purchasing behaviour.

• Change your company’s perspective to view the app from a user’s point of view.

Journey mapping helps shed light on the real human experiences that organizations often know very little about. User journey mapping fosters a customer-centric approach to product building, ultimately leading to better customer relationships.

Some questions you might ask about your user’s journey include:

• What made the user download and open the app?
• How easy is our app to understand and use immediately?
• How long does it take users to accomplish what they came there to do?
• How well does the experience extend across multiple channels, and where do they run into gaps?
•  Break silos, to create a shared vision within the entire organization.

User journey mapping helps facilitate cross-department conversation and collaboration as it creates a vision of the entire customer journey. By highlighting pain points and areas of friction, journey mapping answers the question of “Where is our starting point?” and aids in building an organization-wide plan of action to invest in customer experience.

• Understand your quantitative data and target specific customers.

Analytics and quantitative data help to identify why sales are dropping, or whether certain tools are underutilized. However, journey mapping helps you figure out why these events are happening. It can also help you figure out how to improve your new feature adoption rates .

Throughout the journey mapping process, you will be able to better understand the similarities and differences across the journeys of various user personas. Thereafter, you will be able to better prioritize or target a specific customer base.

Examples of different user journey maps

1.     experience maps.

These maps track behaviours at each phase of a process from start to finish with no focus on any topic such as demographics, company, product preference, etc. They are useful for giving you a sense of the user experience of your app, as you are encouraged to think about the user’s wants, needs, and actions they might take in a certain scenario. 

2.     Empathy maps

These maps do not follow any sequence of events along a user’s journey. They are usually created during user interviews to track what a user says, thinks, does, and feels when using your app.

3.     Day in the life maps

These maps zoom out, identifying users’ daily behaviour to gain insight into how a product can help reduce a person’s pain points. Throughout the process, the company should visualize obstacles a user might encounter and try to resolve the issues before the user notices the problem.

It addresses questions such as:

• What challenges is the customer confronted with?
• How’s the customer using our product?
• In what ways can our product be put to better use?

4. Current state maps

These maps illustrate how users engage with a product at every touch point while using the app. They stimulate thinking about a user’s mindset, behaviour, and pain points when they use your product. With this, you can constantly improve your UX to retain satisfied customers.

• What’s the customer thinking/feeling?
• Should any change be made at this point?
• Why should we make this change and how will we do it?

5.     Future state maps

These maps help companies envision how they hope customers will use their product before they start using it, and then guide them towards establishing specific goals during the design process or at other touchpoints. These maps are usually drawn when brainstorming new product ideas or for mapping out best-case scenarios for existing products.

• What action does the customer take?
• What’s the difference between the above section and the current state?
• How will this affect the customer journey?

6.    Service blueprints

These reveal hiccups in business processes as they focus on the customer, employee and service provider roles in different scenarios.

The main components include:

• Customer actions : What customers do when engaging with a service provider.
• Frontstage actions : Employee actions that the customer sees.
• Backstage actions : Everything that occurs in the backend, out of customer’s view.
• Processes : All events and inner workings of the organization that makes the business work.

Ultimately, when choosing which type of journey map to use, consider your goals and the problems you want to uncover and solve.

Components of a user journey map

Although, as we’ve seen, user journey maps adopt different formats, the following elements are usually present:

• User persona – The user who experiences the journey.
• Scenario – The actual journey the user persona takes.
• Goals – What the user persona expects to accomplish through the journey.
• Journey steps – Steps taken by the user persona to reach the goal. Can be supplemented with real user quotes or videos of user interaction with the product.
• Opportunities – Insights obtained to help the product team understand how to improve the user experience.
• Internal ownership – Assigns person/department in charge of changes to the product based on the identified opportunities.

User journey mapping process

Step 1: define the goals and scope of your journey map..

This determines whether your user journey map will translate into a tangible impact for your users and business. Thus, prior to goal setting, you need to identify your existing and future consumer base, to be able to set specific goals for your target audience at each stage of their experience.

A tip is to gather unique perspectives and insights from key stakeholders who are likely to touch different points of the customer experience. This helps in identifying where improvements are needed.

Step 2: Collect customer data and insights for persona research.

Obtain as much information as possible about the persona your journey map concerns. Depending on the maturity of your business, target persona information may be difficult to obtain.

Here are some ways in which you can gather meaningful customer data:

• Conduct interviews.
• Talk to employees who regularly interact with customers.
• Look through customer support and complaint logs.
• Pull clips from recorded sessions or monitor discussions about your company on social media.

The type of information you want to look out for should include:

• How customers found out about your product/brand?
• Why & When customers purchase or cancel?
• How easy/difficult users found your product to navigate?
• What problems your product did not solve?

Step 3: Define customer touchpoints.

Determine and state in your journey map how and where your customers interact with and experience your brand. Identify your engagement points to see if this feature leads to better retention in the long run (i.e. this is a feature that most users will find useful and is the product’s wow moment . But it’s currently too concealed in some part of the app).

Additionally, include information that addresses elements of action, emotions, and potential challenges. Depending on the type of business, the number and type of touch points you identify will vary.

Step 4: Define dropoff points

You should also check the workflows your customers take when navigating your app, and when they start to drop off. Optimizing this flow can help lead to better retention.

An example of this is in our interactive onboarding tutorials , where you can analyze user interaction. For example, here’s how Nickelled shows user dropoff points inside our guided tours:

Step 5: Map current state

There is no “correct” way to format your journey map. Prioritize the right content over aesthetics and invite input from relevant stakeholders to ensure accuracy when building your journey map. Include the touchpoints, actions, channels, and assigned internal ownership for each phase along the journey timeline. This process helps you to start identifying gaps or red flags in the user experience.

With more complex software, onboarding new users usually poses an issue. With Nickelled, the setup is quick and new users will automatically be brought through a clear and interactive click-through guide when they launch your software for the first time, resulting in a more positive initial user experience.

