Mapping User Journeys To Drive Product Strategy

We undertook a global user journey mapping initiative to create a holistic visualisation of our customers behaviours and attitudes across channels, time and markets.

Company: Vogue

Length: 2 months

Completed: August 2020

Team: UX Lead, Senior UX Researcher, Product Designer (me)

Tools: Miro, Figma

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Business Goal

Use research findings to drive ongoing strategy and design initiatives for improving the user experience and business metrics.

The Challenge

Get insights on the factors that determine "highly engaged" vs "lowly engaged" users (users who are engaged with competitor solutions to meet their needs, just not with Vogue) across markets. Use these insights to uncover opportunities for improving the user experience and turn more customers into “highly engaged”.

My Role

Responsible for note-taking all user interviews and moderating a few. Collaborated with UX Researchers to analyse and translate insights into key user journeys. Finally, worked closely with UX Lead to create detailed user journey maps.

Design Process

Define research areas

As a starting point, we focused on 2 markets (UK and India), within which we looked at 2 key Vogue segments.

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Within these customer segments, we specifically looked at 5 key research areas:

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Engagement triggers - What drives engagement with fashion content.
Goals - How these segments meet their needs and goals.
Channels & Competitors - How they currently engage with channels, as well as with our competitors.
Content - What they are looking for from fashion brands/content.
Opportunities - What are the opportunities for Vogue to better meet their needs/goals.

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For each area, we triangulated existing research and data to identify any potential knowledge gaps, and then outlined a list of questions that would help us fill those.

Conduct user interviews

In total, between the researchers and myself, we conducted 24 user interviews remotely via Zoom, over the course of 4 days. All interviews were 45 mins long, exploratory in nature using open-ended and non-leading questions. I took notes in all but 4 interviews, of which I had the opportunity to moderate myself.

Analyse interview data

We then allocated and individually analysed the interview notes. This involved extracting the key takeaways for each research area, and mapping their engagement with fashion/beauty content over a typical day. As part of an affinity mapping working led by the UX researchers, we mapped the takeaways into common themes, to uncover behavioural and attitudinal patterns relevant to each segment.

results

Render user journey maps

The research findings showed that users primarily engage with Vogue in 4 ways, which we then rendered as the key user journeys.

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For each journey, we defined what pulls and pushes users to/from Vogue and hence what opportunities and initiatives we can drive forward. We created journey maps that describe in detail users’ experience with Vogue across segments and markets, supplemented with the right data.

retro

Lesson Learned

One of the challenges we faced during the project was the fact that journey maps tend to be created and used once, maybe a few times at best. However, we wanted to ensure they would be living, breathing documents that can be scaled and updated with insights from both user and data studies every quarter, as well as used by cross functional teams across markets to inform design initiatives.

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This meant revisiting our detailed journey maps to find the best way to communicate key takeaways. As such, we created a master deck that clearly documented our approach, the key takeaways, user journey summaries and links to the detailed journey maps for those who wanted to dive deeper into the data and detailed sequence of user interactions.