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App User Journey

Have you ever wondered what makes your favorite app so delightfully captivating, so enrapturing, and so fun to use that it keeps you coming back for more every day? Is it the slick and elegant design, the innovative concept, its ingenious features, or its impressive functionalities? While these are most certainly important and will go a long way in making your app great, the unsung hero behind the triumph of any mobile app is often its user journey.

Every step a user takes within your app can either make or break their experience. A meticulously planned app user journey will keep your users hooked and coming back for more, transforming a one-time download into a cherished daily ritual. For app developers, mobile marketers, and product managers alike, fully comprehending and optimizing this journey is the key to crafting an app that people simply can’t resist.

So today, let’s talk about the app user journey. In this guide, we’ll explore all the facets of the mobile app user journey. We will talk about what it is, discuss its benefits and challenges, and learn how to map the app user journey as well as how to analyze and optimize it; we will also be delving into a plethora of examples, case studies, and templates to ensure you’ve got everything you need to ace the mobile app user journey. Prepare to embark on an illuminating journey through this watershed moment of the app experience. From the initial download to becoming a staple of your user’s daily routines, we’ve got your app user journey covered! Let’s dive in.

Top App Engagement Platforms

But first, the basics. What is an app user journey?

What is an app user journey?

In a nutshell, the app user journey refers to the series of steps that users take within an app as well as the ways they interact with it—from the moment of discovery and app install to the point when they achieve the goals they set out to achieve when they first downloaded your app.

In the context of app user journeys, the goal can take many different forms—for a dating app, it would be finding potential dates/partners; in the case of a gaming app, it would be beating the final game level; the goal for an eCommerce app is most certainly going to be making a purchase; whereas for a health and fitness app, the goal will likely be regular sessions within the app and daily engagement, and so on.

App user journey

Click on image for full size

Source: Medium

Simple enough, right? As with so many other things in life, it’s easier said than done—developing a killer user journey takes countless hours of app development and meticulous analysis. It involves dissecting user behavior to identify and mend any weak points that hinder users on their path to success, i.e. achieving their goals.

7 Trends in App Engagement

Download our 7 Trends in App Engagement Guide , covering the seven most important app engagement trends and strategies to keep an eye out for in 2024.

When we speak of weak points, we refer to any stumbling blocks, UX and UI inconsistencies as well as any other sources of hesitation and confusion for users that might prevent them from exploring further and diving deeper into your app. To avoid losing any users and tanking your engagement and retention rates along the way, it’s paramount that you identify and eliminate any and all pain points.

Mapping your app’s user journey empowers you to effectively address these pain points. It will also enable you to efficiently streamline and optimize your app’s UX and UI, which, in turn, will have a positive effect on your app’s engagement and retention and ultimately your users’ lifetime value (LTV) .

App user journey FAQs

Before we dive any deeper, let’s address a few elephants in the room to ensure we are all on the same page.

User journey vs. customer journey vs. user flow vs. user funnel

User journeys focus only on user interactions within your app, i.e. download, use of features and functionalities, etc. As such, user journeys only pertain to digital touchpoints within an app. In contrast, the customer journey extends to all touchpoints—both digital and physical—with your brand. In other words, user journeys are a subset of customer journeys.

User journey vs. customer journey

Source: CleverTap

User flows, crafted by UX designers, detail the micro-steps needed to achieve specific actions within your app’s interface. User journeys may reference these steps but primarily aim to extract insights about user experiences. A user journey evaluates user sentiments, desires, and broader perspectives, while a user flow focuses on optimizing a single, specific step within the app, e.g. sign-up or log-in flow. User journeys generally encompass multiple user flows.

User journey vs. user flow (I)

Source: AppsFlyer

Another way of thinking about it is to consider user flows as purpose-driven, i.e. the goal is to get users to complete an action—register, log in, complete a purchase, etc. The goal of a user journey is optimization to ensure smooth navigation and overall experience and increase an app’s engagement and retention rates.

User journey vs. user flow (II)

User funnels, on the other hand, track users through a series of steps and serve lead generation and customer conversion purposes. Funnel steps can be part of a user journey, but funnels are generally way broader and more abstract. While user journeys provide granular insights into user interactions and experiences within the app, tailored to specific user segments, funnels focus on the overall steps completed by all users.

User journey vs. user funnel (Top, middle, and bottom of funnel)

Why does the app user journey matter?

For mobile marketers, it’s crucial to showcase an app’s functionality and benefits, i.e. its value, to users. Understanding why users install your app allows you to optimize their experiences, shorten the time from install to purchase / subscription , and fix UX and UI issues that cause users to churn . As your app’s user base grows and new in-app features and functionalities are introduced, mapping the user journey becomes increasingly important for marketers and product managers.

What is the purpose of an app user journey?

Instead of considering your users as an abstract mass, a user journey map helps you visualize your app from the user’s perspective, enabling you to focus on their unique experiences and interactions within the app. A user journey map can highlight areas in need of improvement but also areas where user expectations align with your business objectives and the direction your app is already going in, allowing you to conciliate your users’ varying expectations of your app.

Why is it important to understand your app’s user journey?

App user journeys unlock your app’s potential by helping you understand user behaviour and revealing pain points and user desires. Using insights gained from mapping your user journey, you can uncover critical issues before they turn into major problems and optimize your app’s design and functionality to cultivate long-lasting engagement with your users.

How can mapping the user journey help improve app performance?

Visualizing and mapping the user journey provides crucial insights for streamlining and optimizing the user experience, reducing friction points, and driving conversions and retention. It’s possibly the best strategy to increase engagement and enhance your app’s performance.

When to build a user journey map?

Start mapping your user journey once your app starts gathering steam and you have collected enough users, but before your user base grows into the thousands or your app experiences viral success. It’s best to start mapping the user journey in the early days of growth; this allows you to understand your crucial touchpoints, ensure high levels of user satisfaction before your app gets too big, and discover untapped opportunities before scaling up.

Benefits of an app user journey

Understanding the journey users take within your app can yield a plethora of benefits for your brand and business. When you dissect a user’s journey step-by-step, it not only helps you understand user behavior and enhances your app’s design but also boosts user retention and engagement.

Here’s how a user journey map proves invaluable:

Improved user experience

Delving into how users interact with your app provides vital insights for enhancing their experience. By tracking the user journey, you gain a profound understanding of how your app addresses users’ problems and facilitates them in achieving their goals. It allows you to pinpoint the features that users find most valuable and useful as well as to identify friction points that need to be addressed in order to make the user experience as seamless as possible. These insights empower you to craft an easy-to-use app that users genuinely love and value.

Increased user retention, boosted user engagement

Mapping your app’s user journey reveals areas where improvements are needed. For instance, if users tend to churn shortly after downloading your app, it may indicate issues with your onboarding process . Armed with these insights, you can optimize specific areas of your app to make them as user-centric as possible, which, in turn, enhances the overall user experience and boosts your app’s stickiness . When users find your app instrumental in achieving their goals, they’re more likely to stick around , aka not churn.

User journey maps can also be shared across various teams within your organization, including marketing, product development, and sales. This sharing of insights allows each team to align with a user-centric approach. It equips teams with a clear vision of the users they’re targeting, empowering them to craft an app that resonates with the intended audience.

Targeting the right users

Understanding your target audience is paramount for app success. Trying to appeal to a broad range of users without a clear understanding of what they want or need can be and, to be fair, often is counterproductive.

Researching the goals users want to achieve when using your app as well as the challenges they face along the user journey they take within your app helps you gain deep insights into your users.

This clarity enables you to identify who your users really are and how your app can solve their problems effectively, which, in turn, allows you to target potential new users more efficiently and augments your user acquisition (UA) efforts.

App user journey stages

App user journeys are often dynamic and can vary depending on factors like your app’s category and monetization model. A gaming app, for instance, will inevitably have a very different user journey compared to a health and fitness app, which, for its part, will differ vastly from an eCommerce app, and so on.

While each user journey is unique, there are common stages shared by most apps.

Here’s an overview of the core stages that outline an effective user journey, from initial discovery to ongoing loyalty:

App discovery and awareness stage

When users download an app, they usually do so with a purpose—they have a “problem” that needs solving. The problem can take many different forms—they need to relax and unwind, they want to buy items online, they want to have fun, they want to exercise and/or lose weight, you get the gist.

The thing is, however, the app stores are crowded places and are saturated with millions of apps across a single category. In the app discovery stage, users search the Internet and the app stores to find the app that will best fulfil their needs and solve their problem .

So, to stand out in a crowded app market, make sure to prioritize App Store Optimization (ASO) and referral marketing campaigns. These strategies will help you boost the visibility of your app and encourage users to choose it over all the other options available.

App download (user acquisition) stage

The download stage is the most pivotal for your app’s growth and overall success. It’s a watershed moment, the making or breaking of your app—the download stage represents the first conversion point where users take action and install your app.

Optimizing your app store listing is essential here—from app name, icon, and description to subtitle, screenshots, and preview video , don’t leave anything to chance.

Also, don’t forget to consider factors like positive reviews on the app stores that build trust and convince potential new users to download.

App onboarding and exploration stage

App onboarding is yet another watershed moment in the app user journey. Your users might have downloaded your app, but now you have limited time to show them how it works and why they should stick around and keep using it (i.e. show them your app’s value), otherwise, they are churning faster than you can say ‘retention’ and likely never coming back.

A well-designed onboarding experience is, thus, a must and a cornerstone of user engagement . Users need to understand your app’s value proposition, learn its key features and functionalities, and grant necessary permissions. This guided introduction reduces confusion and user friction, familiarizes users with the app’s interface, and encourages effective further exploration, setting users on a path to subscription or in-app purchases (depending on your app’s monetization model).

In-app engagement (app reuse) stage

To combat early churn and foster user loyalty, maintaining user engagement is crucial. Many users tend to leave after the initial onboarding stage, making ongoing engagement vital for long-term growth, success, and profitability.

Focus on getting users to explore on their own after initial onboarding and promoting the adoption of key features to increase active users on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis (DAU, WAU, or MAU).

Use in-app messaging to offer helpful tips, pointers, and rewards, ensuring users keep coming back for more. The overall goal here is to get users hooked and nurture app loyalty.

In-app purchases/subscription (monetization) stage

In-app purchases , or IAPs for short, and subscriptions , depending on an app’s main monetization model, represent a significant milestone and primary objective for most apps.