Step 6: Map future states

After mapping your current customer journey state, you’ll realize some gaps in your customer experience, information overlaps, obstacles for customers, etc. It is time to map out potential solutions and compare the current state map with your idea, future state.

Once the comparison is done, present your findings with a clear roadmap for expected change, and how roles should be assigned to improve the customer journey.

Enhance your user journey mapping process with customer engagement insights from Nickelled.

User journey mapping can help optimize the ways customers use your app, improve retention, decrease drop-offs and lead to a better experience for your users. If your app is complex and has a steep learning curve, a great user experience may be dependent upon an efficient learning system.

Use Nickelled to effectively onboard your new users and turn them into loyal fans of your product. Get instant insights on how they’re using your guided tours.

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

Last updated

Reading time.

There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

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How the User Journey Impacts Your Success

User journeys play a large role in business success. Learn what a customer journey map should include, read examples, and discover how to improve your customers' experience.

A user or customer journey, sometimes visualized as a journey map, is the path a person follows as they discover a product, service, or brand, learn about it, consider spending money on it, and then make a decision to purchase—or not. Not every user journey ends in a conversion, but it is typically the goal.

Creating a customer journey map can help drive sales, because when you better understand your user's journey, you can provide the information or encouragement they need to commit and become a customer.

Let's look at a couple of examples of user journeys.

User Journey Example: Under-caffeinated Chuck

Chuck is downtown and he wants a cup of coffee. His journey might look something like this:

• Chuck feels drowsy on the way to work and realizes that he wants coffee. He is in a downtown area and has several choices.
• He looks around and sees a local cafe with organic fairtrade coffee, a cheap coffee chain that also offers donuts, and another internationally franchised cafe known for their sustainably grown coffee.
• He considers distance from his current location, expected prep time, his budget, and his values—he appreciates both sustainable agriculture and supporting local businesses.
• He knows that 2 or the 3 options offer coffee that match his ethics about food, and although the franchised cafe with sustainable coffee is slightly closer, he prefers going to the local cafe where he can also do more to boost his city’s economy. The local cafe is also typically faster because it’s less crowded.
• He chooses the local cafe with sustainably sourced coffee.

This is a straightforward example of a user journey. A more in-depth example might include asking an employee for information or, if the journey is entirely online, searching for information, looking up reviews, comparing the competition, and considering the cost.

How to create an accurate user journey

To map an accurate customer journey, you need to know your customers and how they discover your brand. To create customer profiles, begin by learning about the demographics of customers who already shop with your brand. This profile is an outline of your target customer’s interests, pain points, income level, age range, location, and more. The entry point is where they become aware of your brand. In the 2 examples above, both had street-level entry points, but other entry points include online searches, word-of-mouth recommendations, as well as social media, television, and print ads.

Consider all the entry points that might lead customers to your brand. Then generate user journeys from those points using your customer profiles to target similar audiences. After that, you'll need to refine your journey maps to turn shoppers into buyers.

Your goal is to guide your potential customers along their journey as much as possible. This will also help you reduce or eliminate barriers to conversion like by answering questions, making the right offers, and providing clarity when it’s needed.

The stages of the user journey

Each user journey is unique. But no matter what customer profile you're dealing with, or what their point of entry is, the structure of all customer journeys has stages in common:

Consideration

Your goal at each of the first 3 phases of the journey is to improve the chances of purchase and retention. Every point on the journey has a connection to every other point, especially when the goal is to motivate and maintain customer loyalty and drive customers through retention and back through the whole process again.

In the awareness phase, the user learns about or is reminded of your product or service, usually as a response to something they need or desire. The awareness phase can follow a previous purchase, which means that the retention phase was a success, leading them around to begin the cycle again.

Here, the user looks at the virtues and the flaws of your brand and any other brands also up for consideration. This is when pricing, value, customer service, branding, communication, and other factors come into play.

At this point, the user has looked at the relevant differences among the available options. If there's any information about your product or service that the customer hasn't been able to find at this point, it could mean losing the sale.

Here, the user either makes a purchase or doesn't. But this isn't the end of the journey—keep in mind that they may be buying from you because another brand is not available to serve their needs at the moment. This is your chance to curry favor with such customers: Your e-commerce platform should be easy to navigate, your customer service should be on point, and any discounts you may have on offer should be extended.

Now that a customer has purchased from you, you want to retain their loyalty. It's a good idea to check in with them after their purchase: Ask for feedback, tell them about complementary products or updates to your services, and try to discover ways to increase their satisfaction in the future. When they reenter the awareness phase, you want positive interactions and friendly and complete customer service to follow them into the next round of consideration.

How to improve a user’s journey

The key to getting the most out of the user's journey is to know your customer as well as possible. This is why a customer profile and all the possible entry points into the journey are important to understand as you define your customer journey . You want an extensive, complete, and accurate profile of the various kinds of people who shop for the products or services you offer.

You need to consider possible entry points into the user's journey. Here’s an example: A woman named Carla is in search of new headphones. She knows that she could travel to her local mall to search for just the right pair, and then she wouldn’t have to wait for them to be delivered. But she also knows that by shopping online, she can more easily compare more options. In this example, a business that sells headphones would need to consider all of the paths that Carla may take to find their products. She could visit a store where they are sold, she might search online, or she might find the right pair through an ad on social media or an email promotion.

The customer profile, the entry point into their journey, and what you have on your shelves (whether brick-and-mortar or online) should all flow together to make a coherent experience for each potential customer.

Build user journey maps

A user journey can be mapped with flow charts or diagrams that take the needs, wants, and habits from a given customer profile and trace a journey from entry point and awareness to retention and back through again. Ideally, you want a journey map for each user starting at each possible point of entry. You're going to need several versions of each user journey map, with different paths based on entry point, previous purchases, email engagement, and so on.

Your goal is to be able to anticipate and answer questions a customer might have before they move on to make a purchase. After they've made a purchase, you want to make sure that the retention phase directs them back to the beginning of the journey. It's all about communication—you need to keep in touch to let them know how you can meet their needs, promote new products or services you have on offer, and get them hooked via rewards and discounts.

