A user journey map is a visualization of a user’s interaction with a product. Having a clear user journey map in place helps UX designers and other key members of the team see a product from a user’s perspective.
Traditionally, the user journey map details all of the different touchpoints between a user and a product. Many use a timeline approach, which makes it easier to see how users interact with a product in a step-by-step process.
Why is it important? Get this: Customer journey maps are known to help businesses increase their ROI by up to 22% if done correctly.
So, how can you create a user journey map that you and other team members can use to visualize the user’s interaction within your product?
Let's begin by highlighting the significance of user journey mapping within the context of SaaS companies.
Why is User Journey Mapping Important?
Building a user journey map is a must for large SaaS companies and startups. It involves mapping out all the steps a user takes to become a paying customer. This process is especially important in product-led growth (PLG), where understanding the user journey can help identify bottlenecks, improve user experience, and drive growth.
The process involves mapping out all the steps a user takes to become a paying customer that completes your sales cycle.
One crucial aspect of the user journey map is understanding where users come from.
Work backward from the end of the customer cycle to the beginning. Ask yourself:
- Where do users come from?
- What do they do?
- What’s the least amount of steps to get there?
Some tools to help answer the customer cycle questions above include Lucidchart, Kissmetrics, and Mixpanel.
This information helps you identify the different channels and sources that drive traffic to your SaaS product. By analyzing the origin of your users, you can optimize your SaaS marketing efforts and focus on the channels that bring in the most qualified leads.
Remember, creating a user journey map is an ongoing process. As your SaaS product evolves and your user base grows, it's essential to regularly update and refine your user journey map to ensure it accurately reflects the user experience and aligns with your business goals.
5 Elements of a User Journey Map
Before you dive into creating a user journey map, there's a series of tasks to tackle. The first and foremost step involves pinpointing the essential elements that your map will encompass. While this can vary from company to company and map to map, there are five general elements that always come into play.
1. The Buying Process
This is the path that you intend your customer to take to reach a specific goal, such as making a purchase. Start with an overview of the typical buying process stages to lay out an easy-to-follow, horizontal map.
2. User Actions
This element details what a buyer does during every step of the buying process. Knowing this allows you to manage emotions, pain points, and solutions more effectively.Â
Do buyers typically speak with co-workers before making a purchase? How about friends and/or family? From there, they may read online reviews, request a demo, and make a purchase on your website.Â
Know the actions that a buyer will take to achieve the goal.
3. Emotions
Add potential customer emotions — such as relief, anxiousness, or satisfaction — to your user journey map. Adding these emotional triggers allows you to focus on the positive and move customers away from negative thoughts.
You may find that your long, tedious buying process results in boredom, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. Or perhaps you learn that your ultra-fast process receives an overwhelmingly positive response.
The emotions that occur during the buyer journey can have a long-term effect on your brand, either negative or positive.
4. Pain Points
What’s the pain point that’s causing a negative emotion such as anxiousness or fear? Adding a pain point element to your map helps you pinpoint when it’s happening and the reason why.
5. Solutions
This is when you outline potential ways to improve the buying process. Your focus should be on reducing pain points and helping buyers maintain a positive mood.
Why Your User Journey Should be Optimized for Value
The first mindset or ‘big picture’ approach you need to embrace is the fact that you need to make sure that people get value out of your product.
Identifying the value of your product can be a little tricky if you’re only focused on the actual product itself. Here’s an example of what I mean by this:
Let’s say that you’re selling Slack. Yes, you’re technically selling a messaging application, but that’s not why people choose to download and use Slack. People use Slack to communicate with teams fast and get projects done more efficiently. So, you’re not selling a messaging app, you’re actually selling a way for teams to effectively communicate with each other.
When optimizing for value, the most efficient funnel isn't necessarily the best.
Instead, focus on getting users to your product’s "Aha!" moment as quickly as possible. Keep the final outcome of your product at the forefront of your mind when building a user journey map.
When thinking of how you can optimize your user funnel for value, consider what users get from your product.
What does your product enable people to do?
Your answer to this question is the value that your product provides. To help you answer this question, consider how your product makes people’s lives easier.
What pain point does your product help solve?
Now that you know your product's value, you must devise a way to optimize for that value.
4-Steps to Optimize Your User Journey
There are four key steps to help optimize your user journey and conversion funnel:
1. Perform a Gut Analysis
The first step is the initial gut analysis of your conversion funnel (user journey map). This involves considering whether you are solving the right job with your product.
At first, marketers will want to focus on the functional job of a product. However, you also need to address and communicate the emotional and social job that your product does.
- Functional Job: The core tasks that customers want to get done
- Emotional Job: How customers want to feel (or avoid feeling) as a result of executing the core functional job.
- Social Job: How customers want to be perceived by others.
Hick’s Law and Paradox of Choice
Why is this relevant to your product and the user journey map?
Well, Hick’s Law states that the more choices you give someone, the longer it takes for that person to make a decision. In other words, decision time increases with every additional choice.
Not only that, but the Paradox of Choice reveals that the more choices someone is given, the less likely they are to choose anything.
With this in mind, ask yourself about the choices you give to users. Are there too many choices? Are you making the decision process more difficult than it has to be?
Directional cues are another important matter to think about. Things like arrows, lines, movement, and so on, can be super powerful. But you need to make sure your directional cues effectively direct attention to the goal.
