User journey

A user journey is the experiences a person has when interacting with something, typically software. This idea is generally used by those involved with user experience design, web design, user-centered design, or anyone else focusing on how users interact with software experiences. It is often used as a shorthand for the overall user experience and set of actions that one can take in software or other virtual experiences.

User journeys describe at a high level of detail exactly what steps different users take to complete a specific task within a system, application, or website. This technique shows the current (as-is) user workflow, and reveals areas of improvement for the to-be workflow. When documented, this is often referred to as a User Journey Map.

User journeys are focused on the user and what they see and what they do, in comparison to the related web design term click path which is just a plain list of the text URLs that are hit when a user follows a particular Journey.

The customer journey is divided into four phases which refer to the AIDA model.

The customer journey can be used in marketing and communication, especially in digital channels, to minimize wastage and make communication more efficient (in technical jargon: conversion rate optimization).

The term "Customer Journey" is also increasingly being used in classic sales channels. In a retail store, for example, there are opportunities to present the product range to the customer so that he can touch it, to advise him personally, to enable a fast, relatively secure and, in the case of cash, anonymous payment process, to hand over the goods immediately after the sale and to offer him a friendly farewell. The stationary trade is striving to use these unique selling propositions in comparison to the mail order business in order to maintain market shares and is investigating how the customer journey can be improved even further to this end. Part of these considerations are also questions of how the possibilities of the Internet can be used for stationary trade. "Click and Collect", i.e. picking up goods ordered via the Internet in the store, or vice versa shipping selected items home from the store, and other mixed forms of the distribution channels "online" and "offline", which are summarized under the generic term "Omni Channel", play an important role in this context.

The Customer Journey is particularly interesting in online marketing or digital channels, as here the behavior of the consumers can be precisely mapped with the help of tracking technologies. The technology of customer journey analysis provides the concrete benefit of uncovering all contact points created by advertising. With the insights gained from this, it is possible to uncover causal relationships between channels and contact points and to derive optimization potential. Related effects can occur in the form of both synergy and cannibalization effects.

With the findings of a customer journey analysis, it should also be clarified whether the last contact point alone was decisive for the purchase of a product or whether this was the result of an interaction or a certain sequence of several contacts and channels. This is possible because the Customer Journey not only records the last contact point, but the analysis covers all contact points in the medium Internet. Furthermore, it is also important what effect the channels have on each other or whether they are dependent on each other. Research on the customer journey provides new insights into the behavior and preferences of the target group with regard to their use of and reactions to advertising on the Internet. The new knowledge helps advertising companies and agencies to better allocate media budgets to the individual channels and to improve the efficiency of all activities of a company in online marketing.