Customer Experience Journey Maps - A New Buzzword for an Old UX Practice?

I have a confession to make - when my workplace started to go bananas for customer journey mapping, I didn’t see much of a difference between what a journey map offers and what is provided through traditional UX research techniques. To me, customer experience journey maps were just a new buzzword for an old thing. 

In one respect, that statement is entirely true. A good customer experience journey map begins with a persona, and includes the user’s flow. The persona and customer journey map are founded in first-person customer research - the hallmark of good UX research, not on the business’s assumptions or generic marketing demographics. Usually this information is gathered from one-on-one interviews with customers, observing the customer using the product or service in the wild, surveys, message board and social media posts, and digging into customer feedback channels and analytics.

From there, the journey map deviates from the typical UX research deliverables. Instead, it is a representation of this persona’s interaction with the product or company from end to end - the customer’s initial need for a solution, their discovery of the product or service, deciding to purchase the product/service, and what it is like to be a customer or owner for the life of the purchase. Often UX user flows assume one thing - the customer is already a user. It ignores the period before adoption where a lot of decisions are made, and it often doesn’t address all the phases of a user’s relationship with the company. 

Another aspect of a customer journey that is lacking from traditional UX documentation is that the customer’s emotional journey is illustrated with equal weight alongside the customer’s interactions with the product. What is easy or delightful and frustrating or confusing during the process is called out boldly in a customer journey map. In addition, the product’s marketing efforts and customer touch points are overlaid with the same clarity. It’s a complete snapshot of the journey, whereas a user flow is just a piece.

The biggest difference, though, is that a customer journey map and persona are agnostic of the technical solution. It’s a customer need-finding tool that identifies opportunities for new products, services, or features. In 12 years of working in user experience, UX research generally begins once the product or service offering has already been identified - the client wants a new website, the company needs a tool to do the following, etc. User experience research sets out to create useful and satisfying designs within the framework of a solution, whereas customer experience research sets out to determine what will be a useful or satisfying solution - and therein lies the value.

Liminal Thinking for More Empathetic Customer Research

I recently finished reading Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray and I can’t stop telling people about it. None of the descriptions of this book do it justice (and neither will mine), but it’s about how people form beliefs, what happens to human interactions as a result of beliefs, and how to change beliefs (or your understanding of people’s beliefs). Like I said, this book defies description. But, it’s a quick read, so I strongly suggest you do. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking about why customer research is often flawed. If you’re a researcher on a project - maybe making personas or journey maps about an audience’s experience - you’ve already done a lot of initial research, maybe talked to the client and heard their opinions, formed your own judgments, made some assumptions, and already thought of a few solutions. It’s only natural. But these are also the thoughts that will color your research, and perhaps skew it toward your preconceived notions. It is easy to interview people, write surveys, and run focus groups that are unwittingly structured to validate your own assumptions.

How do you avoid skewing your own research? Gray offers some liminal thinking practices as a solution, and I’ve identified three that I think are the most helpful. 

Assume That You Are Not Objective

Gray shares a great anecdote about a boss who shoots the messenger when he hears bad news. Because the boss reacts poorly, his employees stop telling him things. After a while, the boss feels out of the loop and wants to find a way to change it. What the boss doesn’t realize is that his reactions caused this cycle - he needs to change his behavior to get his employees’ behaviors to change.

Now, imagine that you are a UX researcher and you’ve worked on a product for years. You know why things work a certain way. While you’re researching, users keep bringing up issues, but because you’re so close to the product you dismiss what they’re saying because it “had to be that way” or it’s “not in the budget.” Meanwhile, an outsider might find these insights to be the most valuable part of the research - possibly the key to designing a better product.

If you’re part of the system, you need to approach things like an outsider and assume that you are not objective. 

Empty Your Cup 

Emptying your cup is one way to get an outsider perspective. This means that you have to consciously suspend your judgment. Let go of any knowledge you have on the subject and forget your theories, preconceived notions, and assumptions in order to let other people’s thoughts and beliefs in. This is hard, but it is possible! 