The user journey from awareness to purchase

Source: Sendbird

The key to success here is not just targeting all your users at once but nurturing the most lucrative users (the ones most likely to upgrade to a paid plan or make a purchase). So, knowing your target user segment is essential for planning the user journey and messaging around it in order to get the highest number of users possible to convert, i.e. make a purchase and/or subscribe.

Re-purchase stage

After an initial in-app purchase, it’s time to start encouraging repeat conversions and re-purchases from existing users. It’s an incredibly cost-effective strategy compared to acquiring new users . Use messaging channels such as email, push notifications , and in-app messaging  for follow-up communication and recommendations. This is also a great way of personalizing the app experience .

Remember though that not all apps rely on IAPs (see above). Some rely on subscriptions or in-app advertising . In such cases, user loyalty and retention become essentially indispensable if you want to succeed in the app world.

User loyalty and retention stage

As users progress through the app’s user journey, their needs and expectations evolve. Personalization becomes crucial—it’s vital to tailor purchase recommendations, app experiences, and promotions based on individual user preferences. Also, refine your messaging strategy with targeted approaches and leverage advanced segmentation . The end goal is to create a supportive community where users can showcase their achievements, which, in turn, fosters loyalty and keeps users hooked and engaged.

Each stage of the user journey presents an opportunity to enhance the user experience, increase retention, and drive user satisfaction. Understanding these stages and employing effective messaging strategies can help your app thrive in a competitive market.

How to map your user journey

Mapping the user journey: steps, best practices, and pro tips.

Mapping the user journey for your app is a strategic process that involves understanding user goals, motivations, expectations, and concerns in order to deliver an experience that best addresses their problems, needs, and wants.

8 Steps to map the app user journey

Follow these eight easy steps to create an effective user journey map that enhances your app experience:

Define your goals and objectives

Begin by clearly defining your objectives for mapping the user journey. Decide whether you want to focus on the entire user journey or a specific aspect of your app’s experience. This sets the direction for your research, which will help you identify what metrics to track and what strategies to employ to improve your app.

Also, consider involving different teams, such as product development and marketing, in this process. Leveraging their expertise can prove invaluable in defining your goals and objectives.

Build user personas

After you’ve defined your user journey objectives, it’s time to create detailed user personas. User personas are fictional representations of your target users and they will go a long way in helping you understand your real users as well as what they want and need.

Gather insights from current users about their app experience, including discovery, touchpoints, goals, challenges, and decision-making factors. This data can then be used to create your user personas, each getting its own name, detailed description, and a visual representation for clarity.

After your personas are ready, share them with all relevant teams to ensure a unified understanding of your user base.

Identify key interaction touchpoints and channels

Next, map all the touchpoints where users interact with your app. Make sure to include as many touchpoints as possible to gain a comprehensive understanding—this can include push notifications, websites, search engines, other mobile apps, email marketing, social media, ad impressions, post-purchase events, etc. The more interaction touchpoints you include, the clearer the picture you’ll get.

Utilize mind-mapping techniques, brainstorming sessions with your team, direct communication with your audience to collect feedback, online surveys, and competitor analysis to identify all your touchpoints and channels effectively.

Pro tip : When conducting surveys and gathering feedback, consider where users are in the customer lifecycle. The timing of user feedback can significantly impact the results. Analyzing feedback based on the user’s stage in the lifecycle helps identify trends and insights that can inform optimizations.

Visualize the user’s journey

Visualize, aka map out , how users engage with your app, starting from their initial encounter to conversion. Then, capture their thoughts, emotions, and actions throughout this journey.

The goal is to gain a deep understanding of how your app fits into your users’ daily lives and how it helps them address challenges and solve problems.

It’s important to keep in mind that each user persona may have and, truth be told, likely has a unique journey, so tailor the user journey map accordingly to address their specific needs and challenges.

For instance, let’s consider onboarding. Not all users will need an in-depth onboarding, some, usually the tech-savvy ones with lots of experience using similar apps, might prefer to explore on their own without any guidance. So, remember not to generalize and use one-size-fits-all approaches when crafting your user journey.

Identify and overcome obstacles

The next step is to pinpoint obstacles and critical points that may hinder users as they progress through the journey, causing them to churn/drop out.

For example, identify situations where users may abandon the app due to user friction or unclear calls to action. To take the onboarding example further, unclear, overly complicated, and confusing onboarding processes tend to annoy users—a surefire way to make them churn.

Learn more about creating killer onboarding journeys here .

List all the obstacles you can identify and brainstorm solutions to eliminate them, streamlining the UX of your app along the way. If implementing changes alters the user journey, create a new map to assess the impact of said changes.

Design and test the final user journey firsthand

Next, compile all collected data into a comprehensive user journey map. Don’t forget to include user steps, success criteria, retention rates, conversion rates, interaction points, obstacles, and solutions (basically, everything we’ve just talked about).

What a user journey map looks like

After that, test the user journey yourself to gain a deep understanding of the user experience firsthand and make necessary improvements based on your findings. This hands-on approach allows you to identify both positive and negative aspects of your app’s user experience. You can also test the app from the perspective of different user personas to determine what works best for each group.

Create several user journeys

Recognize that users engage with your app in various ways, and their goals may differ. To avoid generalizing your audience and misinterpreting data, create multiple user journeys tailored to your different user personas. This approach enables you to better understand how different user groups interact with your app and deliver a more personalized and customized experience.

Develop and monitor essential KPIs

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate your user journey map’s (preferably maps’) performance. Monitor mobile app metrics like active users, cost per acquisition, conversion rate, retention rate, lifetime value, etc.

By analyzing these metrics, you can then gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and user personas. This will also help you identify specific areas that require further improvements in your user journey map.

Pro tip : Here’s a list of all KPIs to consider when deciding what you need to monitor and track. Remember that not all KPIs listed here may apply to your app: Revenue, a ctive users (DAU, WAU, MAU), cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per install (CPI), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, retention rate, churn rate, uninstall tracking, lifetime value (LTV), return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), average revenue per user (ARPU), average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), average revenue per paying user (ARPPU), re-engagement rate.

Continuously optimization

Finally, remember that mapping and optimizing your app’s user journey is an ongoing effort. Continuously seek ways to improve the user experience and meet the needs of all your users.

This may involve eliminating unnecessary steps in the user journey as a way of streamlining it or developing new strategies to keep users engaged. A/B testing should be a regular practice to refine and enhance your app’s performance based on fresh data.

Remember that optimization is an iterative process, so keep regularly gathering insights, analysing data, and refining your app to create an even better user experience.

By following these steps and best practices, you can create a user journey map that not only enhances your app but also contributes to long-term user satisfaction and engagement.

User journey template: Core elements of the app user journey

Creating an effective user journey map for your app involves considering several core elements to provide a comprehensive view of the user experience.

Here’s a breakdown of these elements:

Personas : Start by defining user personas, which represent different groups of users with unique characteristics and needs. Understanding your target audience helps tailor the user journey to their preferences. See above for more information on creating user personas.

Timeline : The user journey map should have a clear timeline with a beginning, middle, and end. The end goal is typically a conversion, purchase, or app installation. Map out the interactions a user has with your app throughout this timeline.

User journey timeline

Actions : Identify the actions users take at each interaction point with your app. This can include activities like watching an onboarding video, clicking a push notification, making a purchase, or completing a specific task within the app.

Feelings, expectations, and questions : Chart the emotional states of users at different points in the user journey. Analyze user feedback and behavioral data to understand your users better and the emotions they experience at each stage. Additionally, consider the expectations and questions that users may have during each interaction.

Channels and touchpoints : Determine the channels through which users interact with your app and brand. This can include desktop, mobile devices, in-app notifications, email, social media, and more. Understanding the channel preferences of your users will help you tailor your app’s communications and messaging.

User journey template

User experience (UX) : Evaluate the overall user experience of your app, including factors like usability, design, reliability, and overall functionality. A positive UX is essential for a good user journey as well as user satisfaction and retention.

Transactions and payments : If your app involves in-app transactions (IAPs or subscriptions), ensure that the payment process is seamless, trustworthy, and accommodating to various payment methods. Also, clear communication regarding pricing and order confirmations is crucial.

Personalization : Personalization is the best way to deliver in-app experiences that charm users and gain their loyalty long-term. Consider implementing personalization strategies based on user data. Remember to take into account factors like user personas, engagement style, messaging, location, etc. to deliver a personalized user experience that meets individual needs.

By incorporating these core elements into your user journey map, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the user experience and identify areas for improvement. This information allows you to optimize your app to better meet user expectations, increase engagement, and drive conversions.

How do you analyze the user journey and overcome major roadblocks and challenges?

Analyzing the user journey and making sure you don’t fall prey to common pitfalls and misconceptions regarding the user journey are critical steps in optimizing your app’s performance and user experience.

Here’s how you can effectively analyze the user journey to make it as smooth and pleasant for users as possible:

Identify unnecessary interactions : Review the user journey to identify any unnecessary touchpoints or steps that may cause friction. Simplify the journey by eliminating or streamlining these interactions to make the user experience smoother.

Address negative experiences : Pay close attention to the low points in the user journey where expectations are not met, or users have negative experiences. These pain points are opportunities for improvement. Prioritize these areas and work on reversing the negative experiences to enhance user satisfaction.

Recognize successes : Identify areas in the user journey where your app has successfully met or exceeded user expectations. Analyze what worked well in these instances and consider replicating these success factors in other parts of the user journey.

Omnichannel friction : Given that user journeys often span multiple devices and channels, look for instances where transitioning to a new channel disrupts the user’s flow. Ensure that users can seamlessly move from one channel to another without encountering friction or inconsistency.

Time spent at each stage : Analyze how much time users spend at each stage of the journey. Evaluate whether the timing aligns with your goals and whether any stage takes longer than necessary. Adjustments can be made to optimize the pacing of the user journey.

Avoid overgeneralization : There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so a single app user journey map simply won’t make the cut. Each user is unique. Broad strokes are easy and convenient, but it’s the small details and nuances that set a great app apart from an average one.

Segmentation : Recognize that not all users follow the same journey. Segment users based on behavior, demographics, or other relevant criteria. (Learn how to segment your user base here .) Analyze the unique journeys of different user segments to tailor experiences to their specific needs and preferences.

