Websites: User Journey Mapping

1. Identify the user goal

Visitors will have landed on your website for a reason. That reason may be quite vague – perhaps they saw an image of their favourite comedian in one of your tweets and clicked the link. Or maybe a friend recommended they check you out.

But more often than not, people are coming to your website for a specific reason. And the key goals they want to achieve will often coincide with your organisational goals – e.g. they want to join your mailing list, become a member, or buy tickets.

To keep things simple, for this exercise you should focus on one – specific goal at a time, starting with what's most important to you as an organisation.

2. Understand your audience

Having a good understanding your audience's needs will help you to create a more empathic experience, by writing more relevant, targeted messages.

Use our User Persona template to build a picture of a specific user. (Even something quite basic and light-touch will help you to make decisions in the next stages ...)

3. Create a Process Flow

Here's where you map-out all the different views (or pages) a user will go through – from landing on your website to achieving their goal.

This might be as simple as 1-2 views, but could be as much as half a dozen. There shouldn't be more than 6 views. At that point the journey becomes considerably harder to manage for both you and the user.

• Start with how a user is most likely going to land on your site. Is it from a search engine, an email or social media?
• List the content requirements at each point of the flow. Balance giving enough information to progress to the next view with avoiding overwhelming them. It can be tempting to provide lots of additional information covering many different scenarios – but this can be confusing and distracting. Instead, make use of links to divert users who have specific requirements.
• Note down what a user may be feeling at each point. Are they impatient? Excited? Engaged or underwhelmed? Considering this can help you to empathise, and adjust content accordingly.
• Finally, include the primary call-to-action at each point in the jourey. What will help the user take the next step? Focus on using clear, unambiguous language.

4. Create your content

At this point, you should have enough information to make the content creation bit easy (or easier) and fun.

Flesh-out the requirements from the Process Flow into engaging content. Reference your User Personas to ensure you are meeting the expectations of your audience.

Don't forget, check-in with their motivations, attitudes and feelings at each point. Does your copy need be emotive at certain points, and more functional in others?

Much of the journey is likely to rely on copy (i.e. words), but don't forget about images, videos and graphics. Visuals can play a useful role in helping to engage users – particularly with things like Donation asks.

5. Test and Review

Don't forget to check your copy with apps like Grammarly or Hemingway. The average reading age of adults in the UK is 9 years. So, review, edit and simplify messaging – especially at crucial points.

Once your content is ready, run-through the journey with a small group of test users. Colleagues and friends can be helpful but you can't beat testing with real users. You can do this in person or remotely, with a user sharing their screen over Zoom, Google Meet, etc.

The test itself is simple. Ask them to undertake the goal – from the start of your journey – and observe them. If possible, ask them to narrate as they go. This will help you to identify pain points, assumptions you've made, and any confusing language or terminology.

6. Measure

With transactional goals such as membership sign-ups and ticket bookings, it should be possible to measure any changes through Analytics. For more hard-to-measure goals, it can be useful to run (very) short user surveys – e.g. Did you find what you were looking for today? – to receive live feedback from real users.