How do I do this? While I’m in a research mode, I do not let myself dwell on theories or solutions. When they inevitably come to mind, I control them by writing them down in my notebook so that I’ll have them for later. Then I block the thought out (knowing I have it noted) and continue researching. 

For example, I was working on a project where I was interviewing about a dozen people who were considering an optional medical procedure. At the start of my interviews, it seemed like health insurance coverage was an enormous blocker. I jotted a solution in my notebook that said “make it easier to check insurance - maybe an online tool?” By the time I had talked to everyone on my list, I had learned that determining insurance coverage was a simple phone call that many people easily made. Those who weren’t calling the insurance company weren’t ready to commit to saying yes or no to the procedure, so they procrastinated while they thought more about it. It was a different problem (and a different solution) than the one I had identified earlier. 

If I had clung to my early idea, I could’ve used my interviews to validate the idea. I bet if I asked everyone I talked to, they all would have liked an easy online insurance coverage checker. But my insurance-checker idea probably would not have changed minds or solved the bigger issue of fear and uncertainty around the procedure itself. 

Triangulate and Validate

The story I just told also brings up the practice of triangulating and validating. With this, Gray encourages people to not just assume that they know what’s going on. Talk to as many people as you can, and to as many different types of people as possible. For my project, I talked to the client, to the medical office staff, and to people who were considering the procedure, in the process of having the procedure, and those who had recovered from the procedure. I read message boards and Reddit strings, online health information, and more. I tried to examine the research through a lot of different lenses so I that I could gain deeper insights. 

As difficult as it is, for the best customer insights you have to let go of your own theories and stay flexible about the outcome. If you manage to do this - even just a little bit - you’ll understand your subject more, and you’ll be able to make an empathetic connection with your customers.

Market Research Tools: Using Google Forms for Surveys & Screeners

Whether I’m recruiting usability test participants or planning customer research, one of my go-to survey tools is Google Forms. I often find myself turning to online survey tools for things like participant screeners for usability testing or user interviews, and I also use it to perform market research and customer surveys. Plus, Google Forms is free, which matters a lot when your client has a small budget or doesn’t need the full capabilities of a paid survey tool. 

Though there are a lot of freemium and free survey tools out there, Google Forms offers a handful of valuable features, and I know that the service is reliable - it’s not a start-up that is going to be shuttered or sold to someone else a month from now. At the risk of sounding too much like an informercial, here’s a list of the many reasons why I like using Google Forms to conduct online surveys. 

Advantages to Using Google Forms for Surveys

• First and foremost, you’re able to build robust surveys with conditional logic. Really, as much logic as you need. Though the editor portion of the form tool can get unwieldy, you’re able to make a friendlier survey experience for your audience with low effort and at no cost. 
• You can collect a lot of survey responses. At the time of this writing, you can collect 400,000 responses if you import to a spreadsheet, and unlimited responses if you only use the tool’s built-in reporting.
• Your data is portable. You can download the responses into a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file so you can import and analyze the results in whatever stats tool you’re comfortable with. Also, you can easily save a copy of the raw survey data outside of the tool for posterity. 
• Lastly, Google Forms can be be customized with an image. Adding an image automatically changes the color scheme to match. So, the survey can match your brand if you need it to, which makes the survey feel more credible (and removes some of that “cheap” Google Form aesthetic).

With Google Forms, cost is never a barrier to reaching out to your users or your customers - you will always have a free, highly capable tool to help you collect information and gain insights from your audience. 

User Interviews: Bias and How to Reduce It

Imagine the following scenario. You’re a UX or CX researcher, and you’re working on a website redesign. You’ve had some preliminary meetings with your client and you’ve done a little of your own research about the marketplace. Based on what you know so far, you have a few ideas that you think would be great for the new website. You’ve set up a half-dozen interviews with your client’s customers to understand their needs, and during the interview, you bring up one of your ideas to solicit their feedback. 