Outliers and micro-moments : Don’t overlook outliers or the significance of micro-moments in the user journey. Sometimes, exceptional user experiences or minor tweaks in micro-interactions can have a substantial impact on overall satisfaction.

In short, to overcome challenges in mapping the app user journey, avoid overgeneralization, pay attention to the small details and nuances, focus on micro-moments and outliers, celebrate successes and remove negative and/or unnecessary experiences and interactions as quickly as possible. Additionally, leverage analytics and user feedback:

• Analytics : Utilize analytics tools to gather data on user behavior, preferences, and patterns. Look for tools that offer both quantitative and qualitative insights, such as heatmaps, to understand where users engage the most and where they drop off.
• User feedback : Collect direct user feedback through surveys, reviews, and direct interactions. Analyze indirect feedback by studying session replays to uncover the reasons behind user behavior. This qualitative feedback provides valuable insights into user emotions, motivations, and frustrations.

By combining quantitative data from analytics with qualitative insights from user feedback, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the user journey and make informed decisions to enhance the user experience and drive app improvements.

App user journey useful resources: Case studies, examples, user journey map templates

• User journey map guide with examples and free templates ( UXCam )
• User journey map examples ( UXtweak )
• 6 User journey map examples to enhance your UX ( Appcues )
• An introduction to the user journey for mobile apps ( Medium )
• The user journey: Onboarding ( Medium )
• The user journey: Activation and commitment ( Medium )
• The user journey: Disengagement and reactivation ( Medium )

Well, we did it—we just covered almost everything there is to cover about app user journeys. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey and will forgive me for the cheekiness. Before we go, here’s your TL;DR.

Importance of user journey : The app user journey is a critical concept and an important step in app development. It involves mapping out the steps users take to interact with your app and achieve their goals. The idea behind mapping out the user journey is to create better user experiences and increase user satisfaction, which ultimately leads to greater app success.

Benefits of the app user journey : User journeys offer several advantages, including enhanced understanding of your user base, valuable analytics insights, improved user experiences, precise targeting of the right users, and increased user retention and engagement. The value of a well-thought-out user journey map cannot be overstated—it’s the difference between a successful app and a failed one.

Key stages in a user journey : While user journeys vary depending on the app itself and its target audience, they typically encompass seven key stages: app discovery and awareness, app download/UA, app onboarding and exploration, in-app engagement and reuse, monetization, re-purchase, and retention and user loyalty. Each stage comes with its own specificities and should be carefully optimized for maximum success.

Mapping out the user journey : To optimize your app experience, you should start by defining clear goals and then create detailed user personas based on thorough research and user feedback. After that, you should identify all touchpoints and channels where users interact with your app. Having done all of this, it’s time to finally create your user journey map, or should I say maps . There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to user journeys, and each user persona will need a dedicated user journey map. Mapping out the journey and testing it yourself helps highlight and eliminate potential roadblocks and obstacles.

Ongoing optimization : App user journeys are an ongoing effort, you can’t simply create your user journey maps and stop at that. Continuously seek ways to enhance the user experience and cater to different types of users. A/B testing, data collection, and analysis are essential components of this ongoing improvement effort.

By understanding and effectively utilizing the app user journey, you can create a more user-centric and successful app that resonates with your target audience.

About the author

Nayden Tafradzhiyski

Nayden is an Editor and Content Manager at Business of Apps.

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Winning Results

Understanding the user journey for mobile apps: Everything marketers need to know

Tiahn Wetzler, Director, Content & Insights, Adjust, Jul 29, 2020.

Mapping user journeys provides app marketers with critical insights into how to optimize the customer experience and eliminate pain points throughout their app’s UX. This makes it easier for users to complete a purchase and helps improve other critical aspects of your app’s performance. In this guide we cover everything you need to know about mapping, monitoring and optimizing the user journey.

What is the user journey?

Also known as a customer journey or the path to purchase, the user journey maps the ways in which users complete a desired action, most often completing a purchase. This typically includes a visual timeline of user actions that show how a user will go from download to conversion, including every interaction they have with your app. User journeys can also be presented as an infographic to help you and your team gain a visual impression of the steps users take to complete a desired action.

Why is the user journey important?

It’s a marketer’s job to show consumers why a product is valuable and worth purchasing. For mobile apps, that means highlighting an app’s functionality and why users will benefit from installing the app onto their device.

As a marketer, you also need to know why a user has installed your app in order to better facilitate their needs. From there, you can learn more about the user experience and how it can be optimized – for example, shortening the usual timeframe between install and purchase, or fixing elements of the user experience that causes users to churn.

Tracking the user journey is a complicated process to master, but with the right data, marketers can observe the path users take with granularity.

Depending on the nature of your app, a user might also access your services via mobile web and in-app, as well as across different devices. And as the number of channels increases, mapping a customer’s journey will become ever more relevant to marketers.

User journey vs. user funnel: what’s the difference?

It’s important to note that the user journey and the user funnel are not interchangeable terms. When developing the marketing funnel, marketers are focusing on a broad audience from the company’s viewpoint. The basic concept is that your potential customers start at the top and move further down the funnel as they get closer to purchase. The user journey is from the perspective of the user, while the user funnel is from the point of view of your company. Because of this, user journeys will account for users’ more complicated path to purchase than the marketing funnel. For example, you can create several user journeys based on different user personas, acknowledging that not all customers will share the same experience or even share the same use for your app.

How to map the mobile app user journey

To start, decide whether you want to focus on the entire journey or one aspect of your app’s experience. For example, in addition to a user’s path to purchase, you can also map the user journey for your app’s onboarding. Once you know the journey you want to map, you can divide your audience into groups that can be identified by different personas.

Creating user personas

This is a user profile that represents a segment of your entire audience. By learning common user behavior, you can create several user personas to understand how different types of users interact with your app. In turn, this enables you to learn what users want from your app, how to build features and which changes will optimize the user experience. User personas should be created with a combination of market research and data analytics. You can also learn about your users by conducting surveys and inviting them to submit feedback.

Gathering data

When trying to identify the ways in which users interact with your app, your research should cover pain points, a user’s primary reason for installing your app and your unique selling point. Answering these questions by gathering data will help you successfully create user personas and begin mapping their different journeys.

Testing results

Your research should reveal how different users interact with your app, which steps they take, and their satisfaction or pain points at every step. Once you have this information and use it to create a map of the user journey, you can begin the optimization process. This includes A/B testing results to learn which changes have positive results and can be implemented to your entire audience. Read our complete guide for more information about A/B testing .

Mapping the user journey: seven best practices for mobile app marketers

1. identify every touchpoint in the user journey.

A touchpoint is any point at which a user interacts with your app, including ad impressions and interactions taking place after a purchase event. Without identifying every touchpoint, you’re missing out on ways to optimize the mobile app user journey and identify areas for improvement.

2. Use user journeys to increase your app’s retention rate

It’s important to find critical problems – for example where customers might churn – in your user journey so you can retain users for longer. For example, if there are fundamental issues with your app’s onboarding, you have an important step in your user journey that is preventing you from generating revenue and causing churn.

3. Create several user journeys for best results

Users will use your app in many different ways and not everyone will share the same goal. To avoid generalizing your audience and misinterpreting data, create several user journeys for your persona groups. Understanding the complexities of how users interact with your app is the best way to offer a better service and impact the performance metrics most important to your company goals.

4. Develop KPIs and measure success

Without measuring the success of the user journey, you won’t be able to move forward with your targets. To understand the performance of each user journey and where to improve, you should develop KPIs. In addition to revenue, here are some of the most important KPIs to consider:

• Active Users (DAU, WAU, MAU) tracks the total active users returning to your app in a given period.
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA) measures how much it costs to acquire a user.
• Cost per Install (CPI) tracks the price of generating an install for your app.
• Click-through Rate (CTR) measures if audiences clicked on your ad.
• Conversion Rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action.
• Retention Rate shows the percentage of users who still use an app after a certain number of days after install.
• Churn Rate tells you the rate at which your users stop returning to your app.
• Uninstall Tracking shows how many users uninstall your app and when it happens.
• Lifetime Value (LTV) provides a running estimate on how much a particular consumer is likely to spend on that app.
• Return on Investment (ROI) measures the effectiveness of your spend
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) tracks the return made on your campaign spend
• Average Revenue per User (ARPU) shows the average revenue generated for each user.
• Average Revenue per Daily Active User (ARPDAU) measures the performance of your monetization models
• Re-engagement Rate tracks the rate of re-engagement your app generates from retargeting campaigns.

These KPIs help marketers understand the performance of their marketing campaigns and the value of their users. You can use them in conjunction with your user personas to learn which types of users need to be retained and which users are generating the most revenue. They can also be used to understand different points in the user journey and where your attention is needed.

With so many metrics at your disposal, it’s also important to be selective. Only measure what matters to your goals to avoid wasting time and money on less impactful optimizations. To learn more about KPIs and how they work, read our Back to Basics guide.

5. Test the customer journey first-hand

When mapping the touchpoints in your user journey, you can also test this yourself for a clear view of the process. By enacting your users’ journey, you gain first-hand experience of your app and have an opportunity to note down the positives and negatives. You can also test out your app as different user personas and see what works best.

6. Continually optimize your mobile app using fresh data

There is no end point to your app’s optimization. You should always be looking for new ways to improve the user experience and satisfy every user persona. Whether you are eliminating unnecessary steps in the user journey or looking for ways to retain users for longer, your app’s performance can always be improved by gathering more data and acting according to your findings. This is why it is important to A/B test as much as possible..

7. Consider the customer lifecycle

When conducting surveys that will inform your user journeys, be sure to consider the customer lifecycle when analyzing the results. Where in the user lifecycle the user is when submitting feedback is an important factor in their results. Without this information you won’t be able to identify trends that could be used to optimize your app’s performance. To learn more about the user lifecycle, watch our webinar with Kara Dake, VP of Growth and Partnerships at CleverTap.

For more mobile marketing insights, read everything you need to know about in-app messaging . You may also be interested in why you need fraud protection .

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How to map a successful app user journey in 8 easy steps

How do you ensure users are using your app in the best possible way?

Your approach to this burning question can be the game-changer between a stellar app with a massive and engaged user base and an impractical one that’s left collecting digital dust.

When users first lay eyes on your app, it needs to leave a lasting impression. It should offer a perfect blend of impact and simplicity, enabling users to effortlessly navigate through the app while accomplishing the desired actions.

