It’s Time to Stop Ignoring the User Journey!
Until teams can understand what the users feel during the journey, they won’t solve their real problems.
Until teams can understand what the users feel during the journey, they won’t solve their real problems.
What’s the goal of a Scrum Team? I guess it’s to make the lives of people better while generating value for the business. Yet, I’ve seen only a few teams spending time understanding a vital aspect of the product: the customer.
It’s not only about solving the users’ problems; it’s about solving the problems the right way. Most of the teams I know spend time answering questions like:
How can we increase sales?
How can we acquire new customers?
How can we scale our product?
How can we reduce the cancelation rate?
How can we reduce our customer acquisition cost?
Well, these questions are indeed important, but pursuing arbitrary numbers won’t let the business reach its highest potential. Although Scrum Teams build products for the end-users, few teams can understand what users feel at each moment of the journey because they are too busy pursuing business goals.
A product cannot excel if it is led only with the head; the heart plays a major role in the success. When you have customers delighted by your User Experience, the rest will follow.
Let me share a story with you where the user journey was a game-changer for the business. Hopefully, you will get insights on how to apply them in your scenario.
User Journey Map
Before I share the case, it’s essential to understand the User Journey Map. To explain it, I will use the words from Thalion:
Journey Maps try to capture the experience of a user during the interaction with the products. They are a visual trip of the user across the solution. Journey Maps are some kind of a journal, where user notes their feelings, pain points and the moments of delight.
The crucial part is to look at the journey from different angles instead of a simple flow. Let’s consider a typical scenario where you are booking flight tickets with your family.
Goal: book the flight tickets for a family holiday.
Expectations: have the tickets booked and receive them by e-mail.
Trigger: the wish of having a family holiday.
Journey: the steps from finding until receiving the tickets, e.g., search, details, cart, check-out, confirmation.
Emotions: excitement for the trip and maybe anxiety to find an affordable price.
Scenario: the customer is in the living room with the family; she holds a laptop and wants to book tickets. Before making any decisions, the family evaluates the conditions and details of the tickets.
Once you understand the whole scenario, then you can evaluate which solution has a better fit. Unfortunately, the emotional aspect is often ignored, which causes frustrations in many users.
Generally, the User Journey Map is the designer's job, but the Scrum Team often doesn't have a person with such skills. Still, I think the team should not ignore the User Journey because it can deliver a pointless solution.
“Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.” — Kevin Stirtz, More Loyal Customers
To know more about User Journey, I’d suggest the following articles as further reading:
Why User Journey Was a Game-Changer For Me
In one of the startups I worked for, we struggled with our conversion rate for months. No matter what we did, we couldn’t reach our goals. Our approach was the problem, we were entirely data-driven, but numbers couldn’t tell the whole story. The tipping point happened once we decided to walk a mile in our customers’ shoes. Let me guide you through it.
Our business was simple; we helped car owners sell their cars without dealing with bureaucratic and stressful processes. Long-story-short, we inspected the vehicles and put them on our auction platform, where car dealers competed for the customers' car for thirty minutes. After that, the customer would get an offer; she could take it and go home by cab, or decline it and pay nothing. Our problem was that too many clients refused the offer.
To increase the conversion rate, we tried different strategies, none of them worked. Some examples are:
Reduce our commission: we reduced that to the minimum value possible. Still, nothing changed.
Increase the auction time: to get better offers; we decided to let the auction available for a longer period. Although the final offer increased slightly, the conversion rate didn’t.
Push car dealers for better offers: we thought car dealers were not attentive to the auctions. We developed features to engage them more. After that, the auctions were more competitive, yet, clients still rejected more offers than we could afford.
Our team didn’t have an experienced UX or Designer, but we had to leave our comfort zone. Otherwise, we would remain stuck. That’s why I decided to act as a customer. Back then, I wanted to sell my car; experimenting with our service sounded a good idea. After going through the whole process, it became clear why most customers rejected the offers. Some points I noticed:
A silent hour without any information: after handing in my car key, nobody talked to me for a whole hour. I was told the process would take around an hour, and I would get updates from someone. That never happened. In the beginning, I was anxious, and then I became irritated by the lack of information.
Delay without explanation: after one hour and ten minutes waiting, somebody came and told me, “Sorry. We have a lot of cars today. It will take a little longer to present you the offer. I will update you as soon as I have it.” The person went away, and I waited twenty more minutes. I was already disappointed, but I hoped to get a nice offer to finish this experience well.
Unprepared Negotiator: finally, someone called me to present the offer. The conversation started by pointing out thousands of problems in my car. I felt fooled; it was like trying to get me to accept a bad offer. When the negotiator presented the proposal, it was 20% under my expectations. He tried to convince me to sell the car. Pissed off, I went away.
When I received the offer, I was so annoyed that I couldn’t process it rationally. Even if the offer was fair, I wouldn’t accept anything under my expectation.
It became clear to me our User Journey was horrible. Something had to change immediately.
Turning the Problem Around
I decided to create a User Journey Map. The most important part was the emotions related to each step. It was clear that the customers arrived excited to sell their car, entered the negotiation room irritated, and left our store pissed off. We had to improve the experience significantly.
We created a hypothesis that if customers could lower their expectations by knowing the real vehicle state, they would be more open to negotiate. To reach that, we did the following:
TV-App: a board presented the status of each car (waiting, inspection, auction, offer). That removed the anxiety; the customers knew what was happening.
Mobile App: car owners generally have a higher expectation for their vehicle than the real market value. However, pointing out defects can be offensive and block the negotiation. We built an app that showed the inspection results. The owners could look at the pictures and make their conclusions.
After we implemented these two solutions, the results changed significantly. Car owners were not anxious and irritated when they came to the negotiation room. Actually, they lowered their expectations because the problems in the car became clear. We finally could increase our conversion rate.
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.” — Dr. Ralf Speth, Chief Executive Officer, Jaguar Land Rover
Final Thoughts
It took us months to look beyond our numbers. The main lesson for me is that being data-driven is not enough; we have to understand beyond what the data can tell us. To summarize everything:
Nothing teaches more about customers than walking a mile in their shoes.
Strive to understand the emotions during each step of the User Journey, which will help you find better fitting solutions.
Don’t let numbers block you from learning the real story.
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