Interviewer: “Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to [XYZ] online?” 
Interviewee: “I never thought of that before. I guess so…sure!” 
Interviewer: “It would be quicker and more efficient…”

Do you believe the interviewee really wants this feature? 

If you answered yes, perhaps you shouldn’t have. When you’re conducting user interviews for research, every question that you ask and every topic that you introduce has the potential to skew your results. There are several types of bias that may influence the interviewee’s response to this type of questioning. 

Politeness and Halo Effect

Often, people will be polite in their answers to spare your feelings, to be friendly, or to build a rapport. There’s also a chance that your interview subject doesn’t want to make waves in his organization, or maybe she or he fears that a negative response will get back to a boss or an important contact. 

Alternately, if you’re conducting interviews and you’ve been introduced as an expert in the field, your interview participants may think you have special insight, and your position might cast a positive glow over all of your suggestions, whether they are good ideas or not. This is called "halo effect." 

Tips for remediating politeness and the halo effect: 

• Downplay your level of expertise and your own investment in the project. “I’m just the researcher…”  
• Tell them you’re at an early stage in your research, even when you’re not. 
• Say that negative feedback is encouraged, and is often more helpful than positive feedback. 

Query Effect

The Nielsen Norman Group cautions researchers to be aware of the query effect. They claim that when you ask someone for their opinion, that person will come up with an opinion, even if it is unimportant to them or is about something they have very little information about. 

Tips for reducing query effect: 

• Ask followup questions that dig deeper into their need and prompt for specifics. For example, ask if they had the proposed feature for 5 days, how many times would they use it based on their current workload? How much time might a feature like this save for them personally? Try a technique like asking why. 
• Even better, don’t ask if they want a certain feature. Inquire about their current experience and whether or not they have any suggestions for improvement. They might suggest the feature. If possible, observe them doing whatever process it is that you’d like to replace or improve. 

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman proposed a theory called What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). Kahneman suggests that your mind is hard-wired to tell a story based on the information you already know and to draw a conclusion from it, forgoing additional research. In the scenario above, the interviewer's findings from her preliminary research made her instinctively identify problems and formulate solutions. This is completely natural, but it can stop you from gathering more information and possibly finding a more appropriate solution. 

When conducting need-finding interviews with users or customers, your primary goal is to deepen your knowledge and to find out what you don’t know. User interviews should not be used to gain confirmation or sign-off for your ideas.

Tips for reducing the influence of WYSIATI: 

• Be open to new information. Although you will absolutely come to the interview with assumptions and solutions, don’t share them with the participant. Pretend that you are a complete novice. Avoid steering the conversation too much in one direction or inadvertently selling the participant on your idea.
• Ask questions like “is there anything else that might be useful to us as we research XYZ?”

When in doubt, it’s always best to keep solutions out of need-finding interviews, and instead focus on gathering as much information as possible about the problem. Save coming up with ideas and recommendations for after you’ve completed all your research, when you can properly reflect on more comprehensive findings. 

Remote Usability Testing Participant Panels: A Loop11 and Usertesting.com Review

As a user experience consultant, I occasionally use remote online unmoderated usability testing tools. Two of the most popular tools that I've used are Loop11 and Usertesting.com. Part of their popularity is because they provide the option to recruit participants for you. If you've recruited participants for a usability test before, you know that it can be difficult and time-consuming to find and schedule qualified people, making these all-in-one services very attractive. However, if you examine what it takes to be a participant for Loop11 or Usertesting.com, you may begin to wonder how qualified these participants actually are. To find out what it is like to be a participant, I signed up to be a tester on Usertesting.com and on Loop11, which uses Cint panels in the United States. What follows is my experience and my opinion about these popular online usability testing tools. 

My Usertesting.com Participant Experience

Over a few weeks, I spent around 3 hours answering screeners for Usertesting.com tests. I qualified for exactly 2 tests, and earned a whopping $3. I can think of many ways that my 3 hours could’ve been more wisely spent, so I’m not entirely sure who has the time and patience to be a participant. 