But achieving this doesn’t happen on a whim. The key is to eliminate those pesky pain points that make users want to throw their devices out the window. That’s where the magic of mobile app user experience (UX ) comes into play, as you strategically optimize your app in various ways. 

And guess what? It becomes a whole lot easier when you map out the app user journey.

What is a user journey?

The user journey is a series of carefully planned steps outlining how you intend users to interact with your app.

This crucial concept in the realm of app development involves closely examining user behavior to identify any weak points along the path to achieving your desired goals. For example, for a meditation app, the end goal is typically daily engagement, while for an eCommerce app, the end goal might be to complete a purchase.

When we talk about weak points, we mean issues that may cause users to stumble, hesitate, or lose their way. For instance, they may hesitate to explore new features or struggle to grasp certain functionalities.

Mapping out the user journey helps you effectively address these pain points, ultimately enhancing user experiences.

Why is it important to understand your app’s user journey?

App user journeys can unlock the full potential of your app by helping you understand user behavior, pain points, and desires. Based on these insights, you can optimize your app’s design and functionality to create valuable user experiences that cultivate long-lasting engagement with your target audience.

In fact, it’s fair to say that launching an app without user journeys is a blind gamble.

You may get occasional insights from interviews or product analytics, but you’re likely to miss out on important revelations. User journeys give you a comprehensive collection of user experiences that you can intentionally explore through analytics experiments and interviews. This makes it easier to uncover crucial issues before they turn into big problems.

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6 benefits of user journeys in app development.

Here’s a quick rundown of the main benefits of app user journeys:

1 — Empathy and understanding

User journeys allow marketers and developers to dive deep into their target users’ hearts and minds. 

By mapping out the user journey, you can deeply empathize with users, gaining a comprehensive understanding of their problems, needs, feelings, and desires at different stages of app interaction. This understanding empowers intentional changes that address pain points and provide irresistible value, resulting in a more user-centric and engaging app.

2 — Insightful analytics

User journeys guide data collection and analysis, enabling you to observe users’ paths in detail. You get to observe the intricate paths users take, uncover patterns, stumble upon pain points, and spot golden opportunities for improvement. 

Armed with this data, you can run intentional experiments and interviews to reveal valuable insights and prevent issues from escalating. 

3 — Elevating user experience

Understanding how users interact with your app enhances their overall experience. 

Tracking the user journey helps you determine whether your app effectively solves users’ problems, meets their goals, and provides a seamless experience. This knowledge drives continuous improvements, allowing you to optimize features, usability, and design to create a truly valuable and enjoyable app.

4 — Targeting the right users

App user journeys also help you define and target the app’s ideal audience. 

By researching goals, challenges, and user journeys, you can gain clarity about your target users and how your app addresses their specific problems. With this knowledge, you can then craft effective marketing strategies, tailor captivating messaging, and better align your app’s value proposition with the target users’ needs.

5 — Increasing user retention

When an app aligns with users’ goals and consistently delivers value, users are more likely to remain engaged and loyal.

Analyzing the user journey helps you identify potential friction points or gaps in the onboarding process that may lead to user abandonment.  You can use the insights you gain to create a smoother onboarding process and an improved user experience, ultimately boosting retention rates. 

6 — Collaboration and alignment

User journey maps foster collaboration across different teams, ensuring a user-centric approach. In fact, product development, sales, and marketing teams all benefit from understanding the user journey. The insights help teams align their efforts and vision, synchronize their talents, and build an app that resonates deeply with the target users. 

User journey vs. user flow vs. user funnel

App user journeys focus specifically on a user’s interactions within your app, from downloads to use of features and functionalities. 

This differs from the customer journey, which encompasses the broader experience that includes all touchpoints — digital and physical — with your brand, going beyond app usage. With customer journeys, you’re considering solutions to pre-app interactions, app usage, and potential post-app engagements.

The user journey is a part of the customer journey — and so are the user flow and user funnel. However, they’re each distinct terms that cannot be used interchangeably. 

Let’s discuss them in more detail below.

User flow vs. user journey 

Crafted by UX designers, user flows include the intricate micro steps required to achieve specific actions within your app’s user interface. Take, for instance, a simplified login flow: 

Opening the app ➡️  Tapping login ➡️ Entering email address and password ➡️ Tapping login again ➡️ Responding to error messages (if necessary) ➡️ Seeing the display of login success message and app home screen

While user journeys may reference these steps, their purpose lies in extracting valuable insights regarding user experiences at each point of the login. Did they find the process easy? Or did they tap the wrong button, take multiple attempts, or give up altogether? These insights, in turn, fuel improvements in future flows.

Consider a high-level user journey, such as making a purchase. This may combine the entire login flow as a single step: Login. Your goal here is to evaluate user sentiments, desires, and other perspectives, ultimately driving enhancements in encouraging purchases at a broader level, including potential tweaks to the login flow.

On the other hand, a more detailed user journey, such as one focused exclusively on login, will deeply analyze each step of the user flow to optimize the login process. It goes beyond a mere flow chart, encompassing all the previous user details. This comprehensive approach helps create an improved login experience, ensuring a smoother journey for users going forward.

User funnel vs. user journey 

User funnels serve as a distinct tool for tracking users through a series of steps, but they have different purposes compared to flows and journeys.

For example:

• Marketing funnels guide potential customers through steps to generate leads and foster interest in making a purchase. They capture and nurture prospects, aiming to convert them into customers. 
• Sales funnels focus on converting leads into paying customers through a series of steps employed by sales teams. They aim to drive prospective customers toward the point of purchase.

While user flows and user journeys share similarities with funnels, the distinction lies in their focus and level of abstraction. 

Sales and marketing funnels can be considered as steps in a user journey, depending on the level of detail in mapping. In addition, funnels generally represent the overall steps completed by all users, from lead generation to customer conversion. That’s why we talk about ‘top of funnel’ (awareness) and ‘bottom of funnel’ (conversion) activity. 

On the other hand, user journeys focus on the specific steps and user reactions of a particular user segment or persona, whether it’s their journey towards a purchase or sharing the app with others.

In a nutshell, funnels serve lead generation and conversion purposes, whereas user journeys provide a more granular understanding of user interactions and experiences within the app, tailored to specific user segments or personas.

What are the different app user journey stages?

User journey stages may differ depending on your app monetization model and category. For example, a free gaming app with multiple levels will have a different user journey than a meditation app that offers in-app yoga classes for purchase.

While each user journey is unique, apps share certain common stages. Here are the core steps outlining an effective user journey, as the user progresses from discovery to purchase:

App discovery

The app discovery stage has users exploring various app options before deciding to download. With countless apps available in app stores every day, you must prioritize app store optimization (ASO) and referral marketing campaigns to increase visibility and encourage users to choose your app and share it with their networks.

App download

This stage is crucial for your app’s growth and success. It marks the first conversion point in the user journey, where users take action and download the app.

In addition to optimizing your app store listing, identify the main factors that can build trust and convince new users to download your app. These can include limited alternatives, positive reviews, and unique features. Then optimize your user acquisition strategies and personalize marketing campaigns to improve conversion rates.

App onboarding 

A well-designed app onboarding experience makes it more likely that users will keep using your app for a long time. Users understand your app’s value proposition, learn key features, and grant the necessary permissions. It reduces any difficulties or confusion they may face and familiarizes them with the app’s interface. 

This guided assistance allows them to explore and use all of your app’s features effectively.

In-app engagement

This stage is crucial for keeping users engaged and loyal. Many users tend to churn after the initial onboarding stage, so boosting engagement becomes vital for long-term app growth and profitability, especially considering the high costs of acquiring new users. It also drives in-app purchases (more on these below).

To achieve this, focus on promoting the adoption of key features and increasing the number of active users on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You can also use in-app messaging channels to help users with useful tips, reward engagement, and continuously deliver value that keeps them coming back for more.

In-app purchase

Following the initial app download, in-app purchases become a significant milestone and primary objective in many user journeys.

The importance of in-app purchases varies based on your monetization model. Freemium apps, for instance, rely on a small portion of users for revenue. So, instead of targeting all users, focus on nurturing the most lucrative ones. Knowing the user segment to reach this goal will help you better plan your app’s user journey and messaging.

Once an in-app purchase has been made, your next step should be to encourage repeat conversions. Use email, push notifications , and in-app notifications to follow up, provide recommendations, and personalize the experience. Be sure to choose the right communication channel and timing for each case to optimize your messaging.

Note that not all apps rely on in-app purchases. Some generate revenue through ads or data collection. In such cases, user loyalty and retention become the end goal. By enhancing engagement and retention, you can expand the ad audience and increase revenue for free apps that feature in-app advertisements.

User loyalty

As users progress through your app’s user journey, their needs, goals, and expectations evolve. This makes personalization even more crucial. 

Tailor purchase recommendations, app experiences, and promotions based on each user’s preferences. Refine your messaging strategy with targeted approaches. Leverage advanced segmentation and personalization features to ensure the app evolves at the right pace for each user.

You can also create a supportive community where users can showcase their achievements to make them feel valued and keep them engaged as loyal users .

How to map your user journey: 8 key steps

An app user journey map reflects the entire path of interaction between the user and the app. Follow the steps below to better understand user goals, motives, expectations, and fears and optimize your app experience accordingly . 

Step 1 — Define your objectives

Before diving into mapping your user journey, it’s crucial to define your objectives. 

Decide if you want to focus on the entire user journey or just one aspect of your app experience. This will give you a clear direction for your research — what to track and how to enhance your app. You can also involve different teams like product development and marketing to define objectives, leveraging their knowledge about various aspects of the app. 

Step 2 — Build your user personas

Create fictional representations of your target users, including their unique characteristics and attributes, based on in-depth research. Collect feedback from current customers and ask them about their experience with your app. This includes how they discovered your app, their touchpoints, goals, challenges, and decision-making influences.

Understanding your audience is key to building a valuable app. Once you’ve gathered insights, develop user personas with names and even visual representations for clarity. Share these personas with all teams involved in building a successful app.

Step 3 — Identify interaction touch points and channels

Next, map all the touchpoints where users come into contact with your app. The more touchpoints you include in your journey map, the clearer the picture becomes. Examples of communication channels are push notifications, websites, search engines, other mobile apps, email marketing, and social media. 

