If you missed our recent live training on Prototype Testing, don’t worry—we’ve got everything you need right here! You can catch up at your convenience, so grab a cup of tea, put your feet up, and enjoy the show.
In the session, we explored the powerful new features of our Prototype Testing tool, offering a step-by-step guide to setting up, running, and analyzing your tests like a seasoned pro. This tool is a game-changer for your design workflow, helping you identify usability issues and gather real user feedback before committing significant resources to development.
Here’s a quick recap of the highlights:
1. Creating a prototype test from scratch using images
We walked through how to create a prototype test from scratch using static images. This method is perfect for early-stage design concepts, where you want to quickly test user flows without a fully interactive prototype.
2. Preparing your Figma prototype for testing
Figma users, we’ve got you covered! We discussed how to prepare your Figma prototype for the smoothest possible testing experience. From setting up interactions to ensuring proper navigation, these tips ensure participants have an intuitive experience during the test. For more detailed instructions, check out our help article
3. Seamless Figma prototype imports
One of the standout features of the tool is its seamless integration with Figma. We showed how easy it is to import your designs directly from Figma into Optimal, streamlining the setup process. You can bring your working files straight in, and resync when you need to with one click of a button.
4. Understanding usability metrics and analyzing results
We explored how to analyze the usability metrics, and walked through what the results can indicate on click maps and paths. These visual tools allow you to see exactly how participants navigate your design, making it easier to spot pain points, dead ends, or areas of friction. By understanding user behavior, you can rapidly iterate and refine your prototypes for optimal user experience.
Think your company is truly user-centric? Think again. Our groundbreaking report on UX Research (UXR) in 2024 shatters common assumptions about our industry.
We've uncovered a startling gap between what companies say about user-centricity and what they actually do. Prepare to have your perceptions challenged as we reveal the true state of UXR integration and its untapped potential in today's business landscape.
The startling statistics
Here's a striking finding: only 16% of organizations have fully embedded UXR into their processes and culture. This disconnect between intention and implementation underscores the challenges in demonstrating and maximizing the true value of user research.
What's inside the white paper
In this comprehensive white paper, we explore:
How companies use and value UX research
Why it's hard to show how UX research helps businesses
Why having UX champions in the company matters
New ways to measure and show the worth of UX research
How to share UX findings with different people in the company
New trends changing how people see and use UX research
Stats sneak peek
- Only 16% of organizations have fully embedded UX Research (UXR) into their processes and culture. This highlights a significant gap between the perceived importance of user-centricity and its actual implementation in businesses.
- 56% of organizations aren't measuring the impact of UXR at all. This lack of measurement makes it difficult for UX researchers to demonstrate the value of their work to stakeholders.
- 68% of respondents believe that AI will have the greatest impact on the analysis and synthesis phase of UX research projects. This suggests that while AI is expected to play a significant role in UXR, it's seen more as a tool to augment human skills rather than replace researchers entirely.
The UX research crossroads
As our field evolves with AI, automation, and democratized research, we face a critical juncture: how do we articulate and amplify the value of UXR in this rapidly changing landscape? We’d love to know what you think! So DM us in socials and let us know what you’re doing to bridge the gap.
Are you ready to unlock the full potential of UXR in your organization?
Download our white paper for invaluable insights and actionable strategies that will help you showcase and maximize the value of user research. In an era of digital transformation, understanding and leveraging UXR's true worth has never been more crucial.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming blog series, where we'll delve deeper into key findings and strategies from the report. Together, we'll navigate the evolving UX landscape and elevate the value of user insights in driving business success and exceptional user experiences.
Understanding your customers is central to any organization which wants to deliver an outstanding experience. But how do you understand your customers better? Tailoring their experience with your products and your organization to suit them should include a customer journey map.
It doesn’t mean your organization needs a brightly colored, fully designed infographic that outlines each and every action your user takes within your product. It does mean an effective customer journey map that promotes empathy and provides a clear vision for improving customer interactions. There are no rules around what that visualization looks like and it is up to your team to create one that makes the most of your customer’s journey.