As a participant, you are given a bevy of surveys on your dashboard, which are screeners to see if you qualify. An astounding number of these screeners ask if you work full-time, part-time, or are unemployed, and what industry you are in. Sometimes they ask for annual income. The screeners are redundant, and it seems like something that could be cleared up with a more robust participant profile. After one or two of these questions, you’re either qualified or not qualified. If you’re not qualified, you don’t get to take the test and you aren’t paid.

Once you finally qualify for a test, you might soon discover that what was supposed to be a 20-minute test is actually a million-minute test. I’m not kidding. I qualified for one test that had 26 total questions. As a UX professional, I know that this is impossible in just 20 minutes. I was only on question 6 at the 10-minute mark so I exited the study. The company wasn’t paying more than $10 for this test, so it was not worth it to me to continue, especially since this test seemed like it would take closer to an hour. 

However, in order to be paid for a test, you have to complete it. If you rush, Usertesting.com’s customer can give you a bad rating or refuse to pay you. A low rating negatively impacts your ability to get more tests. So, as a participant, you have no recourse against customers who are wasting your time. There is no way to report or rate them, and no way to recover your lost time. Before you think this was just one bad test experience, a coworker of mine tried Usertesting.com for much longer than me, and reported having this same experience. 

The other test I qualified for was well-designed, except the screener was generic and I was probably not the true target market. The language used on the website was British English, and they used quite a few different terms that were not common for an American English speaker. Perhaps this was what they wanted, or perhaps they should’ve screened people from the U.S. out. This was short test, designed to only take a few minutes, so my Paypal account was credited $3. Overall, it was a good experience. 

Cint Participant Experience

The Cint participant experience was much better than Usertesting.com, primarily for user experience reasons. First, Cint has an extensive participant profile to fill out that is optional, but asks very typical market research questions. Thus, their screeners are not redundant and you are more closely matched to relevant opportunities than you are with Usertesting.com. Also, their workflow is very well designed - Cint keeps feeding you screeners, so it's rather addictive and easy to use. 

However, I never actually encountered a Loop11 test via Cint in the 2 hours I spent taking screeners, and I only qualified for one survey. Because I've used Loop11 before to conduct usability tests, I know that Loop11's customer also has the ability to reject usability tests if they were rushed through or not thoughtfully completed, so you might take a test and not receive payment. And, though I didn't complete a usability test via Loop11 as a panel participant, the quality of the actual usability test and screener is dependent upon the skill of the customer who created it, just like with Usertesting.com. 

Payment-wise, it seemed like all of the screeners I completed were promising between $1-1.50 for a completion. Based on the prices for running Loop11 usability studies, I know that it is probably not possible to make Usertesting.com-style money as a Loop11 participant. Somehow, the monetary value of my time bothered me much less as I completed the Cint screeners. Perhaps this was because the Cint payment amounts were much lower stakes than the $10 offered by Usertesting.com, or maybe it was due to Cint's interface design pushing me through dozens of screeners, making me feel productive. 

Usertesting.com vs. Loop11: Which is Better for Recruiting?

As a usability professional, attempting to be a participant for both of these services gave me qualms about using their panels for recruitment. For many usability tests, I’m not certain you would truly get qualified participants with their panels. Years ago, I was at a conference session about using surveys for user research, and the speaker pointed out the big problem with validity of survey results - only a certain type of person bothers to complete them because they are a waste of time for the end user. You have to be willing to settle for feedback from anyone, whether they are the right customer for you or not. This is true for usability test participants from panels constructed of individuals who are specifically seeking tests to take for payment. 

For this reason, capturing participants from your own website or recruiting from your social media channels and email lists is a better way to get feedback about your real audience's needs and usage patterns, even though it might require more legwork from the UX team. Loop11 offers visitor intercepts on your website and using your own participant lists as a recruiting option, but Usertesting.com only offers using your own participants in the pro version, which is not pay-as-you-go. If you want to use your own participants and don't have the resources to go pro with Usertesting.com, Loop11 is the better choice of the two. 

