#6 Customer Journey Mapping
Highlighting aspects to be prioritized
I’ll start once again by mentioning that this is part of a series of articles looking back at my progress through the Professional Diploma in UX Design with the UX Design Institute. This is the second in the Analysis Phase. The last article was my thoughts on the Affinity Diagram Session.
This current article will focus on the progression from the range of structured and unstructured research data, filtered through and organised with the aid of the affinity session (and collaborator — thank you Hyungmin!), to the outcome presented in the created Customer Journey Map. This is a generalized journey map based on the customers/users of the competitors’ sites/apps. The FlyUx airline app is assumed to be a new-to-market airline, therefore we are relying on competitor analysis and expert UX design to create the ultimate experience for our customers!
In the Beginning
I started this project by researching various formatted customer journey maps through google images. The format I decided on that best suited my requirements was something similar to the above initial sketch, which evolved slightly into my final layout. As with most of these projects I continued to use Adobe XD to layout these. I have used photoshop and illustrator quite frequently over the past ten years or so, but I really like XD for speed and simplicity.
Why?
A customer journey map should aim to structure data and pinpoint aspects of the journey to be prioritized. This document will also outline the key steps throughout the booking process, from the thought of booking a flight right through to payment.
Structure
The heading above outlines the stages in booking and the high level steps throughout the booking experience. This is laid out as I expected it could be, though this will change later. It was not so important to have it exact, as more work is needed in order to really know the best place for something like baggage and seating selection. As you are probably aware, this varies from airline to airline. The earlier survey was a good reference point for some of these steps, as was the Usability test notes. In fact the Usability Notes formatting procedure basically laid out the general high level steps.
The stages from top left to right are:
PLANNING ,CHOOSING THE FLIGHT, EXTRAS ,SOCIAL ,SUMMARY
Contained within those stages, I included the steps (under):
Emotional levels
Next is the scale from emotional levels of happiness right down to frustration. On top of this graph scale are a series of quotes generally related to that step (above) in the booking process. These were some of the memorable quotes that stood out ore than others when Usability Testing and from Survey results.
The meat
The real hoard of data is below contained within the GOALS, BEHAVIOURS, CONTEXT, and PAIN POINTS sections.
Goals. The user has goals throughout each step of the booking process. These could be labelled as high level goals and immediate or micro-goals. In the beginning the customer has one high level goal; be it a vacation, business trip or some kind of family event. Then, even at say the Flight Selection step, the user’s goal might be to Choose the best flight from a list of relevant flights.
Behaviours. This section was a little tricky to get my head around at first. I was thinking — is it just actions the user makes? Well it is that and more. It’s how the user reacts or behaves at a certain point in the journey through the app or site, be it a positive or negative. It might also be the lack of that reaction or behaviour. Thinking out these detailed points proved really assistive in designing later on. The affinity diagram also helped in initially feeding these points into the journey map. Alone it was not enough to create such detail, but is effective for priority and as a starting point. I had printed all my research material so it was pretty convenient to go back through it to source some additional or connecting details.
Context. As you can see, a simple, but effective section in visualizing the area or background of the journey we are currently on.
Pain Points. This section definitely heavily relies on the post-it notes from the affinity diagram. There were so many areas to improve on; areas that caused frustration, annoyance, inconvenience.
I reckon each area above were equally important in rounding out the customer journey through the airline booking process. This document is definitely one for the wall (just under my son’s just-born bronze foot replica!). It’s a great point of reference for all coming tasks in the project. Keep it close by your side! As you can see below next to my desk…. This was preparation for the next step in creating a User Flow diagram. Connections, connections.
Until the User Flow.
