Customer Journey Map vs User Persona (Part 1)
You know, traditionally, the moment you begin to build a product, one of the first things you do is build a user persona for your intended market. While this is good, it’s not so great, as it fails to capture the fluid nature of the customer’s anxiety (pain points), motivations, and goals. A User Persona is static, in that it only captures in time, the user’s wants, in essence, we’d say that it’s a snapshot in time of the user. A user’s process towards fulfilling a need with the product, changes over time, as it’s a journey. And so, requires a User Journey Map. A persona doesn’t reflect the journey the user goes through up until conversion. A User Journey Map, help us communicate better to our team, what and who you’re building for and how you should build. The feelings (concerns, questions, etc.) of the customer change at every point in time of the journey, and a user journey map captures that better than a user persona would.
As a customer interacts with a product, several touchpoints are established until the point of purchase. A User Journey Map is a visualization of that user’s journey to purchase. A customer journey map consists of two components. First, the step in the journey is the information you want to gather about the user on the step. A User Journey Map is not supposed to be 100% accurate, it simply enables you to build better products, as you understand better how your customer is interacting with your organization. This will help you carry out better experiments to optimize your processes.
But how exactly do you build a user journey map?
When building a user journey map, there are key people you want to have in the room to contribute. First, are some users; if you can’t have them, validate your map afterward with them, to give you feedback, and make sure you’ve been building the right thing. Next are the people you’re building the product with. It’s important that you have their buy-in, as you’re not building alone, and they might have other insight into this matter as you. Senior management within the organization is another group of people you want in on your team. The less you interact with the customer, the farther you’re from the customer’s reality, and having a senior management person in, brings the customer closer to them; they get to understand the processes and journey of the customer towards conversion.
As part of my course requirement, I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on Growth Marketing, and hopefully much after that. But in the meantime, these lessons have been made possible by the good people at CXL Institute