What is customer journey mapping? 🤔
Customer journey mapping (sometimes referred to as a user experience map) is a technique that allows you to visualize your customer’s key touchpoints, sentiments, pain points, and actions. Plotted in sequential order. It’s a map of a customer’s experience with your brand or product, from awareness to purchase and beyond.
Customer journey mapping helps you look beyond key touchpoints and encourages empathy with your customers. To understand who they are, even a persona to give them a life and demographic. Helping designers and key stakeholders understand where they are coming from. And where you can address their needs, avoid their pain points and encourage them to engage with your product. And even identify opportunities for innovation and improvement across the board.
Why you need a customer journey map 💥
What’s better than a customer that feels seen and understood once? A customer that feels the organization or product really understands their needs (and responds to their frustrations). Like all successful, long-term relationships, keeping customers returning is built on empathy and a solid grasp of their needs and frustrations.
When you want to get to know your customer, like really get to know them, it’s essential to map their customer journey. Creating a shared understanding of what your customers think, feel, and struggle with as they interact with your organization. Spending the time to establish a customer journey map can help align around identifying known problems, identifying new user pain points, and removing roadblocks for your customers, ensuring their success.
Spending the time to get inside the mind and journeys of your customers through mapping helps your team to:
Get an understanding of multiple customer pathways and unravel complex user experiences
Create target personas and allow insights to solve problems more effectively
Increase your organization’s empathy for your current and future customers
Identify potential pain points and roadblocks for your customers
Breakdown silos within your organization and improve alignment across teams
With a clearer understanding of your customers, better insights to achieve stakeholder buy-in
How to create a customer journey map 🛤️
Here are 8 key steps to get the most out of your customer journey map process:
Bring key stakeholders together for an initial brainstorming session
Identify potential user personas - demographics, pain points, interests, etc
Create an empathy map - get a real feel for your customer, who they are, and what they want
Flesh out your ideas with user research. Get under your user persona skin with focus groups, interviews, and surveys
Identify possible customer touchpoints
Choose the information you want to highlight - not everything will be relevant
Decide on the best customer journey map tool to answer your questions
Start building your map
Customer journey mapping examples 🗺️
Each and every customer’s journey is different. This, of course, means that there is no single best customer journey map example or template. Instead, the best customer journey map for any given situation will depend not only on your customers but also on your product, your team, and the goals you’re hoping to achieve by creating the map in the first place.
We’ve found a few examples of customer journey maps to help inspire your thinking:
Current state customer journey maps help you to visualize a user’s experience as it is right now. These are fact-based journey maps - to create an accurate, current state journey map. A good dose of user research data around your actual customers and interactions will help shape this.
An example of a customer journey map
Future state customer journey maps focus on what the customer journey can and should look like in the future. Although UX data is certainly an important aspect of understanding customers, future state journey maps involve a fair amount of creative speculation and interpretation. These customer journey maps focus on customer hopes and wants (future feelings), in addition to experiences and reactions. They can be a little objective and should be developed in balance with both positive and negative interactions.
Day in the life customer journey maps help you visualize your customer’s entire daily routine. Interactions with family, their commute, work meetings, afternoon coffee, etc. Regardless of whether or not the activities are related to your company. This type of journey map should be organized chronologically to give key insights into how and where customers are. What are the distractions, and where could they interact with your brand or product? How can key pain points be eased?
Service blueprints are a useful counterpart to a classic customer journey map. Whereas a customer journey map focuses on the thoughts, needs, and actions of the customer, a service blueprint reflects the perspective of the organization and its employees. What needs to happen behind the scenes to ensure the customer’s experience is the very best it can be.
Circular customer journey maps may be useful to visualize the customer journey as a circle or loop. Recognizing that some customers are recurring and non-transactional. Particularly through subscription-based relationships.
An empathy map is used to create a shared understanding of customers around their wants, needs, thoughts, and actions. This can be a great starting point to getting under your customer’s skin.
An example of an empathy map
Wrap Up 🌯
There is no one size fits all customer journey map. Each customer is unique, each organization is different. Through creating customer journeys, personas and visualizing their key touchpoints, pain points, and understanding who they are, empathy throughout the organization can be generated. With this as a tool to bring key stakeholders on board and to pinpoint where products (and services) can be improved to keep customers or even bring new ones on board, the user experience can be better and more effective.