That's where Mailchimp's Customer Journey Builder comes in. Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing and e-commerce platform, allowing you to send marketing emails, newsletters, product and service updates, and everything else you need to keep your customers engaged and satisfied. With Mailchimp, you can also create your business website, employing best practices that will help you turn potential customers into brand-loyal repeat customers. Remember, the customer journey doesn't have to end with the purchase, and Mailchimp is here to make sure it doesn't.

Related Topics

• Email Automations
• CRM Automations
• Transactional Email
• Map Customer Journeys

How to do user journey mapping for your website the right way

• June 24, 2022

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User interaction is the bedrock of a brand’s performance. And the key to effective interaction is to have proper user journey mapping – in other words, creating a roadmap for a potential user to follow to interact with your brand and your online and offline assets.

Today, most user interactions start online. In fact, 9 out of 10 companies say that anticipating what a user needs and assisting them along that journey is crucial. 1 Today, we want to focus on user journey mapping specifically for websites .

How do users interact with your website?

The access a user has to your website or app is the biggest and sometimes first point of interaction they have with your company. It is the angle from which they build their view of who you are and what you offer. That is what helps them make up their mind whether to use you or not. Therefore, fixing your website up to cater to what a user needs is important to the growth of your company.

The user experience aspect of conducting or attracting business has been garnering more attention as more people realise how important it is to the outcome of a business to customer interaction.

So, a lot of marketing strategies have been putting more focus on optimising user experience. This is so important that customer-centric companies make 60% more profits than companies that don’t. 2

User-experience-centric marketing and interactions get better results, and many companies use user journey mapping as one of the tools to help them fix and optimise that experience.

What is user journey mapping?

A user journey map is a diagram that you make which tracks the user path or “flow” they go through when visiting your website, starting with the entry all the way to what could be considered the final steps of the process – usually an action the user performs, like buying a service or subscribing to your newsletter.

It’s usually put together to help further understand what a user experience on your website is like, and how you can make it better.

This diagram should not be arbitrarily made or based on theories or simple perception, but should be the result of research and data collected from users at every stage of their interaction with your company, and may be based on different things or look different depending on variables like the service offers, goals of the interaction, user base, and more.

This means the way you can make your own user journey map (or maps) is by collecting data from the website or app traffic and analysing it to know where your users tend to give up on the interaction, or leave your website, or become dissatisfied with what they’re experiencing.

After collecting the data, you test out different ways to solve any problems you find, and gather data about the new interactions until you find the best solutions and most positive responses.

There is no one formula

Since it is can be based on different points, or made for different websites, a user journey map does not have a specific layout or path it has to follow, so you can take liberties setting the dimensions based on what your users are looking for. However, it’s a good idea to make your diagrams clear, comprehensive, and strongly supported by data.

Most of the time, you may end up making many different diagrams to cover the entire scope of the user-company connection, with varied dimensions for each one to make sure you all the relevant information.

These maps may take into account things like what the user wants to be certain and assured about to keep going, what kind of information are they looking to find, or what step or phase do they show hesitation in or tend to drop the process entirely.

Providing a good experience is important if you want to provide a positive connection, and collecting all this information could help you figure out any gaps in your user experience that you can address and mend, optimizing the flow and making the experience more satisfactory for the user.

Top tips for good user journey mapping

Creating a user experience diagram can provide information that’s helpful for all departments and parts of your company, it will also provide you with clarity on the customer path and experience, and how you can smooth it out and gain user approval, and increase user loyalty to your company.

Here are some simple steps to follow to create one for your brand:

Step 1: Identify a user persona

Who is your ideal user? What do they want from your website? What will make them happy? Understanding these things is the first step.

Step 2: Identify use case scenarios

Chances are your brand or company does not offer just one service. So, create a user ‘journey’ for each service: imagine a scenario where a customer wants to buy service X. Then create the simplest ‘flow’ for them on your website to achieve that goal.

Step 3: Identify interaction touchpoints

A touchpoint is any space where your customers come into contact with your brand. Online, this can be through your social media, ads or your website. Once they’re on your website, more touchpoints open up depending on what they want to do. Identify all of these clearly.

Step 4: Create user journeys across the touchpoints

Mark out a clear roadmap that the user has to follow to complete their journey for each particular scenario you’ve outlined. This journey can be as simple or as complicated as you want, and it can go into as much detail as you require. There are lots of online tools to help you make good user journey maps. It’s good to explore those also.

Step 5: Continuously validate and refine the user journey maps

As we said before, there is no one formula – you need to keep collecting data and analysing what works and what doesn’t. Each time you find a glitch – a user not completing the journey, in other words – find out why it’s not working and how to make the experience better.

If you want more advice, book a free consultation with our team and we’ll help you refine a user journey map for your brand.

Liked this article? Make sure to check out our website and subscribe to our blog for more tricks and tips on content, SEO, and other topics to help your business.

1. Think With Google, Customer Journey Needs Statistics

2. Hubspot, 9 Customer Experience Trends & Stats That’ll Define the Next Year

Sonali Kumar

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Journey Mapping

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Once you’ve created a detailed buyer persona to help guide your website’s content, messaging, and design, what is the next step?

Think about your   buyer persona’s   relationship to your website, and how they engage with it before, during, and after they become a customer.

How do they prefer to discover, inquire, and learn about your offering?

A customer journey map outlines what your personas, leads, and customers will experience once they hit your site. How they interact with your brand from the first point of contact until the sale, and even after. Whether you sell product, software, service, or other offering, a customer journey map is an effective tool to understand how your leads interpret and interact with your website.

When creating a customer journey map, you can approach the process in two ways:

• Focus on the entire journey and experience
• Focus on a specific stage of the journey and experience 

With both, it’s important to identify the key interactions at each stage, and pinpoint what the user is feeling, what questions they may have, and what motivates them.

Many customer journey maps depict this information via an infographic or diagram for easy visualization.

There is no one way to   create a customer journey map . Choose the format that works best for your brand. Later in this post, we’ll look at more ways to create a journey map. First, let’s dive into why your company should consider using a customer journey map.