Here’s a great example of how Basecamp uses directional cues to direct the viewers’ attention to key features.
All of your directional cues and elements in the onboarding phase must work together to achieve the same goal. This includes everything from your headlines to your imagery, videos, copy, social proof, CTA, and the overall onboarding experience.
Gut Analysis Checklist
Here’s a gut analysis checklist for both before and after signup:
| Gut Analysis: Before Sign Up | Gut Analysis: After Sign Up |
|---|---|
| - The first-run experience leads to a specific, relevant, meaningful "quick win" - The workflow for the first-run experience is as streamlined as humanly possible - Users' time spent floating in "limbo" states is managed & limited - Make it fun like Slack. If coach marks & tooltip tours are used at all, they're primarily to spur activity, not point at buttons - Blank states and preloaded content are self-descriptive and helpful - Social and directional cues are provided to indicate highly-valued behaviors - Key early-use activities are explicitly called out, in the form of to-do lists or completion meters - Key tasks are reciprocated with a success state such as Mailchimp's high-five - People are incentivized to form social bonds with others, and thus become more accountable for ongoing use - Lifecycle emails are positioned to act as catalysts driving return visits | - The first-run experience leads to a specific, relevant, meaningful "quick win" - The workflow for the first-run experience is as streamlined as humanly possible - Users' time spent floating in "limbo" states is managed & limited - Make it fun like Slack. If coach marks & tooltip tours are used at all, they're primarily to spur activity, not point at buttons - Blank states and preloaded content are self-descriptive and helpful - Social and directional cues are provided to indicate highly-valued behaviors - Key early use activities are explicitly called out, in the form of to-do lists or completion meters - Key tasks are reciprocated with a success state such as Mailchimp's high-five - People are incentivized to form social bonds with others, and thus become more accountable for ongoing use - Lifecycle emails are positioned to act as catalysts driving return visits |
Even with all of this knowledge and insight, some product creators still make mistakes.
Most Common Mistakes When Doing Gut Analysis
Here are the five most common mistakes – take a look at them and try your best to avoid them!
- Not directing users to the product and relying on activation emails.
- Having a free trial page that takes more than three seconds to load.
- Not showing onboarding progress.
- Not making it easy to experience a quick win or "Aha!" moment within the product.
- Not using the "focus mode."
2. Map the User Journey
The user journey map shows how users get from point A to B.
If you offer a free trial of your product, customers will be able to experience the value of your product and, hopefully, sign-up to become a paying customer. Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures puts it perfectly:
There are many ways to set up a user journey map such as using Trello or another mapping tool to create a storyboard of the user journey (see samples below).
The easiest way to visualize your user journey map is by thinking like a customer and going through the entire experience yourself.
Here are a few of my top tips for building a user journey map:
- Record your screen going through your product experience using a tool like Loom.
- Watch the recording of yourself and of your users using a tool like Fullstory.
- Write out every step someone has to take for EVERY marketing channel.
- Identify the macro and microelements.
- Put everything in a tool such as Lucidcharts or Trello to visualize your user journey for each marketing channel.
3. Perform a Quantitative Funnel Analysis
When users sign-up to use your product, it’s exciting. It’s good news when a user decides to commit to your product but what happens when they suddenly stop using it?
The best way to improve retention is by figuring out exactly where users are dropping off in the user journey and why.
One of the biggest mistakes people make at this stage is focusing too much on microelements along the user journey map. For example, the registration step for many products involves microelements such as signing up with an email address, confirming email, filling out personal details, and so on.
Whilst microelements are important, you should try to group these elements (see an example of this below using Canva). Doing so will help make the entire process easier to understand and help you to find any bottlenecks in your funnel.
4. Harness Motivation
Do you ever sign up for a new online product and then never end up using it?
This is so common, and the main reason why is that humans are easily distracted. There’s always something else demanding our attention, so what can you do to make sure users actually use your product?
The answer is to instill motivation in the user to use the product.
Here are some effective ways to create motivation for your product:
- Checklists
- Percentages
- Progress bars
- High-fives
- Reaffirm your product's Value Proposition
- Showcase the people behind the product
- The promised land
- Personalization
- Add a sense of humor
Remember, value doesn’t come from our product. Value comes from what our product enables people to do!
Start Mapping Your User Journey for SaaS Growth
I hope this post has helped you get a clearer idea of how to build a user journey map so that more people can experience the value of your product. In summary, there are two overarching points to keep in mind:
- Understand the five elements of a user journey map and how they pertain to your product.
- Optimize your user journey and conversion funnel.
Does this sound like an approach that will work in your favor? If so, it’s time to learn more about product-led strategies and the impact they can have on your company as a whole. Properly mapping your user journey opens the door to greater success.
To continue on your journey of building your product-led business, learn all the components of the ProductLed Method.
Alternatively, if you’d like to work with a coach to implement these components into your business, be sure to check out ProductLed Academy.
It’s our intensive coaching program where we’ll help you build a strong foundation for product-led growth so that you can scale faster and with more control.
What’s unique about this program is we’ll work with you and your team to implement the proven ProductLed Method so that you can scale faster with less stress.
We’ll go through everything we went through today with your team to make sure that everyone is aligned on who your ideal user is for your team.