To cover all possible touchpoints and channels:

• Use mind-mapping techniques and tools to organize your thoughts
• Arrange a brainstorming session with your team 
• Communicate directly with your target audience
• Conduct online surveys
• Carry out competitor analysis

Step 4 —  Visualize the user’s journey

Visualize how users engage with your app, from their initial encounter to conversion. Capture their thoughts, emotions, and actions throughout this journey. You want to understand how your app fits into their daily life and how it helps them solve problems. 

Keep in mind that each user persona requires its own specific user journey, so don’t rely on a generic one. Different personas have unique needs and challenges, so tailoring the user journey to each persona is essential.

Step 5 —  Identify and overcome obstacles

Now that you have an idea of what a user’s journey looks like for your app, pinpoint the challenges and critical points that may hinder users from transitioning between journey stages. For example, a user wants to make an in-app purchase but is asked to sign up, which frustrates them and leads to abandonment. Inconvenient registration processes and unclear calls to action are also potential obstacles.

List all obstacles and brainstorm ways to remove them. And if the user journey changes after implementing new solutions, create a new journey to evaluate the results.

Step 6 — Design and test the final user journey

Consolidate all the data you’ve collected into a comprehensive map that includes the list of user steps, success criteria for each step, retention rates, conversion rates, interaction points, obstacles, and ways to overcome them. 

But don’t stop there: after mapping the user journey, you need to test it firsthand to fully understand your users’ experience — and make necessary improvements based on your findings.

Step 7 — Develop KPIs and measure success

To move forward with your goals, it’s essential to measure the success of your user journey. 

Develop clear key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the performance of each user journey. Track mobile app metrics such as active users, cost per acquisition, conversion rate, retention rate, and lifetime value. By analyzing these metrics, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and user personas, and identify specific areas that require improvements in your user journey.

Step 8 — Continuously optimize your mobile app with fresh data

App optimization is a constant effort. Always look for ways to make the user experience better and meet the needs of every user persona. This could involve removing unnecessary steps in the user journey or finding ways to keep users engaged for longer. 

Consider conducting A/B tests to help you fine-tune and enhance your app’s performance . Remember, there is no final destination when it comes to optimization. You have to keep collecting insights, analyzing data, and refining your app to create an even better user experience.

Key takeaways

• The app user journey is a crucial concept in app development that involves mapping out the steps users take to interact with the app and achieve desired goals. It allows marketers and developers to enhance user experiences and ensure app success.
• User journeys are different from user flows and user funnels, although they are related terms in the context of a customer’s overall journey. User journeys focus specifically on a user’s interactions with the app.
• User journeys provide several benefits, including empathy and understanding of users, insightful analytics, elevating user experience, targeting the right users, increasing user retention, and fostering collaboration and alignment among teams.
• Precise app user journeys differ depending on the app and target user. However, they typically include six key stages: app discovery, app download, app onboarding, in-app engagement, in-app purchase, and user loyalty.
• To optimize your app experience, define your objectives, build user personas based on in-depth research and feedback, and identify all the touchpoints and channels where users interact with your app. Then you can map out and test the journey yourself to highlight any obstacles. 
• App optimization is an ongoing effort, and you have to continually seek ways to improve the user experience and meet the needs of different user personas. Conduct A/B tests, collect insights, and analyze data to create better user experiences over time.

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Building a Mobile App: A Guide to Planning Your User Journey

An awesome app always starts with an awesome idea, but not all awesome ideas turn into awesome apps. What comes after the idea? The process of bringing that great idea to life often involves a bunch of things that you didn’t consider – UI/UX research, marketing, development, hiring people, prototyping, wireframes… there’s more to it than meets the eye!

The thinking, planning, and execution that goes into planning your mobile app design is well worth the effort. It’s what sets your app apart from the millions of other apps on the market. Today we’ll explore wireframes and user journey planning.

It’s an essential part of your user experience, which is something we’ve discussed on our blog before. Let’s dive in!

What are Wireframes?

Like the floorplan of a building, a wireframe is a simple sketch that acts like a floorplan of a mobile app, explaining how different screens are connected to one another. Designers will often provide a complete wireframe diagram to a developer so they can build it out. It’s a great meeting point for developers and designers to work on the app idea together before the execution phase.

Wireframes generally include the following aspects of the user journey and experience:

• Possible app user actions
• Space distribution
• Positioning of elements
• App features
• Content hierarchy
• Transition between pages

Visualizing Your User Journey

Wireframes are one of the most commonly used ways to visualize your user journey, but there are other options too! We’ll cover the differences between the three main ways to help you visualize and refine your user journey, listed in order of the amount of detail in each: Wireframes, mockups, and prototypes.

This is usually the first stage of planning your user journey. We covered the basics of wireframes earlier on. The purpose is to clarify and communicate features and tie them together in a cohesive journey between screens. Wireframes do not incorporate the apps look and feel.

A mockup is a version of a wireframe that is more detailed. It’s static, like a wireframe, but it contains more visual aspects like the branding colors, buttons, graphics, icons, and typography. Mockups help designers add in aspects of the user interface into the user journey.

Prototypes differ from wireframes and mockups for the main reason that they aren’t static. They include UI elements and animations, with buttons that are clickable. The idea of a prototype is to get the complete experience of using the app. It lets you test and discover any user journey issues before moving on to the development stage.

How Does Wireframing Improve the App Development Process?

It seems like a lot of work, sketching out the ideas, drawing up possible linkages between screens. So why is wireframing important? Let’s say you have a great app idea, maybe your local gym could benefit from a virtual training platform. You decide to build an app that includes training plans, a food diary, a calendar, and a community feed. But how do these features interact with each other? How do they provide a cohesive experience for people that attend the gym? An app wireframe helps bridge the gap between your initial idea and the final product that’s in someone’s hands.

1. Refine Your App Idea

When your app idea is just an idea, a lot flies under the radar. You may not see some glaring gaps in the execution or design. There may be some features that simply won’t make sense but you won’t know until it’s built out. An easier way is to wireframe your app idea so you can virtually interact with all the features and clarify your app idea.

2. Streamline Design and Dev Work

Wireframes are much easier to make than actually building out features on an app. You get to track and analyze the user experience and make the journey as easy and intuitive as possible before starting the process of design and development.

3. Helps You Focus on The End Users

Different people may engage with your app in different ways – and that’s a good thing. Doing simple persona-building helps you define the types of users you may have so that you can carve out specific user journeys for them. Wireframes help you visualize those journeys so that you can make them as seamless and effective as possible.

Steps to Visualize and Plan Your Mobile App User Journey

STEP 1: Sketch Out Your User Flow

Think of the different journeys your user may take if they’re given your app – how they’ll behave, what they’ll be drawn to, when they might leave. User flow is a chart that draws out the specific steps a user can take to complete a task. This chart will help you figure out how many screens you need to complete each task and interact with features.

This diagram typically just has rectangle frames and arrows connecting them. It doesn’t necessarily have to be linear, since users can take different paths to complete the same task. The objective is to provide clarity as you move to the following steps.

STEP 2: Design Your App Screen

Now it’s time to roughly piece together what the app screen may look like. This will give your user flow some structure and will be one step closer to a mockup. You can sketch out where particular elements, buttons, and graphics will be.

Generally, boxes are used to represent content in a clear visual hierarchy. These boxes represent how you want your user to process the information on each screen, and their sizes are sketched out accordingly.

This means the important information is placed in bigger boxes from the top to bottom, and left to right in order of priority.

STEP 3: Add Your Copy

No more dummy text! Goodbye, ‘Lorem Ipsum’! Now it’s time to add the actual copy to your screen sketches. It may seem a bit early to do this, but as you start adding copy, you may realize that some UI elements don’t fit the way you thought. Or it might make more sense to rework some parts of the user flow entirely. If you need a simple guide to writing copy for your mobile app, check out this guide.

STEP 4: Link Up Your Screens

Now comes the fun part. Up until now, you’ve only sketched out individual app screens, and now it’s time to connect the screens. This helps your dev team understand how the app will function and how it’s to be built out. To make it easier, assign a reference number to each app screen so you can collaborate with other teams to work on the design and development.

STEP 5: Build Your Prototype

Now it’s time to transform your wireframe into a working prototype. This involves adding more details to your wireframe to end with a version that looks and feels like the final version of your app.

A clickable prototype is an even better option because it gives you a more comprehensive insight into what the final user experience will be like.

Our Top Tools To Visualize Your Mobile App User Journey

User journey planning and wireframing may feel like an intimidating process, especially if you’re new to building an app. But don’t worry! There are some awesome, powerful tools that make the process much, much easier. A good wireframing tool should ideally have templates, make collaboration easy, and have smooth vector editing. Here are a few great options to consider.

Sketch is a popular wireframing tool, available on Mac only. According to their website, “Sketch gives you all the tools you need for a truly collaborative design process. From early ideas to pixel-perfect artwork, playable prototypes and developer handoff.” Key features of Sketch include vector editing, pixel-perfect precision, ability to sync with hundreds of plugins, ability to export presets and code, prototyping, and tools for collaboration.

AdobeXD is one of the most widely-used tools for wireframing and prototyping. Adobe calls it the “fastest and most reliable UX design solution on the market for companies of 10 or 10,000. Break through bottlenecks, iterate rapidly, and scale for the future.” It’s made for design and backed by a solid infrastructure. You can design with reusable elements (and edit), responsively resize groups and objects, and create universal assets, styles, or a repeat grid.

Zeplin is a collaboration and handoff solution, which enables enterprises to share ideas, organize projects and create products using a digital workspace. The platform assists users with generating global style guides, enabling designers and developers to organize, update and share design system colors, text styles, codes, and other components in a centralized repository with drag-and-drop capabilities. It integrates well with software like Adobe XD and Sketch.

Figma is an online, cloud-based, collaborative, vector design tool. On your browser, you can create your wireframe and prototype it in one place. Because of its real-time collaboration capabilities, Figma makes it possible for multiple designers and stakeholders to work on the same project at the same time.

Let’s Wrap It Up

While wireframing may sound tedious and painstaking, it’s well worth the effort. Good user journey planning helps you understand your app’s purpose and its target users better. And while it may not seem that way, it also optimizes the amount of time and money you spend on design and development because it minimizes the likelihood of wasted effort.

Happy building!

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How to Design a Perfect App User Journey (+Template)

Are you looking to create a seamless mobile app user journey that keeps your users engaged and satisfied? You're in the right place! 

