UX Research & User Journey Mapping

Every team believes it knows its users, and most are describing themselves

UX research is the work of finding out what users actually need before a product is designed around what the team assumed they need.

The people building a product understand it too well to use it like a newcomer. They know where things are, what the words mean and what happens next, and none of that transfers to a first time user.

Wink uncovers customer needs, behaviors, motivations and challenges before websites or applications are designed.

What Wink researches and produces

Wink delivers the research artefacts a design team works from.

• User research
• Stakeholder interviews
• Competitor analysis
• User personas
• Customer journey mapping
• User flow creation
• Usability insights
• Behavior analysis

Stakeholder interviews surface the disagreement early

Stakeholder interviews establish what the business believes the product is for, and they routinely reveal that different people believe different things.

A project where sales, operations and management each describe a different primary user will produce a product that serves none of them.

Surfacing that at the start is uncomfortable and far cheaper than surfacing it at review, when a design already exists to argue about.

Journey mapping shows the parts you do not control

Customer journey mapping traces the whole path a person takes, including everything happening before they reach your product and after they leave it.

Most usability problems are not on the screen. They are in what somebody expected, what they were promised elsewhere, or what they had to do first.

Mapping makes those visible, which is why journey work regularly changes the scope of a project rather than just its interface.

User flows turn a journey into something buildable

User flow creation converts the journey into the specific sequence of screens and decisions a product has to support.

A journey describes a person's experience. A flow describes what the product must do at each step, including the paths people take when things go wrong.

Error states, empty states and interruptions are where most designs are thin, and flows are where they get accounted for.

Friction is found by watching, not by asking

Behavior analysis and usability insights identify where people hesitate, backtrack or give up.

Users are poor at explaining why they struggled and excellent at demonstrating it. Watching somebody attempt a task produces more usable findings than asking their opinion of the design.

Every friction point identified this way is a place where the product currently loses people, which is what makes research a commercial activity rather than an academic one.

Competitors show what users already expect

Competitor analysis in UX establishes the conventions your audience has already learned elsewhere.

Users arrive with expectations formed by every other product they use. Meeting those conventions is not unoriginality, it is the difference between a product that feels obvious and one that has to be learned.

Who UX research is for

• Businesses about to build a website or application
• Startups validating a product before committing to development
• Companies whose existing product has poor adoption or high drop off
• Teams that disagree internally about who the product is for
• Organizations redesigning something without knowing why it underperforms

What UX research connects to

Research is the first stage of UI and UX design, and its findings feed directly into wireframing and prototyping.

It informs interfaces produced through website UI design, and audience findings often overlap with target audience and buyer persona work.

Where to start

Tell us the one task users most need to complete and how often they fail at it. If the failure rate is unknown, that is the first thing research establishes.