The Importance of Using a Customer Journey Map

Mapping out your customer’s journey   allows your organization to understand exactly how a person is feeling at each point of interaction with your brand; what key questions they may have (that perhaps you aren’t currently answering), and their specific needs at each stage of their journey.

Using a customer journey map, your entire organization gains a better understanding of not only your   customer,   but how your website affects their   decision making   process.

For more on the benefits of a customer journey map,   watch this video .

The Marketing Team

learns more about the customer than a buyer persona alone can tell them. Insights into the type of questions the customer   seeks   to answer, and the opportunities to improve and optimize their experience in finding those   answers,   helps align copy, CTA’s, and resources in a more effective way.

The Design Team

Gains access to the before and after: How did the customer arrive, and where are they going next? This insight helps build a stronger, more optimized design approach and helps aid the natural flow and browsing behavior of the customer.

Gains an understanding of how each customer moves through the website and sales funnel, allowing them to better understand where and how they can optimize for greater results.

Overall, your team will be able to pinpoint the exact places where your user experience falls short. Identifying:

• Channel Changes:   What exactly is happening when your lead is arriving from or going to a different channel associated with your website. How can you make this transition smoother?
• Device Changes:   How does your customer’s experience change when using different devices to browse your website.

The Stages of a Customer Journey Map

Your business’s journey map should be centered around the buyer journey stages : Awareness, consideration, decision, and after purchase.

From there, dig into each stage. Explore the following to ensure a seamless transition from one stage to the next:

What are the visitor’s motivations?

What questions are they asking, what actions are they taking, where are they blocked.

At each stage, what has motivated the lead to be there? What motivates them to keep moving forward? What are the emotional aspects attached to their motivations?

Just as their journey unfolds, so too will their questions. What questions do they need to answer before they can move to the next stage? Is industry lingo, or a technically difficult concept, holding them up?

What types of activity are you seeing from leads and customers at each stage? What actions are they taking to help move toward the next stage. What actions are they not taking?

Are there any reasons that your visitor can’t move to the next stage? What are they? Is your price structure, onboarding, service, or overall process confusing them or giving them pause?

Through customer research centered around site browsing/purchase behavior, customer interviews, and tools like website heat maps, you can gain a solid understanding of what customers may be experiencing at each stage.

While documenting a customer journey is one thing, the actual way people choose to purchase, or make buying decisions, can be very different. Some prospects will skip everything between awareness and purchase, while others will stay in the consideration phase for months. It’s important to understand that not everyone’s journey is the same. Yet, with more information, analytics, and research, you will be set up to provide a streamlined experience for most leads; anticipating their concerns and questions to move them toward a purchase decision.

HOW TO PERFORM CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP RESEARCH

If you’ve already performed your   buyer persona research ,   you should have a solid foundation to start on your customer journey map. Next, you must develop an understanding of the interactions your personas will have with your website, and learn more about their specific actions. Of course, these actions are based on what their personality dictates.

When approaching a deeper analysis, you will need to look at both analytical data and anecdotal.

BUILDING YOUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

Here comes the fun part! Putting together all of your new insights, personas, hypotheses, and data and   making your customer journey map.   Design it in a way that best suites your organization. Some people choose infographic styling, while others choose a timeline view. However, your company chooses to represent your customer journey, make sure the design does not overshadow the main purpose: The website visitor’s journey and their story.

Here Are The Elements You Should Definitely Include In Your Customer Journey Map:

Phases : Make sure you clearly depict the buyer journey phases ( awareness, consideration, decision, and after purchase).

Personas : Whose journey are you mapping? Refer to your buyer personas and include them, or break them out into individual maps.

Channels : Where are these personas coming from? How did they find your site? Once they arrive what happens?

Touchpoints: What actions are your visitors taking? Where are your key opportunities for interactions? What are their clicks, downloads, signups, etc.?

Emotional Response: What emotions are they feeling at each stage? What are their questions/concerns/feelings? What moves them to the next phase, and holds them back from another?

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map, and there are many channels, personas, and scenarios you could create. Start small - you don’t need every single option. The goal is to tell a story about a customer’s needs, what they are searching for, and how and if they find it on your site.

SHARE, REFINE, AND PUT TO USE

Building a customer journey map is exciting and useful for the entire organization. Once you’ve created your first prototype - share it with your team.

Remember, every time a lead or customer has a negative interaction with your brand or website, it lowers your brand’s trustworthiness and chance to delight a customer. By outlining your customer’s interactions, emotional state, and questions/concerns in a visual way, your organization has a better chance of discovering new ways to win customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship with the brand.

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11 User Flow Examples + How to Inform UX Design With Them

10 min read

Looking for user flow examples to inspire your UX design process ?

This article shows you 11 examples across different user journey stages. We also cover best practices to help you create logical user flows and develop memorable user experiences.

• A user flow is a visual representation of the steps a user takes to achieve a specific goal within a website or app.
• The benefits of tracking user flows include creating user-centered product design , eliminating friction in user journeys, and reducing churn .

Follow these steps to create a user flow that leads to better user interactions:

• Define your objective for creating user flows .
• Discover user paths to app actions .
• Track user interaction patterns .
• Build your user flow diagram .

11 User flow examples to inspire you to create your app flows:

• Basic user flow chart for logging in.
• Registration with authentication user flow.
• Forgot password user flow .
• Onboarding flow for new users.
• Referral user flow.
• Plan upgrade user flow.
• Review generation user flow.
• New feature release user flow.
• Cross-sell user flow.
• Customer support user flow.
• Account cancellation user flow.

Best practices to create a good user flow

• Add visual aids to your user flow charts .
• Plan your paths to accommodate for user mistakes.
• Collect user feedback to improve your user flows .

Interested in combining user flows with in-app analytics to understand users better? Userpilot can help. Book a demo now .

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What is a user flow?

A user flow visually outlines the series of steps users take to achieve a specific goal within a website or app.