Why use participant panels?

Of course, built-in participant panels are not all bad. First, you can absolutely uncover basic usability problems with the participant panels provided through Usertesting.com and Loop11's Cint relationship. For example, you can identify an image carousel that changes too quickly, or common web conventions like navigation and search that aren't behaving the way an average user expects. These are issues any tester may find, and this type of functional usability testing can resolve major usability impediments. 

Another time when these built-in recruiting services do well is when everyone actually could be a participant. For example, e-commerce retailers with mass market appeal, health information websites like WebMD, news sites, recipe websites, etc. However, these are the easiest participants to recruit because they are also your neighbors and friends, and can even be intercepted at your local coffee shop.  

In the end, for the most valuable usability testing results, you'll want to make sure your website matches your participant’s reality, and even their vocabulary. Therefore, if your website isn’t mass market, or if your issues are deeper than pure function, you will be better served by a more targeted participant recruiting strategy than a built-in participant panel. 

Want to know more? Check out my other posts about usability testing methodologies and tools.

5S: A Tool for Web Content Management

Too often, website content grows old and outdated and loses its usefulness for visitors and the organization. No one pays much attention to this until it is time to overhaul the website. At that point, content becomes a huge obstacle and a seemingly insurmountable amount of work. The fix for this? Routine housekeeping to make sure the content has life-long value for site visitors and the organization. 

To create a process for routine content management, borrow a practice from Japanese lean manufacturing called 5S. 5S is a workplace organization methodology that consists of five Japanese words that loosely translate to sort, straighten, shine, standardize, and sustain. In manufacturing, applying this methodology reduces errors and improves quality - the same thing you need for your web content. Here’s how to 5S your web content. 

Sort  

The first practice is Sort. For this, you’ll want to identify and remove unnecessary content. This can be done by making a content inventory. You can learn all about making a content inventory here, but the basic idea is to make a spreadsheet that lists page titles and links to all of your content, from pages to pdfs and videos. Examine each piece of content and indicate if anything is redundant, outdated, or trivial (ROT). If it is, delete the content or fix it. 

In conjunction with the content inventory, take a look at your website’s analytics. Specifically, examine the least visited pages. What about these pages makes them so unpopular? Are they ROT, or is there a problem that is causing these pages to be overlooked? Fix the problems if the content is still valuable, or move these pages to the trash bin. 

Straighten

The second practice is Straighten, which is essentially the old aphorism “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Going back to the content inventory, now you’ll assess the organization of the content. Has it grown disorderly? Do the navigation or categories still make sense based on the content contained within them? Are callout features and promotions still relevant to your audience? Identify the top tasks for your website and conduct a usability test to check that everything is still functioning well for your users, or to test any proposed changes to your site’s navigation or workflow to make sure they'll solve the problem.  

Shine 

Next up is the Shine step. In manufacturing 5S, this is cleaning everything and eliminating dirt. For your website, do the following: 

• Run a link check to find broken URLs, 
• Use an accessibility tool like Wave to find WCAG 2.0 violations, and
• Look at every page for improper formatting, jargon, and outdated images. 

Standardize

To Standardize is to create and follow best practices for your site and maintain high standards. You might consider doing this by creating a style guide if you don’t already have one, and make sure everyone who is contributing to your website has the right tools to do their best work (such as image and video editing tools). Update documentation and training materials to make sure they are still useful, and make them easily accessible to your content contributors. Re-run trainings if you need to, or if you’ve never held training before, start now! 

Sustain 

This brings us to the final S, Sustain. This step is to “do without being told.” Repeat Sort, Straighten, Shine, and Standardize as part of a systematic process to continuously improve. Do it quarterly or monthly - make it habit! If you do, 5S will help you improve the user experience, quality, and relevance of your content - turning your website into a well-oiled machine.