The importance of user journey optimization on your website
User journey is a visitor’s experience during a session of using a website. It consists of a series of actions that a visitor performs in order to achieve a certain goal. User journey optimization is crucial for your website success and it helps you maximize the conversion rate.
Before you embark on your own journey of designing a website and working on the visual aspect of it, you need to focus on two sets of goals: your goals and your customers’ goals.
Your goals
What are your business goals and what do you want your website visitors to do when they surf your website? Try to think of it as defining a target for your visitors. Do you want them to sign up for a free trial, subscribe to a newsletter or make a purchase? When you define your business goal,s you are ready to work on the strategy and specific steps to reach these goals.
Your customers’ goals
Though your customers’ goals are for sure different from yours, you need to understand them in order to be able to meet them. When you do that, you have a better chance of reaching your own business objectives.
When a person visits a website for the first time, it is highly unlikely that they have already decided to make a purchase (or do anything you have defined as your own business goal). They come to your website to get to know your company or learn more about your products and services. For that reason, you need to build trust and you do it by showing them that your company is legitimate, that you have been in business for a long time, have a number of successful projects or happy customers.
The importance of User Persona
To be able to do that to align yours and your customers’ goals, you need to define a User Persona. A User Persona is a representation of your ideal customer. User Personas are defined through research or surveys through which you identify behaviour patterns, goals and personalities or your customers. Having completed this task, you can create a realistic user journey and optimal user journey scenarios for different User Personas.
Having defined User Personas, you are ready to start working on journey mapping. Start by mapping user flow. Identify the actions taken by the users and drive them through conversion funnels, towards the final action. Given that there can be multiple user personas, you might want to come up with several routes to complete the goal action.
Think carefully about where to place call to action buttons and make sure they are well connected with the point of interest of your user personas and lead straight to them.
Conclusion
User journey optimization is an ongoing process, don’t forget that. It might not turn out perfect at first, so set KPIs and regularly check if your website is converting. When designing a website for a major manufacturer & supplier of a range of thermoplastic masterbatch, Abbey Masterbatch Ltd, we carefully planned a design that would deliver a great user journey and reach the business objectives of the client.