For a user flow to be complete, it must highlight the starting point of the interaction , steps users take, key decision points along the flow, and finally, an endpoint.

Here’s a user flow example depicting the user journey from login to successful credit card payment. Notice how it includes several decision paths along with alternative paths for troubleshooting issues.

Benefits of tracking user flows

Mapping and tracking user flows give you invaluable insights that lead to smarter UX design decisions and a more satisfying user experience . Here’s how:

• Create user-centered product design : User flows force you to think from your users’ perspective. You’ll understand user behavior better and be able to pinpoint where they might struggle or become confused, leading to design adjustments that prioritize their needs.
• Reduce friction in user journeys : By visualizing user flows, you can identify friction , confusing navigation, or dead ends in the UX. Eliminating these pain points creates a smoother journey for your users.
• Reduce churn : Users are far more likely to stick around when they have a positive, frictionless experience with your product.

How to create user flow diagrams and analyze user journeys

Before diving into examples, you need to understand the thought process behind creating impactful user flow diagrams. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Define your objective for creating user flows

Before creating a user flow diagram, it’s crucial to establish what you want to achieve with it.

Do you want to simplify sign-ups , improve free-to-paid conversion rates , or increase product adoption ? Having a clear objective will guide your focus and help you determine which aspects of the user journey to emphasize in your diagram.

Use the SMART goal-setting framework when defining your objectives and building user flow charts. The SMART goal framework indicates that each goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

For instance, instead of a broad objective like “improve adoption for new users,” specify the user task you want to focus on, such as “streamline the onboarding process for new users.”

2. Discover user paths to app actions

Implement path analysis to visualize the user journey and find all the possible paths from the starting (or entry) point to where the flow ends.

This allows you to find the following information:

• The percentage of users who take each path.
• Users who drop off along different paths.
• The most popular paths.
• Key actions that drive users from one decision point to the other.

3. Track how users interact with your pages

Observe how users navigate through various pages, what paths they choose, and where they click . Session recordings provide additional insights that show preferred navigation patterns and spot areas of confusion.

By watching the replays, you’ll understand user behavior and spot deviations from expected behavior .

If you want to dig deeper, you can also observe heatmaps , feature reports , and other analytics tools to identify popular actions and the UI elements users love interacting with.

4. Build your user flow diagram

With the insights gathered, visualize your customer journey . Start with the entry point, then chart the user’s path through your app, including actions they take and decisions they make. Then, mark out alternative paths and endpoints, and use different shapes or colors to represent various actions or decision types.

Once your user flow diagram is ready, analyze it to identify areas to improve. Look for steps you can simplify or remove, and consider how to increase product value at each point in the flow.

11 User flow examples to inspire you to create your own user flows

User flow design depends on your needs. For a B2C company like Spotify, they’ll need a music app user flow, an e-commerce payment flow, and so on. The important thing is to understand your users and their needs. For example, based on how people use your tool, you can decide if you’ll be creating mobile screens or sticking to a web app and website user flow.

Ready to get your inspiration flowing? Here are some user flow examples to explore.

1. Basic user flow chart for logging in

This simple user flow represents a user’s journey when logging in or registering .

It outlines the decisions the user faces and the steps they take based on whether they’re new to the platform or just coming back. For new users, the flow details the registration process. For returning users, it leads them to the login screen.

Keeping the login/ sign-up process intuitive reduces user frustration and motivates them to engage with the platform.

2. Registration with authentication user flow

This is a more comprehensive registration flow with different authentication options that caters to various user preferences.

New users can sign up with their Facebook or Google accounts or use the good old registration form to authenticate their identity.

3. Forgot password user flow

Forgetting a password is a common occurrence, and a smooth password recovery flow prevents this minor frustration from turning into product abandonment.

In this simple flow, the user initiates password recovery by inputting their registered email. The platform automatically checks for the email in the database, and the user receives a password reset link once verified.

If the email doesn’t exist, users get prompted to re-enter their email address. They’re asked to register if the new email also doesn’t match the database record.

4. Onboarding flow for new users

This example shows how users move through a two-step onboarding flow after signing in. If the user chooses to start the onboarding process, they’ll see tooltips that highlight and explain key features.

The flow also caters to users who don’t want to go through the onboarding process and allows them an option to dismiss it. This is important because many users prefer to explore new tools on their own.

5. Referral user flow

This is one of the user flow examples that can help you boost customer acquisition and revenue.

The flow begins with a page telling users (ideally, power users ) about the referral program and what they can gain by participating in it. If the user doesn’t click the CTA, they get returned to the previous page they were on.

However, they see the referral form when they show interest. Once they fill it out, the user gets a unique referral code in their email.

One good thing about this flow is that it includes a feedback loop —if the user doesn’t fill in the form, they are directed back to a previous step, and not to a dead end.

6. Plan upgrade user flow

When prompting users to upgrade , it’s important that your flow is easy to follow and tailored to the user’s behavior. Here is an example that you copy.

The flow begins with identifying the power users. An upgrade pop-up appears the next time the power user logs in.

The user has the option to dismiss the pop-up and end the session. However, if they show interest, the flow leads them to the pricing page, where they can choose a higher-tier plan or end the session.

7. Review generation user flow

Positive reviews help build social proof and make it easy to acquire new users . Potential customers in the discovery and consideration phases of their journey tend to trust word of mouth from other users rather than traditional marketing or advertising.

All companies understand this. However, there’s a delicate science to requesting reviews. Your review funnel needs to target happy customers and make it easy for them to share a few positive words without wasting time.

Here’s an example of such a flow. It begins with an NPS survey targeted at users who have used the app for at least two weeks. After the survey is displayed, the user either:

• Dismisses the NPS survey and ends the process early.
• Fills the NPS survey, rates the app under 9, is identified as either a passive or detractor , and exits the flow.
• Fills the NPS survey, rates the app either a 9 or 10, is identified as a promoter , and is redirected to a third-party platform to leave their review.

This approach to review generation ensures you stay in control of your brand image . While you technically can’t stop anyone from reviewing your tool on sites like G2 and Capterra, funneling NPS promoters to the review sites puts you in charge of your public image to a great extent.

