How can you use user journey testing to inform business strategy?

1 What is user journey testing?

User journey testing is a qualitative research method that involves observing and interviewing real or potential users as they complete a specific task or goal using your product or service. This method enables you to uncover users' thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and feedback at each stage of their journey, and to evaluate how well your product or service meets their needs and expectations. Through user journey testing, you can gain insight into who your users are, what their goals, needs, and pain points are, how they discover and choose your product or service, how they onboard and use it, how they perceive the value and quality of it, how they respond to your brand, tone, and messaging, how they overcome challenges or errors, and how they share or review your product or service.

2 How to conduct user journey testing?

User journey testing can be conducted in different ways, depending on research objectives, resources, and constraints. Generally, the process involves defining research goals and questions, identifying user segments and scenarios, preparing test materials and environment, conducting test sessions, analyzing and synthesizing data, and communicating and acting on the results. Specifically, you need to consider what you want to learn from users and why; who the users are you want to test and what tasks or goals they aim to achieve; what tools, platforms, or prototypes you will use; how to guide and interact with the users; how to organize and interpret data collected from the test; how to present the results; and how to translate the results into actionable recommendations.

3 How to use user journey testing to inform business strategy?

User journey testing can provide valuable insights into your users' needs, expectations, and motivations, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your product or service. By using user journey testing to inform your business strategy, you can align your value proposition with your users' goals and pain points, optimize your design and functionality with user behaviors and feedback, and measure and communicate the impact of UX improvements on business performance. This can help you increase relevance, differentiation, usability, accessibility, and satisfaction; demonstrate value, credibility, and ROI; and evaluate effectiveness and efficiency.

4 What are some best practices for user journey testing?

User journey testing is a flexible and adaptable method that can be tailored to your specific context and needs. To ensure successful user journey testing, it is important to define a clear and realistic scope and objective for the test, recruit and test with representative and diverse users, prepare and test materials and environment before the test, be respectful, empathetic, and curious with users during the test, and analyze and synthesize the data with a critical and collaborative approach. Avoid testing too many or too vague things at once, using users who are not familiar or interested in your product or service, using test materials or environments that are too complex, incomplete, or unstable, leading, interrupting, or influencing your users during the test, jumping to conclusions, ignoring outliers, or confirming biases when analyzing the data. Doing so will help you generate meaningful results and insights from user journey testing.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?