In this post, we'll walk you through the process of designing a perfect app user journey, complete with a handy template. We'll also explore how surveys can be a valuable tool to optimize your mobile app user journey. Let's get started!

What is an app user journey?

An app user journey represents the path a user takes while interacting with your app, from the moment they download it to achieving their desired goals. It's like a roadmap that guides users through the app's features, functions, and content.

To design a perfect user journey for your app, you need to take a walk in your users' shoes and map out their experience step by step. This process ensures that users can seamlessly navigate your app and have a positive experience, which, in turn, boosts engagement and retention rates.

The mobile app user journey template

To make the user journey design process more manageable, we've created a handy template for you to use. This template consists of six crucial stages that help structure your mobile app user journey effectively.

1. Onboarding

The user's journey starts with the onboarding process. This is where you introduce your app to the user, showcasing its value and features. 

It's crucial to provide a smooth onboarding experience, making users feel welcome and eager to explore further.

Key elements:

• Welcome screen
• User registration
• Tutorial or walkthrough

2. Discovering features

Once users are acquainted with your app, they start discovering its features and functionalities. This stage should be engaging and intuitive, encouraging users to explore and learn more.

• App navigation
• Feature introductions
• Interactive tips

3. Achieving goals

This is the heart of the user journey. Users come to your app with specific goals in mind, such as making a purchase, completing a task, or accessing information. Ensure that this stage is effortless and rewarding.

• Completing actions
• Making transactions
• Receiving notifications

4. Staying engaged

User engagement is essential for long-term success. Keep users coming back to your app by providing valuable content, personalized recommendations, and incentives.

• Personalized content
• Push notifications
• Gamification

5. Handling issues

No app is perfect, and users may encounter problems or have questions. Make sure there's a clear path for users to get support and resolve any issues.

• Customer support
• Troubleshooting guides

6. Leaving feedback

Feedback is invaluable for app improvement. Encourage users to share their thoughts and suggestions, creating a feedback loop that aids in constant refinement.

• In-app feedback
• Ratings and reviews

Leveraging surveys in app user journeys

Now that you have a user journey template at your disposal, let's talk about how surveys can enhance your mobile app user journey.

Surveys are a fantastic tool for collecting valuable insights from your users. They allow you to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points, all of which can significantly influence your app's design and performance. 

Here's how surveys fit into the various stages of the user journey:

After users complete the onboarding process, you can use a quick survey to gauge their initial impressions and any issues they encountered during setup.

During this stage, you can ask users about their experience with the app's features and how easy it was to discover and understand them.

After users complete significant tasks or transactions, a survey can help you understand their satisfaction level and identify any roadblocks they encountered.

To improve user engagement, you can periodically send surveys to assess the relevance of your content and features.

When users seek assistance, you can send a survey to assess their experience with customer support or troubleshooting resources.

Encourage users to leave feedback and suggestions through an in-app survey, ratings, or reviews. This feedback is invaluable for continuous improvement.

Surveys can be strategically integrated into each stage of the user journey to capture insights and feedback in real-time. Analyzing survey responses allows you to identify pain points, areas for improvement, and opportunities to enhance the user experience.

Crafting effective surveys

To ensure your surveys are effective, keep the following best practices in mind:

• Keep it concise
• Users are more likely to participate in short and straightforward surveys.
• Use a mix of question types 
• Include multiple-choice questions, rating scales, and open-ended questions to gather diverse feedback.
• Timing matters
• Send surveys at appropriate moments within the user journey, so the context is fresh in users' minds.
• Act on feedback
• Let users know that their input is valuable by implementing improvements based on their suggestions.
• Incentivize participation
• Offer small rewards or discounts as incentives to encourage survey completion.

Start improving your app user journey with surveys

Designing the perfect app user journey is an ongoing process that requires constant refinement. The mobile app user journey template we provided is a solid starting point, and surveys are the icing on the cake to optimize and enhance the experience .

If you want to start harnessing the power of surveys in your mobile app user journey, we recommend using a comprehensive survey tool like Survicate. It allows you to easily create, distribute, and analyze surveys within your app.

Don't wait; take the next step in creating a better user journey for your app. Sign up for a free account with Survicate today and unlock the full potential of surveys in improving your app's performance!

Designing a perfect app user journey may seem like a complex task, but with the right template and the assistance of surveys, you can create a smooth and enjoyable experience for your users. Start optimizing your app user journey today and watch your user engagement and retention rates soar.

We’re also there

• Introduction

What does your mobile app customer journey look like?

How can mapping the user journey help improve app performance.

• The 5 stages of the mobile app user journey

Core elements of the app user journey

Mobile app user journey example, empower your mobile customer journey with sendbird.

Drive growth and reduce costs with omnichannel business messaging

Understanding the mobile app customer journey

Understanding every user’s experience at each step of the mobile app user journey is critical to driving engagement , retention , and conversion. Knowing why users have installed your app and how they will benefit means you can better meet their needs.

In this blog, we’ll cover all things related to the mobile app journey; including how to map the user journey, core journey elements every marketer should consider, an example of a customer journey from a mobile game to help you bring it all together.

The user journey generally outlines how users complete a desired action, which usually includes making a purchase or reaching a goal.

Your mobile app customer journey looks like the path everyone takes on the way to that goal. For dating apps, the action could be purchasing unlimited swipes. Food delivery apps, purchasing a subscription to bring delivery costs down. Gaming apps, upgrading your gameplay with an in-app purchase.

The app user journey includes a flow chart of touchpoints and the user's actions, from downloading to conversion. You can also present your specific journey as an infographic to visualize the steps users take to complete each action (find an example of this below).

By visualizing and building out your user journey, you can gain valuable insights into optimizing the customer experience and eliminating pain points wherever they exist. This exercise allows everyone to put themselves in the customer’s shoes to increase engagement and conversion.

For example, if users are churning too early on in the journey, take steps to shorten it. Make sure there aren’t any friction points, and add personalized messaging to help shortcut any search time on your customer’s end.

Boosting conversion and driving retention is the name of the game. Mapping your journey helps everyone in your org understand the critical aspects of your app and how customers navigate there.

Mapping your user journey also helps develop your UX, for apparent reasons. Here are some relevant UX resources from our team to yours:

Top 15 must-know mobile app UX best practices

Evaluating developers’ onboarding experience

The five stages of the mobile app user journey

The tricky part about mastering the mobile app user journey is that if you want people to download and engage with your app, you need to know what they need before realizing they need to do something.

That means you need to understand the problem driving their need, how they feel, and how they learn about your app as a solution. With this information in mind, you can then increase the chance they will download your app to meet their needs.

User engagement depends on what users think and feel as they encounter each step in the user journey. You need to know if your UX design and messaging encourage them to stay engaged with your app or if some element of the user experience frustrates them. It’s crucial for users to feel engaged and positive about your app at every touchpoint so they continue to the next stage of their journey.

The stages can vary depending on your app’s purpose and monetization goals. For example, the user journey for an ad-supported free game might focus on engaging users in the game to show them ads. In contrast, a trial version of a photo editing app might focus on engaging users so they buy a full version or subscription.

While every user's journey may differ, most apps share these common stages in their user journey:

1. App discovery and awareness

To start, your app must stand out among the millions of other apps on the Google Play Store and iOS App Store.

App store optimization, i.e., investing in early marketing funnel activities like app story copy and advertising, can help raise awareness around who you are, what you do, and where to find you.

2. App download

The first conversion point is when a user downloads and opens your app after finding it. If they like the app, they may continue on to create an account.

Competition is fierce, and the stakes for failure are high. The day one retention rate for new apps is 25.3%. Your app needs to make an excellent first impression so users stay engaged and continue to use it after downloading it. That means optimization: Ensuring the app is targeted to the right users, meets their needs immediately, and provides a seamless and engaging experience.

Get it right; users will sign up and enter your onboarding process.

3. App onboarding

The onboarding process must be intuitive enough to show users what to do and how to complete actions without adding friction.

A smooth and seamless onboarding experience will introduce the UX, explain features, build trust (and get necessary permissions like location sharing and permission to send push notifications), and make users familiar with and comfortable using your app.

When done right, onboarding should show users everything they can do with the app and build long-term retention and engagement.

4. Engagement and re-engagement

In this stage, user adoption and retention are crucial for your app’s success. This involves encouraging users to use key features , increasing active users daily, weekly, and monthly, and fostering app loyalty.

Since the 30-day retention rate for mobile apps is only 5.7%, building user engagement and reducing churn is essential. One effective way to achieve this is by using in-app messaging solutions . These can boost user engagement, provide instant customer support, and create a vibrant community for your app.

5. Purchase, action, and monetization

In-app purchases are the second key conversion point in the mobile app customer journey. For example, for a ride-sharing app, this point occurs when a user requests a pickup, or in a mobile game, it’s when a player buys a loot box or subscription.

In-app purchases can also take other forms depending on the app monetization model. Freemium games may focus on revenue from in-app advertising, so their end goal is long-term user loyalty and retention to increase the ad audience and earned revenue.

This stage can be challenging, as users may churn when faced with a purchasing decision. For example, users may search for an app offering the same features for free or become frustrated by too many in-app ads and delete their app. Building user engagement can help offset churn – highly engaged users are likelier to make in-app purchases.

Whatever the steps of your unique user journey may be, there are a handful of elements that every builder and marketer needs to consider when creating an app with the perfect user flow:

Sign-up and login

The sign-up includes creating a user account in your app and successfully logging in.

Because it often requires providing personal information, it can also cause users to abandon the app. Make the sign-up process simple, transparent, and easy to understand to minimize the chance of users getting frustrated.

User experience is fundamental to how people interact and react to your app. In general, providing a good UX means creating an intuitive, easy-to-use, and understandable app.

Ensure that elements such as in-app chat , overall look and feel, usability, and reliability are well-designed and let users do what they set out to achieve with your app. Functional bugs and glitches, a clunky interface, or an outdated design can result in users leaving the app.

Transaction and payment

Few things frustrate users more than a negative payment experience. Transactions within your app should be seamless and flexible. For example, users may want to use different payment methods or channels to make a transaction. If the payment process has friction points or doesn’t inspire trust, users may abandon the transaction (and the app) without purchasing.

Your user journey map must understand and consider the various handoffs and possible hiccups affecting the payment process to ensure a seamless user experience. Ensure that your payment methods are clear and straightforward and that essential communications such as order confirmations, pricing , and in-app messaging are informative and timely so users feel comfortable purchasing.