8. New feature release user flow

When you release a new feature , you want to ensure users engage with it immediately. Aside from the potential quick adoption that a good feature release flow provides, it also helps you gather data on how users respond to the feature release strategy, showing improvement areas.

In this simple user path , users see a feature release slideout and are faced with a decision: Engage with the CTA, dismiss the slideout, or navigate away. If the user clicks on the CTA, a new screen appears with details on the new feature.

The other two options end the flow.

9. Cross-sell user flow

Cross-selling helps provide more value to users and also generates more revenue for the company.

The flow triggers when a regular user converts into a power user or the moment they hit a specific engagement milestone .

Then, they see the add-on pop-up contextually along with an option to dismiss the notification. The session ends if the user dismisses it. But if they click the upgrade button, you lead them to a page where they can authorize the payment and successfully include the add-on to their plan.

10. Customer support user flow

This flow begins when a user clicks on the help button. This action connects them to the AI chatbot that asks the user to share their question. The chatbot attempts to provide answers, and the session ends if the user is satisfied.

Otherwise, they get routed to a human support agent .

SaaS companies prefer adding chatbots to their support flows because most user queries are repetitive and don’t need a human agent. This approach leads to faster customer satisfaction and reduces the load on support teams.

11. Account cancellation user flow

Well-designed account cancellation user flows are an excellent opportunity to win customers over or spot recurring reasons for churn .

This example provides a template you can use. The flow begins when the user clicks the account cancellation button. They’re then shown a churn survey in an attempt to find their churn reason and try winning them back.

Some users will be beyond the point of return, so allow them to dismiss the survey if they want and cancel easily. For those who fill it out, automatically suggest alternate solutions based on their responses. For instance, if they’re leaving because they feel the app is “hard to use”, you can offer a live product tutorial at their convenience.

Best practices to create user flows

Here’s how to create user flows that provide valuable insights to understand and improve the user experience.

Add visual aids to your user flow charts

Visual elements like colors, icons, and symbols make it easy to present your flows to stakeholders or colleagues. User flows can get pretty confusing without them.

Once you’ve decided on the visual aids to use, ensure to keep them consistent and intuitive to avoid any confusion or cognitive load when interpreting. You can also share a key along with every user flow to make them easy to understand.

Plan your paths to accommodate for user mistakes

User research shows users tend to make mistakes no matter the app they use. This is why it’s important to design user flows with user errors in mind.

A well-designed flow allows you to quickly correct your mistakes. So, if you accidentally delete an element in your email template, an undo button should be available to save the day.

Collect user feedback to improve your user flows

As you design new flows and update existing ones, collect customer feedback to track the resulting user experience with in-app feedback surveys.

Focus on asking survey questions that reveal potential friction points and improvement areas. For example, you can ask, “How easy was it for you to upgrade?” immediately after users upgrade their accounts. You’ll discover the improvements you need to make.

User flows help visualize the user journey, so you’re able to build new paths and improve existing ones.

Ready to recreate some of the user flow examples we discussed in this article? Userpilot can help you collect direct feedback and gather data on user behavior so you can design engaging user flows. Book a demo now to get started.

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This Week's IDEA

Build Sites to Address the Entire User Journey

“ I wisely started with a map. ” —J.R.R. Tolkien

Welcome to This Week’s IDEA , where we talk about one essential topic around 21st Century IDEA and share resources and tools that you can use to start making small, incremental changes to your websites and digital services.

One of the design principles of the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) is promoting continuity , or minimizing disruption, for your customers over time and across platforms, agencies, and devices.

Agencies, websites, and services all have different audiences, goals and missions, so we may implement solutions differently. One way to mitigate these challenges is to design sites with the USWDS in mind, and build sites with user-centered solutions to address the entire user journey, not just a specific task. One way you can do this is through journey mapping .

Below, we cover how journey maps provide value to your project and how you can use them even when the people you need to work with are geographically distributed.

What are journey maps?

Journey maps are artifacts that display how one person goes through a process, which could be as common and everyday as making a cup of coffee, or important and infrequent as applying for a passport. They range from as few as two steps on a path, to as many are needed to adequately make the journey understandable. Each mapped step of a journey can describe goals, interactions, materials required, and even thoughts or emotional states.

Why use a journey map?

It’s rare for an agency to have control over how a customer experiences a service from start to finish. Creating journey maps can help you see how your customer experiences the full service - before and after they interact with your piece of the puzzle. The process and resulting map can reinforce empathy skills, like walking in someone else’s shoes, that helps you understand the customer mindset as they enter and exit each step.

Journey mapping as a process can help your team think strategically about work, prioritize, and gain alignment on shared goals. Journey maps help ask “Why?” in a focused way, e.g.:

Why are we doing ____?

Why are we not doing ____?

Why are we doing ____ the way we’re doing it?

How to journey map

The major steps of journey mapping are:

Align on the purpose of your journey mapping

Select a process to map

Identify phases and steps of the process (it’s critical to get customers’ or users’ perspective here)

Select and visualize the attributes of each step

Analyze the map to find patterns or opportunities for improvement

When you have a distributed team

When your team is distributed or cannot be together in person, you can condense this process by structuring your meeting in three steps:

Align on the journey mapping purpose and determine what to map

Break the process down and visualize it

Before you collaborate remotely

For a seasoned facilitator and experienced researcher adjusting to remote synchronous collaboration may be the most challenging part. Gauge the participants’ familiarity with synchronous remote collaboration and with activities like journey mapping in order to decide how to orchestrate the session.

What helpers do you need?

In advance, ask someone to be the moderator. While you guide the discussion and share your screen with the group, the moderator can keep an eye on the chat, assist anyone having a technical issue, and call your attention to someone who has something to say. Will you be making notes on your shared screen while you facilitate, or would you like a scribe to do the typing/drawing?

