What is journey driven design?
Journey driven design is an approach to design that takes into account the user’s journey towards whatever outcome they wish to achieve for visiting your website or using your app.
If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: Why is journey driven design important?
Journey driven design is important because it helps your user accomplish whatever goals they have for using your website or app more quickly and easily. This makes your website or app a joy to use, which, in turn, makes it easier for you to not only build a loyal user base but also get these users talking about your website or app to their family and friends.
Of course, the larger your active user base is, the easier it is for you to make money off your website or app. It does not matter if you are selling products and services, doing affiliate marketing, offering lessons, or simply earning from digital ads, the more people you can sell to, the more money you can make.
Think about it. If you had a million active users (or website visitors), even if you could only sell to 1% of them, that is already 10,000 people. If you had a $20 offer, that translates to an easy $200,000.
Question #2: What are the advantages of it?
The biggest advantages of journey driven design are:
- It improves your website’s or app’s usability
- It keeps your users happy and eager to come back for more
- It saves you time and money
- It helps keep you and your team focused on the user’s needs, challenges, and goals
Let us go over each one in more detail:
First, as we have seen earlier, by taking into account what the user hopes to accomplish by using your website or app, you are able to design a user experience that helps them do just that, making your website or app a real joy to use—which brings us to the next point, which we have also talked about in the previous section: it keeps your users happy.
Of course, when your customers are happy, they not only keep coming back for more but also talk about your brand to their family and friends. This, in turn, makes it easier for you to grow not only your brand but for your website’s or app’s user base too, which puts you in a better position to make more money.
The third advantage of journey driven design is that it eliminates the need for blind experimentation and costly tweaks along the way. You and your team already have an idea of what the user journey would look like right from the get-go.
The fourth and final advantage of journey driven design is that it keeps the focus on the user, minimising the risk of you and your team falling into the trap of making your entire website or app all about how awesome your brand is and alienating your users.
Question #3: What are the steps in doing this design?
The basic steps in journey driven design are as follows:
- Define your target users
- Identify their main pain points
- Design the journey and wireframes
- Do user testing
- Refine
- Launch
Let us take a closer look at each one:
The first step in journey driven design is to identify your target users by defining user personas. Be as detailed as you possibly can. Do it as if you are creating a fictional character for a book or movie. The more you know about your target users, the easier it would be for you to design the right journey for them.
The second step is to figure out what your target users’ main pain points are. The goal of your app or website should be to help your target users make these pain points go away as quickly and easily as possible—which brings us to the third step: designing the journey and wireframes.
Again, the goal is to help the user to get from where they are to where they want to be as quickly and easily as possible. This means eliminating all unnecessary distractions and steps and making features and content they might find helpful easily accessible.
The fourth step is to do user testing. The goal is to find out if the journey and wireframes you design has successfully accomplished the goal of the previous step.
The fifth step is to refine (and keep refining) until you and your target users achieve the desired results.
Finally, once everything is in order, it is time to launch your website or app.