Enhancing Design with Detailed User Journey and User Flow Insight
User Journey and User Flow focus on how our user will accomplish their goal, providing us insight in to where we can improvement their experience.
We use each tool during the ideation and evaluation stage of a project, focusing on a set user goal to uncover where we can improve our product or service at a macro and micro level.
What is a User Journey
When we look at a User Journey we are looking at a top level experience, one which will occur over a long period of time. For example, when we want to rent a car we might have to research each option, call each company for additional information, fill out an online form for the vehicle, receive a reminder from the company, visit the company to collect the vehicle, fill out a pick-up form and finally complete a follow up call with the company after we return it. When looking at a journey like this, it could take place over a day, week or month.
What is a User Flow
When we look at a User Flow, we look at set of steps a user takes to complete a specific task within a product or service, we can often find a flow from within our journey, looking at a specific step or action. For example, we might set a goal to amend a vehicle booking for a rental car. We want these goals to be achieved within minutes or hours at most and with a limited set of interactions.
How we capture insight
When we look at a User Journey, we want to consider each paint point, and opportunity the user will experience, in addition to this we want to track their emotion during each step and their thought process. We can utilise these insights to derive key areas of improvement within our product or service.
Looking at a User Flow, we want to conduct a usability test, that way we can get direct insight from each user, in addition to this we can also utilise data from heatmaps and user sessions to track where our user is struggling within a journey.
Utilising both User Journey and User Flow
We can combine both tools together to provide a micro and macro look at our experience, utilising the User Flow as a deep-dive into a given stage of our User Journey.