Select the tools you’ll use

Tools can range from pen and paper to spreadsheets to concept-mapping software or slide deck tools. The tools you use should prioritize collaboration over complexity. A high-fidelity version of the journey map will come later. When selecting the right tool consider:

Which tool are you most confident using?

Do you want everyone to easily work together in the document?

Is the team learning new tools or the journey mapping process on their own without a facilitator?

Tech check: test your tools

Test out your setup with the moderator. Tell participants in advance what tools you’ll be using and make sure that everyone will be able to participate equally. You might suggest they have pen and paper handy so you can ask them to write thoughts down during the session. If this type of collaboration is very new for team members, schedule a 30-minute drop-in session for people to try out whatever you will be using.

Set the ground rules

At the beginning of each session, tell people how and when they can contribute, e.g.:

“Stay muted and unmute yourself to speak any time” -or- “Type ‘Comment’ in the chat and the moderator will call on people”

“Go ahead and write in the shared document as we go” -or- “The scribe and I will be taking notes on-screen as we go. If we don’t capture your intent, please let us know!”

Step 1: Align on journey mapping purpose and determine what to map

Introduce mapping and prep for collaboration.

Provide a simple example to introduce your participants to the concept and structure of a journey map. For example, describing the process of going out for ice cream (Excel spreadsheet, 5 KB, 1 sheet). a. Consider where the journey begins and ends. Break down the journey into phases and steps, being as high level as possible and include only the detail necessary for the journey to be understood.

Ask everyone to send you a list (could be in a shared document) of the expected steps in the process

Set up the journey map document. For this example, we’ll use the spreadsheet above. a. In the first column, label the rows: Phase, Steps, Pitfalls, Thoughts, Feelings, Channel b. In the steps row, enter the steps, left-to-right. When there are duplicates of a step, just pick one.

A simple spreadsheet version of a journey map for easy remote collaboration

Step 2: Break the process down and visualize it

Review the steps in the process.

Ask your team to group these steps into phases of the process and name each phase. (Enter these in the phase row)

What are some pitfalls that can happen during the process? Enter them below the step where they can occur.

For each phase, what might people be thinking?

For each phase, what feelings might they have?

Step 3: Analyze the map to determine next steps

Identify pain points and opportunities for improvement

Review the map focusing on how things interact, noting the unexpected, points of friction and steps that might be streamlined

Determine priority areas to address

Next steps could be, sharing this map with others, to make sure you’ve accurately reflected the journey, or creating buy-in for changes to roles and processes, or adding a “How might we?” brainstorm to think about ways to improve the journey.

To maximize the usefulness of your map, make it a living document that is updated as process changes or with additional rows of information that could be metrics you could measure improvement by, like how much time or money is spent at each step (or in between steps) or customer satisfaction. You could also show the current state and a reimagined future state map to get buy in for making the experience better.

Additional Resources

Journey Mapping from 18F’s methods cards collection

3-part series on journey mapping from GSA’s Customer Experience Center of Excellence

Attend Shifting Your Metrics Mindset on June 24. Learn how to orient your analytics strategy around success metrics. This webinar is part of the Digital Analytics Program’s learning series.

The Lab at OPM offers classes in human-centered design. Check out their 2020 classes, including the monthly workshop on the Fundamentals of Human-Centered Design .

Attend “Making Remote Work Work for Journey Mapping” on July 9. This webinar will be conducted by members of the 18F Research Guild.

From the Field

Meet Charlotte. She is a resident of Northern California who survived the devastating Camp Fire, which burned nearly 154,000 acres. Her house was destroyed and her family farm severely damaged. To Charlotte, this is a tragic life event that is upending her existence. To the federal government, it triggers possible eligibility for programs spread across dozens of agencies: Imagine each of the U.S. government’s services as part of a broader customer journey. How might federal agencies change their approach or even work together? How might citizens think differently about those services and their overall experience with government? — via Performance.gov

Do you have a 21st Century IDEA-related comment or question? Or would you like to give a shout out to your colleagues? Send it to us at [email protected] , and we’ll work to incorporate it into the next newsletter.

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From Microscopes to Flames: A Journey into Wildland Firefighting

Life's journey often leads us down unexpected paths. One moment, you're entrenched in a career as a biological technician, the next, you find yourself amidst the flames as a wildland fire apprentice. This unpredictability is precisely what Lindsey Green encountered as she transitioned from her previous profession to her current role at Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. Join us as we look at this apprentice’s journey into the world of wildland fire, exploring the moments that have shaped her career trajectory. 

Q: How long have you been in fire?  

Prior to joining the Wildland Fire Apprenticeship Program with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, I was a biological technician for Pea Island and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuges in North Carolina. During my time there, I was also a collateral duty firefighter, mostly helping with prescribed fires. A collateral duty firefighter is someone who holds another primary role, in my case biological technician, but also fulfills duties related to firefighting as a secondary or collateral responsibility. In February of 2022, I applied for a Wildland Fire Apprenticeship position and got it! Now, I’m almost through the program and will then move into a permanent wildland fire position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Q: What detail assignments have you filled as part of the apprentice program?  

Being a part of the Wildland Fire Apprenticeship Program has allowed me to travel all over and learn about the different types of wildland fire crews and what it takes to manage wildland fire and build relationships with other wildland fire personnel. So far, I’ve been able to experience what it’s like to be on a hand crew, an engine crew, and even completed some helicopter assignments. I’ve also traveled to Minnesota, South Dakota, and Nebraska to assist with prescribed burning assignments. Over the next few months, I will experience working in a dispatch center. 

Q: Where did you grow up?  

I grew up in South Florida. I went to school in Orlando and attended collage at the University of Central Florida where she studied Environmental Science/Biology. A year after I graduated, I moved up to North Carolina for the seasonal biological technician position. 

Q: Recently, you joined a National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center  

Our burn module was based in Titusville, Florida, for the first part of our assignment, where we joined an interagency burn with Florida State Parks. We completed prescribed burns at Faver-Dykes, Dunns Creek, Lake Louisa, Bulow Creek, and Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Parks! After we completed those burns, we traveled to the Florida panhandle where we burned with the Florida Forest Service at Tate’s Hell State Forest. 

