Why Understanding the Customer Journey is Essential to Good Web Design

Whether you work in WordPress development exclusively or you use other platforms for website development, it’s essential for you to be intimately familiar with the customer journey. Why is that the case? Because understanding the customer journey can enable you to produce even better websites.

In many cases, it takes a lot of steps to get a customer to ultimately click a Contact Us or Buy Now button. A prospect may start interacting with your brand using a desktop and then revisit your website later using their smartphone. When they’re on your website, they may take an interest in certain things while bypassing others without even a glance. When you understand why consumers behave and react in certain ways, you can use that knowledge and apply it to your web design.

Customer Journey Maps

Being in web development, it’s vital for your web designs to be customer-centric. You can only create customer-centric web designs when you are well acquainted with the customer journey. While it would be easy enough to study the customer journey if there was just one standard path, things are naturally not that simple.

Every customer has their own unique personality. Just as each customer has their own personality, every website visitor will embark upon their own customer journey. While some journeys may overlap or follow similar routes, others will stand alone for the most part.

Customer journey maps</span are often used to represent the different journeys customers take to complete whatever task they wanted to perform when they originally navigated to your website. A website’s visitors can want to do a wide array of things when they land on a website, such as sign up for a newsletter, enter a drawing, make a purchase, download a whitepaper or get to know more about a company.

You have to study the customer journey using journey maps so you can effectively lead visitors to their end goal in a pleasant way through your web design. When you do this successfully, the user experience will improve dramatically and your website will produce more conversions.

Journey mapping is often used in web development when a website is initially being created, a site is being redesigned or a problem with an existing website has been detected. Whether you’re developing, redesigning, or fixing a website, here are the main elements you should be sure to include in your journey maps:

Personas

As we stated earlier, every website visitor will have their own personality. Some will take their time to conduct research before they make a purchase while others will pull the trigger right away. Because of differences like these, you have to recognize that the customer journey will likely differ from one website visitor to another.

Emotions

Emotions are a big part of a person’s experience with a brand or website. A journey map will shed light on how a website’s visitors feel at various points of their journey. Being familiar with what makes customers feel satisfied, what frustrates them, what puts them at ease, what makes them smile and the other triggers that evoke emotional reactions is critical in website development.

Channels

To gain a complete understanding of the customer journey, you need to examine how customers interact with a brand across channels. Consumers will interact with a website differently than they will with an app. Similarly, people will behave differently on social media than they will when they’re reading a brand’s blog. You have to examine interactions across digital channels or you may end up missing information and touchpoints that could have improved your web design and its user experience.

Touchpoints

While a website is a channel, your touchpoints are more specific. If your website has a chat feature, that very feature would be considered a touchpoint because it’s a specific feature on a broader platform. It’s critical for a journey map to identify the touchpoints customers interact with as they make decisions throughout their journeys.

Pain Points

If you want to improve a website’s user experience and generate more conversions, it’s vital for you to remove as many pain points as possible from the customer journey. Pain points are instances that can prevent visitors from achieving the objective that initially led them to a website.

A broken link that stops people from seeing a product they want to view is an example of a pain point. A pop-up that requires people to share their email address before they can continue viewing your website is another example of a pain point. Videos and audio that play automatically are additional examples of common pain points.

Eliminating pain points from the customer journey is an integral part of web design. If you don’t remove all or at least enough of them, pain points will drive visitors away from a website and toward a competitor’s that provides a better customer journey and user experience.

Timeline

You should consider the timeline it takes for a customer journey to come to its desired end. When you review the timeline, you may be able to identify ways you can expedite the journey to improve a website’s user experience.

Now that you’re familiar with the key components of the customer journey, it’s probably obvious why the customer journey is essential to web design. In addition to providing insights into the answers to the “what if” questions that invariably come up during conception and web development, the customer journey is what empowers developers to create masterful web designs that provide enviable user experiences.

Contact GoingClear 

Founded in 2001, GoingClear is a leading digital agency serving the Boston area and beyond. As website developers, we know the customer journey inside and out. While the customer journey differs from website to website and customer to customer, we develop websites that are designed to provide a fantastic user experience and increase conversions and sales.

We invite you to look over our web design services for performance websites now. To learn more about our services or to discuss your web development project in detail, contact GoingClear today.