How to Design a Customer Journey for Mobile App

Henn Akimov

Marketer, Startup Advisor

We are all brand users who are aware of our preferences when making a purchase, but from a business perspective, it can be difficult to predict what consumers would think. Every app marketer needs to be aware of the needs of customers, their decision-making processes, and the trends they are most likely to follow. How to reach that expertise? One solution is to design a customer journey for a mobile app. A business strategy must also take into account every client experience at every stage of the customer journey map.

Why do users download mobile apps but never use them? Why are some apps adored and others deleted after 5 minutes of use? You’ve come to the correct spot if you’re looking for answers to these questions. Our article will teach you how to design a customer journey for a mobile app and comprehend user behavior via it.

What Is a Customer Journey Map for Mobile App?

A customer journey map provides a visual representation of customers’ interaction with an app. It provides insight into the needs and problems of potential customers, which could either stimulate or restrict their activity. With the use of that information, one can enhance the customer experience while also boosting conversion rates and customer retention.

Marketers may monitor how customers interact with a brand until they purchase by using a customer journey map. There are several phases and processes every smartphone owner passes between learning about the mobile app and using it regularly. Marketing professionals cannot make guesses about the UX experience that clients will have based on their presumptions. The process is very data-driven and it requires that you design a customer journey for a mobile app.

The Basics

A customer journey map (CJM) aims to generate a visual representation of the customer’s interaction with your app. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. CJM demonstrates how customers interact with the brand as well as presents marketers’ viewpoints on users’ predicted behaviors.

Understanding this relationship can help you develop specific strategies (push notifications, in-app messages, etc.) to provide your users with the best possible experience. A customer journey map depicts the consumer’s journey from the first encounter to the last. It aids in figuring out whether users are on course to make a purchase and, if not, how to make them change their minds.

Why Do You Need to Tailor a Customer Journey Map for a Mobile App?

Business teams can better understand user behavior by applying user journeys. After you design a customer journey for a mobile app, this step-by-step scheme helps you optimize your app’s overall design, strategy, and retention. Below are a few reasons why businesses need to investigate the user journey:

Enhance User Experience

You can enhance users’ experiences with your app by learning how they use it. Follow the user’s journey to learn how your app is resolving issues or assisting users in reaching their objectives. Do they find specific features of your software useful? Do your consumers consider the app intuitive and simple to use? These elements are important to consider when you build an app more involving for your users.

Choose the Proper Audience

Businesses occasionally fail to comprehend their target audience. This could be a serious setback for the success of your app. It is a waste of time to reach a diverse audience without thoroughly comprehending your core audience. Learning more about your customer’s goals, difficulties, and user journeys is an excellent way to get to know them better. After you design a customer journey for a mobile app, it helps you understand who your target audience is and how your app may meet their needs.

Boost Customer Retention

The user journey reveals areas in which you need to make changes. If users abandon an app more frequently after downloading it, the reason may be in onboarding or failed expectations (the app turned out to be less useful than predicted). Having studied these aspects, you can enhance user experience.

Step-By-Step Guide to Design Customer Journey for Mobile App

Before you design a customer journey for a mobile app from scratch, establish your objectives. Determine what you need to track specifically and how you want to enhance your app. This can help you better focus your study on specific goals.

Define the User Personas

A fictionalized version of your target users is called a user persona. The traits and qualities of your target clients are reflected in these personas. Before creating user personas, you must conduct extensive market research on your target demographic. Learn current or potential users’ opinions of your app by sending them a survey. Ask them where did they learn about the app and inquire about their current touchpoints, objectives, difficulties, and factors that affect their choices concerning the app.

Learn what the user requires to achieve their objectives. You must feel your target audience if you want to develop useful software. Create a user persona once all the insights have been gathered. For further clarity, give it a name and a face. 

Mark the Points and Channels of Interaction

Touch points are all the points at which clients come into contact with your company. Depending on the channel, the points of contact fall into online and offline ones. The buyer accesses the site from a computer or mobile device, orders a product by phone or at a representative’s office, talks to a courier, or fills out a form on the site. Include all these options as you design a customer journey for a mobile app.

Informal interaction — a person turned out to be an acquaintance of the manager or solved their problem in social networks — should also be stated in the map. There may be more touch points or fewer touch points. Websites, social networking platforms, paid advertisements, email marketing, and more are examples of touch points. You can also conduct a Google search about all the places your company or app has been mentioned online.

As you design a customer journey for a mobile app, devote the most time to this step because it may be extremely different from your standard marketing funnel. Create a comprehensive list of all the marketing and sales strategies your team uses to interact with mobile clients as a starting point. Next, associate each activity with the customer behavior it is intended to promote. Depending on your mobile product, your touchpoints may have multiple targeted client behaviors or just one. Allow your lists to grow as long as necessary!

Identify Critical Points and Barriers

Barriers prevent the client from moving from one point to another. It can be either an error on the site or spam letters, or doubt or loss of interest.

It is necessary to find barriers and ways to overcome them. Difficult points are the most critical. The more effort it requires to reach the point, the more negative emotions a user feels associated with the product or brand. For example, they are annoyed or disappointed with the quality of service. As a result, their loyalty is reduced, and they will choose a competitor over you next time.

As you design a customer journey for a mobile app, ensure that several barriers do not meet at one point on the map. In such a situation, the customer is very likely to change their mind and leave.

Define User Emotions

Consider your persona’s sensations, thoughts, and impressions as they move through each step. Which course do they follow? Your stages should progressively become more specific at this time. These develop into an interaction record that is turned into a narrative. Consider people’s queries, the drivers of their motivation, and how they overcome previously mentioned barriers. Explain the feelings and thoughts users have at each stage. Your attention should be on the emotions.