Q: Can you tell me more about being a part of a burn module and what exactly it entails?  

The National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center brings together individuals from all over the country from different fire backgrounds and experience levels to train them on specific prescribed fire skills. Essentially, any individual who wants to join has to apply for a specific training position – RXB2 (Prescribed Fire Burn Boss), FIRB (Firing Boss), ENGB (Engine Boss), FEMO (Fire Effects Monitor), FFT1 (Firefighter Type 1). Once selected, that person is placed into that role in a new environment to gain those skills. I absolutely love the National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center because it promotes learning, training, and understanding the objectives of each area.  

Q: Can you tell me about your overall experience on the module with the training center? What did you learn?   

My experience with my module was awesome. Each person brought a different perspective, and I had a great time getting to know and work with each person during my time there. It was great getting to burn in Florida and experiencing the different landscapes and objectives with each state park and forest. I was pushed out of my comfort zone multiple times, and I truly appreciate that opportunity. My group and field coordinators created a fantastic learning environment that allowed me to fully work through each situation.  

Many times, when you’re on a prescribed fire, there can be an overwhelming goal to complete acres. The National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center helps shift that focus more on the objectives of the burn and what firing techniques are optimal for those objectives. Being a part of a module provided me the latitude to implement different techniques so I could see firsthand what worked, what didn’t work, and when to adjust tactics. 

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Watch CBS News

AT&T informs users of data breach and resets millions of passcodes

March 30, 2024 / 2:51 PM EDT / CBS/AP

AT&T said it has begun notifying millions of customers about the theft of personal data recently discovered online.

The telecommunications giant said Saturday that a dataset found on the "dark web" contains information such as Social Security numbers for about 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.

The company said it has already reset the passcodes of current users and will be communicating with account holders whose sensitive personal information was compromised.

It is not known if the data "originated from AT&T or one of its vendors," the company said in a statement. The compromised data is from 2019 or earlier and does not appear to include financial information or call history, it said. In addition to passcodes and Social Security numbers, it may include email and mailing addresses, phone numbers and birth dates.

It is not the first crisis this year for the Dallas-based company. 

New York prosecutors said they are opening an investigation into a wireless network outage in February that left  thousands of AT&T customers  across the U.S. without cellphone service for roughly 12 hours.

The outage, which also affected some Consumer Cellular, T-Mobile, UScellular and Verizon subscribers, led to widespread frustration by phone users and briefly disrupted 911 service in some communities. 

AT&T apologized for the network disruption and offered a  $5 credit to customers .

More from CBS News

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Millions of customers' data found on dark web in latest AT&T data breach

Chloe Veltman

An AT&T store in New York. The telecommunications company said Saturday that a data breach has compromised the information tied to 7.6 million current customers. Richard Drew/AP hide caption

An AT&T store in New York. The telecommunications company said Saturday that a data breach has compromised the information tied to 7.6 million current customers.

AT&T announced on Saturday it is investigating a data breach involving the personal information of more than 70 million current and former customers leaked on the dark web.

According to information about the breach on the company's website, 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders have been impacted. An AT&T press release said the breach occurred about two weeks ago, and that the incident has not yet had a "material impact" on its operations.

AT&T said the information included in the compromised data set varies from person to person. It could include social security numbers, full names, email and mailing addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, as well as AT&T account numbers and passcodes.

The company has so far not identified the source of the leak, at least publicly.

"Based on our preliminary analysis, the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier," the company said. "Currently, AT&T does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in theft of the data set."

AT&T says cell service is back after a widespread outage and some disrupted 911 calls

The company said it is "reaching out to all 7.6 million impacted customers and have reset their passcodes," via email or letter, and that it plans to communicate with both current and former account holders with compromised sensitive personal information. It said it plans to offer "complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services" to those affected by the breach.

External cybersecurity experts have been brought in to help investigate, it added.

NPR reached out to a few AT&T stores. The sales representatives in all cases said they were as yet unaware of the breach.

On its website, the telecommunications company encouraged customers to closely monitor their account activity and credit reports.

"Consumers impacted should prioritize changing passwords, monitor other accounts and consider freezing their credit with the three credit bureaus since social security numbers were exposed," Carmen Balber, executive director of the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, told NPR.

An industry rife with data leaks

AT&T has experienced multiple data breaches over the years.

In March 2023, for instance, the company notified 9 million wireless customers that their customer information had been accessed in a breach of a third-party marketing vendor.

In August 2021 — in an incident AT&T said is not connected to the latest breach — a hacking group claimed it was selling data relating to more than 70 million AT&T customers. At the time, AT&T disputed the source of the data. It was re-leaked online earlier this month. According to a Mar. 22 TechCrunch article , a new analysis of the leaked dataset points to the AT&T customer data being authentic. "Some AT&T customers have confirmed their leaked customer data is accurate," TechCrunch reported. "But AT&T still hasn't said how its customers' data spilled online."

AT&T is by no means the only U.S. telecommunications provider with a history of compromised customer data. The issue is rife across the industry. A 2023 data breach affected 37 million T-Mobile customers. Just last month, a data leak at Verizon impacted more than 63,000 people, the majority of them Verizon employees.

A 2023 report from cyber intelligence firm Cyble said that U.S. telecommunications companies are a lucrative target for hackers. The study attributed the majority of recent data breaches to third-party vendors. "These third-party breaches can lead to a larger scale supply-chain attacks and a greater number of impacted users and entities globally," the report said.

Government rules adapt

Meanwhile, last December, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) updated its 16-year-old data breach notification rules to ensure that telecommunications providers adequately safeguard sensitive customer information. According to a press release , the rules aim to "hold phone companies accountable for protecting sensitive customer information, while enabling customers to protect themselves in the event that their data is compromised."

"What makes no sense is leaving our policies stuck in the analog era," said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement regarding the changes. "Our phones now know so much about where we go and who we are, we need rules on the books that make sure carriers keep our information safe and cybersecure."

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