Onboarding is the process of introducing new users to your product or service and helping them achieve their goals. It's a crucial part of user experience (UX) design, as it can influence retention, engagement, and satisfaction. But how can you design an effective onboarding that meets the needs and expectations of your users? One way is to use journey stories.
Journey stories are short narratives that describe the experiences of a user persona from their perspective. They cover the user's motivations, emotions, actions, and outcomes as they interact with your product or service. Journey stories help you empathize with your users, understand their pain points and goals, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Product and design leadership | Customer experience | Startup Mentor | Ex-Thoughtworks
Journey stories are the end to end narrative of what the customer experiences while using a product or a service, focussing mostly on their emotions and pain points. The most important aspect of this journey is in identifying 'where' most of the customers are facing problems or issues and gaining a deep understanding of the problems.
Let me add about empathy. The challenging approach is to understand the difference between a persona and a singular user, an individual; a product must enable the experience to particular- individual users, and to those we own our empathy and from those we receive valuable information. Individuals are dynamic and will change their minds, desires, and emotions, so the persona we designed for will change, and so we shall. We need journey stories flexible enough to consider multiple paths and changes. They are excellent for communicating potential scenarios and allow broader and more accurate designs.
In summary you understand thw real need of the persona.That helps the team to explore and be creative to come up with best solution to meet the need
Journey stories are pivotal in shaping "moments that matter," acting as touchpoints along what are, at times, complex yet connected customer experiences. These narratives unveil the pathways customers take, revealing opportunities for authentic brand interactions that add value to their journey or assist them in finding shortcuts in achieving their objectives. Understanding these stories enables tailored, resonant experiences, fostering deep connections. They have the power to transform mere encounters into connected branded experiences, cultivating loyalty, advocacy, and preference.
Journey stories are like windows into the real experiences of those who trust us. Analyzing these journeys helps us understand their moments of joy, frustration, and unmet needs.
To create journey stories, it is essential to conduct user research and define user personas. User personas are based on data gathered from surveys, interviews, analytics, or other methods, and they reflect the demographics, behaviors, needs, and preferences of your target users. Mapping out the user journey for each persona is also necessary. The user journey is the sequence of steps a user takes to achieve a goal with your product or service. To visualize the user journey and highlight the touchpoints, channels, and emotions involved, you can use a tool such as a journey map. Afterwards, you should write the journey stories for each persona and touchpoint. A journey story should start with a sentence introducing the persona, their goal, and their context; then describe what the persona does at each touchpoint, how they feel, and what they expect; and end with a sentence summarizing the outcome of the journey and the persona's satisfaction. For example, a journey story for a persona named Alice who wants to use a fitness app could look like this: Alice is a busy professional looking to stay fit and healthy who hears about a new fitness app offering personalized workouts and nutrition plans. She downloads it and signs up with her email account feeling curious and excited. After receiving a confirmation email and verifying her account she is taken to the app's dashboard where she can see her profile, goals, progress, and recommendations; feeling happy and motivated to explore the app she has successfully completed onboarding ready to use it.
User journey stories is a tool to express a persona's thoughts, feelings, actions and behavior to a situation they are thrown into at each part of the journey. The journey stories not only convey emotions and mood but the underlying variation in behavior among persona's and reasons why they do so ! On a recent project for a hotel app, while writing the journey story of guests, Persona A - A Married person would react to a situation which Persona B - A Young adult who is also a guest would react different. These stories act as a bridge that maps out a persona over a user journey map
Developing journey stories consists of two primary stages: initially, collecting user information through research to build personas employing surveys, interviews, or data analysis. Subsequently, outline the user's actions using a tool like a journey map, giving importance to touchpoints and emotions, and later craft stories for each persona and touchpoint. To illustrate, consider the case of David, a college student grappling with stress who explores a meditation app, experiences relief, and, after a week, expresses satisfaction. This narrative highlights how grasping user experiences is a compass for designing products that authentically address their needs.
Creating journey stories involves talking to users about their experiences, mapping key touchpoints, and identifying challenges. Outline the user's journey chronologically, highlighting emotional moments. Visualize this journey to share insights and iteratively refine the story based on user feedback. This user-centric approach ensures ongoing improvements for a more resonant and enjoyable experience.
Start by diving into user research to shape diverse personas. They’re not just stats – they’re real-life snapshots with unique goals and challenges. Map out each persona’s journey, focusing not just on their actions but also their emotional experiences. As the storyteller, introduce your persona, their mission, and backdrop. Narrate their experience at every touchpoint, capturing their initial intrigue, challenges, and final satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This process isn’t just about plotting a course; it’s about understanding and valuing the varied journeys people take with your product, ensuring your design resonates with a wide audience.
It's important to do the research to discover the traits, beliefs, desires and needs (pain points) of your ideal customers. Then, distill your data into a persona that is a description of a single person. You use that persona to predict answers to questions, in order to "see life" from that POV. (This can be done with an AI. Basically, you train the AI with that data. Then, you instruct the AI that you'll ask it questions, and it should answer from that POV, as if it were that persona, or "expert." Then you can ask it questions, to get specific answers from that persona. It doesn't NEED to be done with an AI, traditionally it hasn't been, but AI is a new tool that can be used that way.)