There’s not much a parent won’t do to ensure their child has the best chance of succeeding in life. Unsurprisingly, things are much the same in product development. Whether it’s a designer, manager, developer or copywriter, everyone wants to see the product reach its full potential.
Key to a product’s success (even though it’s still not widely practiced) is UX research. Without research focused on learning user pain points and behaviors, development basically happens in the dark. Feeding direct insights from customers and users into the development of a product means teams can flick the light on and make more informed design decisions.
While the benefits of user research are obvious to anyone working in the field, it can be a real challenge to convince others of just how important and useful it is. We thought we’d help.
Define user research
If you want to sell the importance of UX research within your organization, you’ve got to ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of what user research is and what they stand to gain from backing it.
In general, there are a few key things worth focusing on when you’re trying to explain the benefits of research:
More informed design decisions: Companies make major design decisions far too often without considering users. User research provides the data needed to make informed decisions.
Less uncertainty and risk: Similarly, research reduces risk and uncertainty simply by giving companies more clarity around how a particular product or service is used.
Retention and conversion benefits: Research means you’ll be more aligned with the needs of your customers and prospective customers.
Use the language of the people you’re trying to convince. A capable UX research practice will almost always improve key business metrics, namely sales and retention.
The early stages
When embarking on a project, book in some time early in the process to answer questions, explain your research approach and what you hope to gain from it. Here are some of the key things to go over:
Your objectives: What are you trying to achieve? This is a good time to cover your research questions.
Your research methods: Which methods will you be using to carry out your research? Cover the advantages of these methods and the information you’re likely to get from using them.
Constraints: Do you see any major obstacles? Any issues with resources?
Provide examples: Nothing shows the value of doing research quite like a case study. If you can’t find an example of research within your own organization, see what you can find online.
Involve others in your research
When trying to convince someone of the validity of what you’re doing, it’s often best to just show them. There are a couple of effective ways you can do this – at a team or individual level and at an organizational level.
We’ll explain the best way to approach this below, but there’s another important reason to bring others into your research. UX research can’t exist in a vacuum – it thrives on integration and collaboration with other teams. Importantly, this also means working with other teams to define the problems they’re trying to solve and the scope of their projects. Once you’ve got an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, you’ll be in a better position to help them through research.
Educate others on what research is
Education sessions (lunch-and-learns) are one of the best ways to get a particular team or group together and run through the what and why of user research. You can work with them to work out what they’d like to see from you, and how you can help each other.
Tailor what you’re saying to different teams, especially if you’re talking to people with vastly different skill sets. For example, developers and designers are likely to see entirely different value in research.
Collect user insights across the organization
Putting together a comprehensive internal repository focused specifically on user research is another excellent way to grow awareness. It can also help to quantify things that may otherwise fall by the wayside. For example, you can measure the magnitude of certain pain points or observe patterns in feature requests. Using a platform like Notion or Confluence (or even Google Drive if you don’t want a dedicated platform), log all of your study notes, insights and research information that you find useful.
Whenever someone wants to learn more about research within the organization, they’ll be able to find everything easily.
Bring stakeholders along to research sessions
Getting a stakeholder along to a research session (usability tests and user interviews are great starting points) will help to show them the value that face-to-face sessions with users can provide.
To really involve an observer in your UX research, assign them a specific role. Note taker, for example. With a short briefing on best-practices for note taking, they can get a feel for what’s like to do some of the work you do.
You may also want to consider bringing anyone who’s interested along to a research session, even if they’re just there to observe.
Share your findings – consistently
Research is about more than just testing a hypothesis, it’s important to actually take your research back to the people who can action the data.
By sharing your research findings with teams and stakeholders regularly, your organization will start to build up an understanding of the value that ongoing research can provide, meaning getting approval to pursue research in future becomes easier. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but it’s a practice that all researchers need to get into – especially those embedded in large teams or organizations.
Anything else you think is worth mentioning? Let us know in the comments.
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