Journey Mapping: Using Personas to Perfect your Product
In a previous article, we spoke about persona mapping — creating fictional personas in order to gauge how target audiences would interact with a digital website, application or marketing campaign. Today we’re going to be going into more depth and look at how the personas are put to work to gather such information. Journey mapping is the next phase following a persona’s creation and directly relates to how it may be utilised to gather useful data and insight from a digital product.
Understanding the significance of journey mapping
With established personas on hand, journey mapping will allow a designer or marketer to follow each persona whilst they experience the entire product — analysing their reactions and emotions at each junction to decipher what steps can be taken to further perfect the product.
There will be questions raised and desires uncovered that won’t have occurred to you, the creator, previously. And that’s the entire reason for journey mapping and using personas — to gain a unique outside perspective from your target audience. It’s all about the decisions and feelings your product elicits from each persona.
Are you happy with the direction the product is driving each persona? If not, then how can you amend it to achieve the desired result? Whether it’s swapping around some words in a marketing campaign’s slogan or making a website’s menu more accessible — there are always improvements to be made and journey mapping will allow a creative team to refine their product.
The aim of journey mapping
Personas on their own can offer invaluable information, but simply creating them and putting a handful of questions to them isn’t always enough, and that’s where journey mapping comes in to take them on an expedition in the hopes that a greater understanding can be discovered.
The marketing team will learn to hone their copy and campaign direction from journey mapping — concentrating on the what aspect of things. What is the persona looking for when engaging the campaign? What is driving them further towards it?
On the other hand, a design team will identify how the persona reached a certain point and where they would go from there. It’s all about the before and after, the how and why with website and app design.
The customer journey map in four stages
1. The personas’ motivations
Something drove the persona to the product in the first place and something compelled them to keep going. Identifying the motivations behind why they kept moving forward, chose to leave at a certain point or even took an unexpected turn is crucial to refining the product.
2. The personas’ internal questions
As they move further into a website or campaign there are certain questions that the personas will ask themselves. If they come to a fork in the road on a website — for example when looking at a certain type of product — then the rest of their journey will be dictated by the decision they make at that very spot. This is a critical thinking stage where it’s important to understand the personas thought process and also their motivations.
3. The personas’ actions
Their actions are directly influenced by the answers to the questions they ask themselves and will drive them (or not drive them) further into the next stage. Why have they chosen a particular path over another? It all weaves into their motivations and questions they’re asking themselves.
4. The personas’ potential complications
Are there elements that are hindering their journey? This could be copy that is too technical to understand and may need to be simplified, or, it could be something as simple as a broken pathway that needs to be fixed. Whatever it may be — this is the stage where it’s addressed and solutions are put forward in an effort to remedy the issue.
Are you looking for digital marketing experts?
Here at AWD Digital, we excel at crafting custom websites and applications for your business as well as forming detailed and thorough digital marketing campaigns. We employ the use of persona mapping and journey mapping to ensure your digital product is of the finest quality and effectively caters to the target audience.
If you’d like to learn more about our services, then please don’t hesitate to contact us by filling out our online enquiry form or calling 03 9001 6255.