Personalization

Users increasingly demand personalized experiences, and smart mobile app marketers are taking notice. According to research by Google , 89% of marketers reported that app personalization increased their revenue.

To create user journeys that accurately reflect the experiences of real users, it is essential to gather data on user behaviors, perspectives, steps, thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs. This data lets you build features and design your app to provide the personalization users want. That means focusing on several key areas:

Create user personas based on common behavior to understand how different users interact with your app so you can optimize the user experience. Use research, analytics, and surveys to gather feedback and synthesize it into personas, including demographics, attitudes, and interests. Interest-based targeting is also important to tailor content and UX to user preferences.

Engagement style

How users engage with your app should inform the in-app messaging and UX experience to guide them along the user journey.

For example, understanding when users last engaged with the app and for how long lets you respond with special offers or messages to encourage them to re-engage. The more data you can collect on user engagement styles, the more you can refine your app to increase long-term engagement and reduce churn.

Personalized and relevant in-app messaging creates a more positive user experience, which builds loyalty and retention. Use personas and user data to transform customer communication into ongoing, focused messaging conversations to inspire confidence and trust.

Using location data can significantly enhance the functionality and personalization of your app. For example, you can provide localized and personalized content like recommendations and relevant updates to engage with users at any time and place.

Let's look at how all this comes together in a sample user journey for the mobile RPG/strategy game Heroes of Neverdale:

Discovery and installation: Users find the game on the app store or via ads and install it on their device.

Initial launch:  Users are greeted with an animated splash screen on the first launch.

Onboarding: An automatic tutorial guides users through game mechanics like character movement, combat, and story progression.

Gameplay introduction: After the tutorial, users are introduced to different game modes, like PvE campaign and PvP arena.

Character customization: Users can create and customize their characters with unique appearances, skills, and weapons.

PvE campaign: Users engage in story-based missions and strategic challenges.

Social interaction: Users can join guilds, collaborate with other players, trade items, and communicate via chats.

PvP arena: Users can participate in PvP battles and compare their skills with players worldwide in a competitive ranking system.

In-game store: Users can buy in-game currency to enhance gameplay, with premium currency also available for purchase with real money.

Engagement mechanics: Daily missions, weekly challenges, and surprise content maintain user engagement and excitement.

Game updates: Regular content and feature enhancements are based on user feedback.

Community support: An in-game reporting mechanism is provided along with a dedicated community section with forums and developer logs.

With Sendbird, effective, easy-to-integrate, and customizable mobile user engagement is at your fingertips with our in-app user communications solutions .

Sign up to try Sendbird’s customer service software for free, or request a demo . Sendbird is ready to supercharge your app so you can deploy customer journeys that generate better engagement, conversions, and retention.

Take customer relationships to the next level.

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Mobile app user journeys: Definitions, analysis, and best practices

User journeys are one of the most powerful tools for building great mobile apps. And when employed with thoughtfulness and rigor, they can be your golden ticket to first-class rates of conversion, retention, and engagement.

The problem is user journeys are often misunderstood and conflated with other industry concepts like user flows and funnels , leading them to be poorly applied or overlooked entirely.

In this article, we’ll explore what user journeys are with nuance, why they’re crucial for successful mobile apps, as well as provide best practices for getting investment-worthy results.

What is a user journey?

A user journey (or mapping a user journey) is a technique for gleaning insights about your users by putting yourself in their shoes. And the key to understanding how it works to produce these insights is right in its namesake: journey.

The word “journey” triggers an array of associations. We think adventure, obstacles, and a variety of experiences. We think about a spectrum of emotions complete with highs and lows. And we often think about a journey being framed around something specific such as a career journey or fitness journey or personal growth journey. Regardless of whether an explicit goal is involved, the emphasis when talking about a journey is always about what the person on the journey did and experienced at various stages along the way, whether they achieved the goal or not.

Likewise, a user journey is an attempt to document a holistic account of the journey a user takes as they attempt to do something with your app. And that includes not just what happens when they use the app’s features, but also what happens before they know your app exists, as well as what happens between and after uses. 

Why do we need user journeys?

If you want people to download your app and do something (e.g., convert), then you need to understand what they’re going through before they even realize they need to do something. You need to understand the problem driving this need, why they are encountering it, the steps that led up to them encountering it, and what they’re feeling and thinking in response to encountering it. Furthermore, you need to be aware of how they might become aware of your app as a solution to the problem, whether that involves ads, advice from friends, or another channel. With this data in mind, you can then take intentional steps to increase the likelihood that they will seek out and download your app as the solution to their problem.

User journeys provide you a comprehensive list of experiences about which you can intentionally conduct interviews and run analytics experiments so you force these insights to the surface before they become serious issues.

Similarly, if you want people to continue using your app once they’ve downloaded it (e.g., engage and retain), you need to understand their thoughts and feelings as they encounter each step in your app’s UX. You need to know if they’re closing the app out of frustration or using your app plus an additional third-party tool because they don’t realize your app can do it all. And if they do abandon the app, you want to know what they do and why so you can prevent future users from making the same choice.

By mapping out a user journey, you force yourself to empathize with your users with a whole new level of rigor. First, you do work to identify all the ways in which they may encounter your app, brand, or the problems your app solves. Then, for each of these “touch points,” you create holistic accounts of problems, needs, feelings, and potential wants that you can then use to make changes that either resolve pain points or introduce new and irresistible value. The user journey map forces you to cover all your bases, and it forces you to get so specific that you can’t help but notice high-value next steps.

Trying to launch a successful app without user journeys is like playing a guessing game. Sure, you might get lucky and discover an important pain point during a routine user interview or notice some patterns in your product analytics data, b ut critical insights may never come up. User journeys provide you a comprehensive list of experiences about which you can intentionally conduct interviews and run analytics experiments so you force these insights to the surface before they become serious issues. It’s like having a heat map of where to look before problems really become problems, not to mention where to look to create new and lasting value!

Who needs user journeys?

Since user journey’s are essentially a tool to empathize with your users, their value transcends a variety of roles:

UX designers

Understanding pain points, wants, and needs at different stages helps UX designers refine existing features and introduce new experiences that positively impact key metrics.

Understanding what happens before conversion helps marketers drive conversion. But understanding what happens after also drives conversion, engagement, and retention by allowing marketers to frame value and more effectively set expectations.

Product managers

The high-level product insights that come from understanding actual feelings and behavior, and the opportunities for value creation around them, can drive important roadmap decisions.

Founders and solo developers

As an app founder or solo developer, you often perform all of these roles, so user journeys are essential for making your life easier by adding structure to all the noise.

What’s the difference between journeys, flows, and funnels?

User journeys are often conflated with user flows, sales funnels, and marketing funnels because they all involve a user moving through a process with various steps or stages. However, that’s where the similarities end, since each of these tools exist for very different purposes.

Flows vs. journeys

User flows are defined by user experience (UX) designers and are comprised of every little micro step needed to make something happen in the context of your app’s user interface. For example, the following steps might constitute a simplified login flow:

• Open the app
• Enter email address
• Enter password
• Respond to error messages if necessary and repeat steps 3 through 5
• Display login success message
• Display app home screen

While a user journey may reference these steps in some way, the flow exists to define how a UI is to be built and the journey exists to glean insights on what the user is experiencing at each step of the journey so future flows can be improved.

For example, a high-level user journey, perhaps one focused on making a purchase, might represent this entire login flow as a single step: login. Next, one would assess details about user feelings, wants, and other perspectives in order to glean insights for how we can better encourage purchases at a high level, including but not limited to tweaking the login flow.

On the other hand, a more granular user journey, say one focused on login, might include every step in this user flow as a step in the journey for the sole purpose of optimizing the login flow. Each step in the flow wouldn’t just appear as a flow chart, but include all the aforementioned user details for the purpose of creating a better login flow going forward.

Funnels vs. journeys

Funnels are another tool to track users through a series of steps, but again, exist for different purposes than both flows and journeys.

A marketing funnel is a tool used to generate leads. That is, it’s a series of steps a potential customer goes through, resulting in a conscious interest in purchasing a product. A sales funnel is a tool used to turn leads into customers. It’s yet another series of steps that sales teams push prospective customers through in order to convert them into customers who’ve made a purchase.

Like user flows, the steps in a sales or marketing funnel may be represented as one or more steps in a user journey, depending on the focus of the user journey and level of abstraction. Moreover, a marketing or sales funnel may represent steps completed by all of your users in order to become leads and subsequently customers, while user journeys are the nuanced steps (and reactions to those steps) a specific class of user (as represented by a persona) is taking in order to do something in your app, whether that’s making a purchase or simply sharing the app with a friend.

Finally, there’s one more type of funnel worth mentioning: the Funnel tool in Mixpanel. This is a product analytics tool used to track which users complete any arbitrary series of steps, whether those steps are part of a user journey, user flow, or something else attempting to be measured. Once you define a user journey, the funnel tool in Mixpanel can be used to run experiments to test the degree to which your assumptions align with the reality of your user behavior.

How does one create strong user journeys for mobile apps?

There’s a variety of ways you might approach crafting your user journeys, including opting for a different ordering as needed, but I find this series of steps to be particularly helpful in creating high-quality journeys:

1. Clarify your goals and choose your framing

User journeys do not exist in a void. They are created with the explicit purpose of gleaning insight about something specific. Do you want to drive more purchases? Then you want a user journey that focuses on making a purchase. Are you exclusively interested in downloads? Then purchase activity may or may not be relevant. Do you want to test a specific feature of your app to the exclusion of others?

The answers to questions like these are essential to framing your user journey so you can decide which steps and details are relevant to your mapping. You might even decide to prioritize multiple goals and framings, each requiring one or more user journeys of their own to provide sufficient insight.

2. Research your users and define personas

Creating user journeys is both an art and a science. In part, you’ll combine anecdotes and your experiences to intuit your users perspectives, but that can only take you so far. Your user journeys should reflect real perspectives, steps, thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs of real users, so you’ll need to do the legwork to collect real data in all of these areas by running experiments and conducting user interviews.

Once you have sufficient data to start, synthesize your research into personas. A persona is a concrete way of documenting a class of real users with real characteristics—complete with a name, specific demographics like age, location, and income, as well as roles in life, attitudes, needs, and the like. Without this defining this all well, a user journey is largely meaningless because it’s too abstract to serve any actual category of user.