Finding out what drives the preferred activities of users is important because every action they take is influenced by their emotions (purchases, subscriptions, etc). See how their feelings evolve as the customer journey progresses. Remember that the pain points are what is driving all of this. After you design a customer journey for a mobile app, you can solve consumer difficulties by learning about their issues. Positive feelings will undoubtedly result from this, and the user will select your product!

Define Solutions

The ultimate goal of any CJM is to create a positive consumer experience and a continuous and successful interaction with the product. There should be as few barriers as possible, and the consumer’s movement throughout the map should be comfortable and seamless. Determine the ways to optimize the product and the work of the team at critical points. From brainstorming to attracting external consultants — use all methods to come up with more solutions.

Removing barriers usually requires improving the quality of service or upgrading the product. It also makes sense to simplify the map and remove some points of contact or completely rebuild the path if you cannot provide a solution to them. Don’t forget to evaluate the cost of lowering barriers.

Identify specific actions to improve performance and calculate the additional investment required. For example, while doing CJM, you found that customers often don’t make a purchase because they can’t find the “buy” button on the app. To eliminate this barrier, you can redesign the app. What resources do you have for this? How much will a redesign cost with external specialists? Are there other ways to remove such a barrier?

Validate the Journey Map and Design the Final User Journey Map

CJM will not be effective without multiple user personas. If you have multiple user personas, each one will have a unique user journey. Make sure that each persona’s user journey is unique and not generic. Each persona means an audience with various wants and difficulties. They, therefore, require a unique approach that is meaningful to them.

To validate a journey map, it’s essential to gather feedback from actual users. This feedback can come from a variety of sources, such as user interviews, surveys, usability testing, or analytics data. The goal is to identify any gaps or pain points in the current user journey and to validate assumptions about user behavior and needs.

Customer Journey Map for Mobile App: Example

A customer journey map aims to demonstrate how the customer experience evolves over time in a format that is understandable to everyone in the company. It enables you to identify potential issues and enhance the design, increasing the likelihood that it will surpass customers’ expectations at all touchpoints.

Our client asked us to create a product concept for a neobank. We think of a customer’s relationship with a company as a story. Like all other stories, it has its beginning, plot twists, and challenges and should have a happy end. For a better understanding of the user experience, we mapped user journeys, measured touch points, and examined all of the most challenging areas.

In an enlarged form:

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Mapping Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping is similar to medication that must be taken cautiously and follow the doctor’s instructions. Nevertheless, adhering to the best mapping methods is insufficient for a project to be successful. It’s important to take into account all the pitfalls. Let’s discover the most typical of them:

No objectives established

Inexperienced journey mappers are frequently tempted to design a customer journey for a mobile app only to create one or to attempt to pinpoint every problem with every customer’s journey using a single journey map.

Why is it wrong? No pain, no gain, they say. A failed initiative will occur due to no clear objectives or outcomes defined. Also, you must persuade the stakeholders and teammates to approve of the CJM. You won’t be able to do it if you don’t have a clear objective. What CX/UX improvement tactics can you create if you don’t know why you’re creating a map?

Solution: Research is the first step in creating a customer journey map, but even before that, make sure to respond to the questions below.

1. What do you wish to analyze, and why?
2. What procedures are you hoping to improve?
3. Who owns the initiative?
4. What team members should be involved?
5. Are there any particular customer groups to consider?

Insufficient or no research

No CJM can be constructed in a single step. Yet occasionally, marketers make wild guesses instead of detailed research. They neglect to speak with colleagues who work directly with customers, cut the study short or completely out, just contact a small number of consumers to learn about their experiences, or rely solely on assumptions.

Why is it wrong? Nearly nonexistent research yields unreliable data, obscuring your customers’ journey and giving you the wrong impressions about how to improve it. Ultimately, you work hard on the path-mapping project, spend money on making enhancements to your product or service, and wear yourself and your coworkers out for nothing.

At the same time, your clients struggle since you missed the critical points of the customer experience and accidentally made things worse at the ones that were already okay. And because you take action rather than just tilting at windmills, it’s the largest crime you could commit against your audience.

Solution: Take the CJM initiative’s current phase extremely seriously. Unreliable information is useless. Customer journey mapping isn’t fiction writing, after all. You must be ravenous for data and the most thorough audience feedback.

Incorrect viewpoint

Marketing experts sometimes think designing a CJM means quietly constructing a map. Literally. Additionally, the stages of their CJM mirror what they believe their client’s experience is. Why even worry about customers, you ask?

Why is it wrong? Simply put, by approaching customer journey mapping from a perspective other than that of the consumer, you lose the attempt to enhance your experience and promote your brand of goods or services.

Solution: Consider yourself your customer. Think as they do. A CJM should be developed around a person’s journey, ideas, expectations, and goals, as well as the channels they utilize and the actions they take. You must assess how well your service satisfies the demands of your clients and assists them in completing their responsibilities.

Customer Journey Map (CJM) For Mobile App: Summary

User journeys assist you in comprehending the actions, requirements, feelings, and difficulties that your consumers experience with your app. You must design a customer journey for a mobile app if you want to develop user-centric software. Concentrate on your target audience to gather insightful information that will enable you to enhance their flow throughout the app. 

User interaction with the app should be smooth from registration to service orders. You can reach that by tackling the barriers clients meet when reaching their touchpoints. Provide the right solutions for the barriers and encourage positive emotions in users.

You now have the necessary resources to design a customer journey for a mobile app. This exercise will assist you, regardless of where you are in the sales process, in gaining a better understanding of how your consumers behave, enabling you to enhance your product, target your marketing, and, most importantly, win more customers.