A well-designed journey map offers valuable insights into customer needs. However, to use this tool effectively, you need a clear customer journey map research strategy.
Journey mapping is a method for making user interactions and needs easier to understand. However, workshop insights often fall short, leaving gaps in the map. Using customer journey map research techniques, you can close these gaps with precision.
Thorough research provides both orientation and validation for the user journey. Adopting these methods enables more informed decisions that lead to sustainable, long-term impact.
Effective user journey research projects depend on a well thought-out and structured approach. With these best practices, your project is set for success:
Set clear objectives
Transform unclear assumptions into clear, focused research objectives. For each objective, develop a single hypothesis to keep results targeted and actionable. Maintaining a specific focus for each hypothesis helps to avoid confusion and information overload, as highlighted in Assumption Mapping. By testing assumptions – not ideas – you ensure the research remains unbiased and grounded in reality.
Understand your target audience
Your journey map should be a true reflection of your audience. Always keep in mind who you’re creating the map for. Tools like empathy maps can uncover valuable insights. Beyond usability, be sure to test desirability to gauge how attractive and appealing your product or service is to users.
Use resources wisely
Avoid duplicating work by thoroughly reviewing existing data sources. Ensure the right people take part in the workshop, and include key stakeholders in the process afterward.
Triangulate data sources
Combine multiple data sources, such as surveys, interviews, and workshops. This approach provides a well-rounded perspective, enhancing both the reliability and the value of your journey map.
Each of these measures deepens your understanding of the customer journey and enhances the journey map with actionable, value-driven insights.
A comprehensive customer journey framework relies on the strategic use of both qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Often, it becomes evident that people’s actions differ from what they express. Quantitative data from sources where users are unaware they’re being observed – like digital tracking methods – provides particularly valuable insights. This data offers an unfiltered view of actual behavior and is often more revealing than qualitative findings at this stage.
In the field of customer journey mapping research, every method has unique strengths for uncovering deep insights into user needs, expectations, and experiences. Below, we outline the key approaches and their specific benefits in journey mapping.
Customer interviews
Customer interviews deliver detailed, qualitative insights that numbers or digital tools can’t capture. In these one-on-one sessions, either in person or via video, customers share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
These conversations uncover hidden needs and friction points while often revealing unexpected insights. The open-ended format allows flexibility, creating opportunities for innovative solutions.
Website analyses
Web analytics tools are indispensable for data-based recording of user behavior. They provide concrete metrics like traffic sources, bounce rates, and session durations, which are essential for understanding the digital aspects of the customer journey.
Tools like Google Analytics enable you to identify key touchpoints on your website and pinpoint where potential customers drop off or encounter obstacles. These metrics provide a solid foundation for comparing SEO KPIs and UX-KPIs with actual user behavior.
Quantitative surveys
Quantitative surveys are an effective journey map research method for obtaining a statistically valid overview of the user journey. They capture responses to specific questions, often in yes/no or multiple-choice formats. One of the key advantages of this method is that the results are easy to compare, offering clear and actionable trends.
The KANO model can be particularly useful for categorizing survey results into basic, performance, and excitement requirements. This approach provides well-grounded insights, enabling you to tailor your offerings to meet customer needs more effectively.
Customer satisfaction ratings
Customer satisfaction ratings are an important indicator of how well certain touchpoints work from the user's perspective. These ratings often use a scale to identify which elements are well-received and where friction points arise.
Analyzing satisfaction scores throughout the journey highlights where positive experiences dominate and where improvements are needed. This evaluation provides a solid foundation for prioritizing optimization efforts.
Task analysis
Task analysis involves examining the individual steps required to complete a specific task. This method is especially valuable for designers and developers, as it helps them understand the complexity and information flows within the current system and identify potential obstacles.
It is particularly useful during the validation phase to ensure the journey map stays realistic and produces tangible, actionable results.
Combining orientation and validation methods is critical to building an effective customer journey framework. The orientation phase focuses on defining clear research objectives based on assumptions identified through Assumptions Mapping. This provides a solid foundation for understanding user behavior and forming initial hypotheses.
“Aim to be proven wrong. And you’ll be far more right in the long run.“
Zitat von Erika Hall, Director of Strategy at Mule
A key tip is: "Test assumptions. Don't test ideas." During the orientation phase, focusing on testing assumptions ensures the research remains unbiased and grounded.
Equally important: "Test desirability, not just usability." Evaluating how appealing an offer is complements usability testing and provides a more complete understanding of the user's perspective.
Customer interviews and qualitative analyses provide the necessary depth during the early phase. The validation phase builds on this by confirming hypotheses with qualitative data and continuously refining them. This is where usability test methods come into play, allowing you to consistently evaluate and enhance the user experience while the product is already in use.
With this two-phase approach, we at Moccu ensure that every journey map is not only well-founded from the start but also delivers long-term value for your business.
Our expertise in UX/UI design helps you choose the right methods and fill every phase of the customer journey with meaningful insights. This results in products and services that align with your customers’ expectations and needs, driving measurable success.
Once data has been gathered, additional tools and models can help you refine your insights and deepen your understanding of users. These methods complement journey map research by providing more targeted analysis and actionable results:
Highlights how the product or service meets user needs and desires, while also identifying areas where concrete value is created.
Visualizes what users think, feel, say, and do – fostering an empathetic, user-centric approach to designing the journey.
These fictional representations of target groups illustrate their specific needs, enabling tailored design decisions that align with user expectations.
Unlike a journey map, which outlines the entire user journey, user flow focuses on the specific steps users take within a system to achieve a goal.
Service blueprints go beyond the user perspective to connect frontstage interactions (visible touchpoints) with backstage processes (invisible operations), offering a comprehensive view to enhance the user experience.
Using these models alongside your customer journey map research ensures a comprehensive understanding of the journey and enhances your ability to deliver meaningful, user-centered improvements.
Qualitative methods such as customer interviews and empathy mapping offer deeper insights, while quantitative approaches such as web analytics and satisfaction surveys provide objective data. Together, they create a detailed and data-based journey map.
Qualitative methods capture detailed individual experiences, while quantitative methods make patterns and trends visible. The combination of both approaches enables a journey map that combines personal insights and statistical relevance.
We recommend the following approach based on our experience: Segment target groups, combine data sources for robust insights, update the journey map regularly and use visual models. This will keep your journey map precise, up-to-date and comprehensible for the entire team.
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