Journey stories can help you improve your onboarding by uncovering the user's needs, emotions, and expectations at each stage. With journey stories, you can evaluate your current onboarding to identify gaps or confusion that may affect the user's experience. Additionally, you can generate ideas for new or improved features, content, or interactions that can address the user's pain points and goals. Furthermore, journey stories allow you to test and validate your ideas with real users and get feedback on whether the onboarding meets their needs and expectations. For example, using Alice's journey story, you could assess your welcome screen and sign-up form to make sure they are clear and engaging. You could also consider adding a value proposition or a testimonial to persuade the user to sign up. Moreover, you could ask the user some questions about their fitness level, preferences, and goals in order to personalize the onboarding and create a sense of progress and achievement. Additionally, you could use gamification elements like badges, rewards, or feedback to motivate the user and celebrate their milestones. Finally, you could use methods like usability testing, user interviews, or surveys to measure the user's behavior, emotions, and satisfaction.
Enhancing onboarding with journey stories is simple. Understand user experiences deeply, identify pain points, and optimize the process based on their journey narratives. By focusing on emotions and continual improvement, journey stories become a powerful tool for creating a more user-friendly onboarding experience.
A continuous user onboarding strategy — an approach that consistently guides users beyond their initial software encounter through an ongoing educational experience. ? Take Trello for example: First-time users are introduced with simple features: boards, lists, and cards → This allows the user to immediately get value. As users become more advanced they introduce complex features: power-ups, integrations, and advanced permissions → This allows users to expand features as they are ready to use it.
Your user journey should be a high level visualization of the current journey with value or aha moments, as well as pain points. At the low level, you should have metrics in place to measure and quantify the journey and any UX improvements made. Users want to immediately use the product and most onboarding flows they will click through quickly to get to the product. Consider limiting warm welcome onboarding flow screens. Also, consider well timed proactive guided flows such as tooltips, spotlights, and animated icons/entry points to gain attention, while not distracting users. Finally, if you need onboarding for a complex product, consider using multi-modal content such as video or gif, instead of static text.
Les récits de parcours permettent de comprendre les besoins des utilisateurs à chaque étape. Ils aident à repérer les lacunes, générer des idées pour améliorer l'expérience, personnaliser les interactions et motiver les utilisateurs avec des éléments de gamification. En utilisant ces récits, comme celui d'Alice, on peut évaluer et améliorer les éléments clés, tout en mesurant la satisfaction utilisateur pour une intégration toujours plus adaptée et engageante.
Journey stories can add value to the product in many ways - 1. The pain points and positive highlights can be identified and the user interactions can be improved 2. The most used screen layout pattern of user can be analyzed and the most and least used features can be rearranged based on the user preferences. 3. For easy reading of entire product at a glance, use of differences in appearance and color schemes can be incorporated. 4. The user goal can be broadly defined and highlighted in initial screen narratives as a source of inspiration for more use of product
Utilizing journey stories to enhance your onboarding can offer many advantages for your UX design and business. It allows you to create a user-centric onboarding that focuses on the user's needs, goals, and emotions rather than product features or functions. Moreover, it increases user engagement, retention, and loyalty by providing a smooth, enjoyable, and valuable onboarding that helps them achieve their goals and solves their problems. Additionally, it reduces user frustration, confusion, or abandonment by eliminating unnecessary, complex, or irrelevant steps or information that may hinder their onboarding. Finally, it can set you apart from competitors by offering a unique and memorable onboarding that reflects your brand's personality and values.
Using journey stories offers deep insights into user experiences, allowing for targeted improvements. Visualizing user paths enhances team collaboration, while continual refinement based on feedback ensures ongoing user-centric design.
Benefits of journey stories are - 1.journey stories can be used to understand the big picture and to see how individual product backlog items fit into the overall development effort. 2. Decision-making becomes quicker and more efficient with a shared understanding of the product structure and priority. 3. Journey stories helps teams prioritize their product backlog items, making it easier to focus on the most critical work. 4.journey stories provides a shared understanding of the product and its features among all stakeholders.
Users stumble on a roadblock → software offers an intuitive solution → streamlines the user workflow → diminishes frustration and churn. The ultimate goal is to proactively assist, not overwhelm users along a journey from beginner to expert. Each touchpoint builds confidence and creates a sticky product that users want to grow with rather than outgrow.
It’s an incredible way to “pre-test” assumptions, refine the design, retest until it works and very cheaply versus and before real user testing.
It’s an incredible way to “pre-test” assumptions, refine the design, retest until it works and very cheaply versus and before real user testing.
My favorite Journey story is that when they wrote "Don’t Stop Believing" they said that the city boy was "born and raised in South Detroit" and there actually is no part of Detroit that residents refer to as "South Detroit."
One of my favourite stories comes from an Australian bank. They were calling customers who had abandoned loan applications, trying to get the potential borrower to complete. When asking a customer why hadn't finished the response was "My kid threw up - so I had to go deal with that!" It left a lasting impact on me that "life gets in the way". We can think our onboarding is the more important thing in the world...it isn't. Sh!t happens and we need to make it easy for customers to respond when it does.
Consider the impact of unexpected user journeys on product design. Sometimes, users take unique paths we had yet to anticipate. Take a social media app designed for sharing photos. Unexpectedly, users have started leveraging it to organize events. This unanticipated shift unveils a new user need, prompting the addition of event planning features.
Journey stories are as much about what is not needed as is and it’s really important to think about the full end to end process, when creating stories. Removing a step upfront may seem like a good idea from a customer experience perspective but if it has a knock on negative impact to their subsequent interaction or makes the customer unprofitable to the business, you need to way you the balance between the optimum short and long term experiences.
Playing out user journey stories in your mind is actually crucial to the design process as a whole, as well as helping stakeholders and new designers integrate their mindset into the product's issues and problem solving needs. A high level of empathy for users is conducive to an environment where cross-functional teams work more effectively and efficiently - and ultimately great for business!