Luckily there’s tons of articles on defining user personas out there, and defining the full set of personas that are relevant to your app is a step that should be taken as early as possible in the product development process.

3. Brainstorm touch points and channels

A touch point is any point at which a user interacts with your app or your brand, before, during, or after installing and using the app itself. For example, a user might see an ad for your app on Facebook, notice it in the App Store search results, or hear it mentioned in a podcast episode. Once they start using the app, different screens or functions could serve as touch points through which the app might communicate with the user. For example, a user might submit a form in your app for review and then receive an email when the form has been processed. That email is as much a touch point as the form itself, along with the website, customer support chats, or any other way the user might interact with you or your company.

When brainstorming touch points for a user journey, it’s important to consider only those that are relevant to the focus of the journey. Does the user have the ability to contact support before making a purchase? If not, then it’s likely not a touchpoint to list out in this step if you’re defining a user journey around purchases.

Additionally, touch points can be further organized by splitting them into different channels. For example, you might classify a touch point as “submit loan application” but provide the user multiple channels to submit the application: via the mobile app and via the website. This simply provides an additional level of granularity that can help you cut through the noise.

4. Pick your steps

Now that you’ve brainstormed your touch points, you have more of a concrete sense of the steps the user is going through in order to complete the action you’re trying to measure with the user journey. You can now use these touch points as a basis for revealing the high-level steps that are relevant in going from the start of the journey to achieving the result.

There is no standard set of steps for mobile app user journeys because they can be created for so many different levels of abstraction. As we already established, a user journey about your login process might include all the steps of your current user flow with maybe a few others leading up to and preceding the user flow.

That said, if you’re trying to map something high-level like a journey to making a purchase (also referred to as a customer journey), chances are others have attempted to do this, as well, and have come up with some clever ways of organizing touch points into journey steps for their mobile apps.

If your steps are a comprehensive account of the user’s path toward doing the action you’re trying to measure, you’re good to go.

5. Prioritize details for analysis

Now that you have your steps, it’s time to decide what data you want to collect for each step. For mobile app journeys, I recommend collecting the following:

• The touch points for the step (see above)
• The user’s goals and wants at this step
• Expected user behavior vs. actual user behavior (to the best of your knowledge)
• The user’s emotional state, miscellaneous thoughts, and reactions at this step
• Causes of user friction (related to emotional state)
• The opportunities and ideas for providing additional value at each step

The above are a great starting points for most mobile apps. However, depending on your app’s niche, you may track additional details for each step in their own right:

• A fitness app may track the user’s perceived fitness progress at each step
• A to-do list app may track the user’s sense of productivity at each step
• A meditation app may track the degree to which a user feels peace at each step

6. Lay out your journey into columns and swim lanes

Now that you have the ingredients for your journey, we want to see it laid out in a way that’s easy for us to reason through and digest. That’s why user journeys are most often laid out with one column per step and one row or swim lane for each detail being analyzed.

7. Experiment and iterate

Finally, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned! Refer to your journey regularly. Systematically walk through each step and create a backlog of experiments and user interviews about specific topics to test whether the assumptions you’ve laid out are correct. Where they are, use that validation to update your feature backlog and marketing strategy. Where they are not, run experiments to find out what’s really happening and adjust your journey accordingly as you craft a deeper understanding.

About Joseph Pacheco

Joseph is the founder of  App Boss , a knowledge source for idea people (with little or no tech background) to turn their apps into viable businesses. He’s been developing apps for almost as long as the App Store has existed—wearing every hat from full-time engineer to product manager, UX designer, founder, content creator, and technical co-founder. He’s also given technical interviews to 1,400 software engineers who have gone on to accept roles at Apple, Dropbox, Yelp, and other major Bay Area firms.

Gain insights into how best to convert, engage, and retain your users with Mixpanel’s powerful product analytics.  Try it free .

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• user experience

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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

• What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
• Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
• How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

• Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
• Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
• Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
• Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
• Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience.  In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

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User Onboarding

App user journey: mapping from download to daily use.

18 March, 2024

Growth Manager

What's the secret sauce behind the success of your favorite app? Is it the sleek design, the ingenious concept, or the robust functionality? While all these elements surely contribute, the unsung hero of a successful app is often its  user journey .

So, why is this journey so important? It's simple. A well-planned app user journey keeps users coming back. It turns a one-time download into a daily habit. And for product managers, understanding this journey is the key to building an app that people love to use.

So, get ready to step into the shoes of your users as we embark on an exploratory journey, delving into this comprehensive guide to understanding the app user journey. From download to daily use, we've got you covered!

The app user journey defined

An app user journey refers to the series of steps a user takes when interacting with an application, from the moment they first discover and download it to the point where they achieve their primary goal or complete a specific task within the app. This journey can be mapped out to understand and optimize the user experience (UX).

Let's break it down.

Imagine your first day in a new city. You have a map, some destinations in mind, and a whole city to explore. The app user journey is like that map. It's the path users take as they explore an app. From the moment they download it to their daily interactions, every step is a part of the journey.

Now, why does this matter so much? Think about that city explorer again. If the map is confusing, they might end up lost or frustrated. If the destinations aren't interesting, they might cut the trip short. The same goes for apps. If the user journey is confusing or uninteresting, users might uninstall the app or simply stop using it.

But if the journey is clear, engaging, and leads to satisfying experiences, users will keep coming back. They'll tell their friends about it, write positive reviews, and the app becomes a success.

In other words, the app user journey isn't just a path; it's the heart of the app. It's what turns a cool idea into a must-have app. And understanding this journey isn't just helpful; it's crucial for the success of the product.

Tools and techniques to analyze app user journey

Dive into the world of user journey analysis, and you'll quickly realize it's a vast ocean of data, insights, and opportunities. But how do you navigate these waters effectively? Let's introduce you to some essential tools and techniques that can be your compass and guide.

Discover the power of UXcam

As a product manager, one of your primary objectives is to understand and enhance the user journey. This starts from the moment a potential user discovers your app and culminates in their daily use of it. A fantastic tool that can assist you in this task is UXcam . 

UXCam website

UXCam stands out as a leading mobile app analytics solution. UXCam's strength lies in being designed specifically for mobile apps, making it a reliable choice for mobile app-focused user behavior data and analytics. The best mobile product teams use UXCam to get actionable user insights to optimize app performance. Teams can analyze user behavior, track interactions with app screens, diagnose low conversion and retention rates, pinpoint areas of improvement and work towards building a better, more intuitive product. 

It's user-friendly, so you don't need to be a tech wizard to get started.

It offers real-time insights, ensuring you're always in the loop.

It's designed with product managers in mind, focusing on what truly matters for optimizing user experience.

Key features for mapping app user journey

Imagine being able to see exactly where users tap, swipe, or linger on your app. Heatmaps give you this superpower. They paint a picture of user activity, highlighting hotspots and cold zones.

Why heatmaps are important;

They visually represent user engagement, making data interpretation a breeze.

You can quickly identify which features users love and which ones they're bypassing.

They help you prioritize design and feature enhancements based on real user behavior.

Session Recordings

Ever wished you could sit next to a user while they navigate your app? Session recordings are the next best thing. They let you watch, rewind, and analyze user sessions, offering a front-row seat to their experience.

What you'll gain from session recordings:

A clear understanding of user flow and navigation patterns.

Insights into potential pain points or hurdles users face.

The ability to validate if the onboarding process is smooth and intuitive.

Funnel Analysis - Mapping the user's path

You've set up goals for your users, be it signing up, making a purchase, or any other key action. Funnel analysis helps you see how many users complete these goals and where others drop off.

Why funnel analysis is essential:

It pinpoints stages in the user journey with high drop-off rates.

You get clarity on which parts of your app drive conversions and which ones need tweaking.

It aids in optimizing the user journey, ensuring more users reach the desired end goal.

Understanding the user journey isn't just about collecting data; it's about making sense of it. With tools like UXcam and techniques such as heatmaps, session recordings, and funnel analysis, you're well-equipped to craft a user experience that's not just good, but exceptional. Dive in, explore, and let these tools guide you to product success.

Stages of the app user journey

The Discovery stage marks the beginning of the user's journey with your app. It's that critical moment when potential users stumble upon your app in an app store, through an advertisement, a friend's recommendation, or any other medium. The goal at this stage is to capture their attention and compel them to download your app. 

There are certain factors that can influence a user's decision at this juncture: 

App Store Optimization (ASO): Akin to SEO for websites, ASO involves optimizing your app's title, description, and keywords to ensure it appears at the top of search results in app stores.

User Ratings and Reviews: Potential users often consider the experiences of others before deciding to download an app. High user ratings and positive reviews can greatly enhance your app's appeal.

App Description and Screenshots: An engaging description paired with visually appealing screenshots can give users a snapshot of what your app offers and how it looks and feels.

Understanding the importance of the discovery stage and optimizing these factors can significantly increase your app's visibility and download rates. 

.css-61w915{margin-right:8px;margin-top:8px;max-height:30px;}@media screen and (min-width: 768px){.css-61w915{margin-right:38px;max-height:unset;}} The Discovery stage is your chance to make a great first impression. Make sure your app stands out in the crowded app marketplace. Every detail - from your icon design to your app's description - should be compelling and appealing to your targeted audience.

Practical tips to optimize each of these factors in the discovery stage;

Use relevant keywords in your app's title and description, and keep track of what keywords competitors are using. Make sure to update these periodically.

Encourage satisfied users to leave positive reviews. Address negative reviews promptly and professionally, showing potential users you care about their experience.

Highlight your app's unique features and benefits in the description. Use high-quality screenshots that display key functionalities of your app.

Mastering the discovery stage will set a solid foundation for the rest of the user's journey with your app. Remember, the goal is not just to get users to download your app, but to pique their interest enough to use it regularly. And that journey begins with Discovery.

Download and installation

Understanding the user journey begins with the crucial first step: the download and installation of the app. The first interaction a user has with your app sets the tone for their overall experience. It's here that they form their initial impressions, and these impressions can significantly impact their decision to continue using the app. 

First impressions matter  

As the old adage goes, "you never get a second chance to make a first impression." This rings particularly true in the world of app downloads. If the installation process is slow, complex, or fraught with errors, users may already start contemplating uninstallation. Thus, it's essential to ensure a smooth and hassle-free download and installation process. 

The download and installation experience is the user's first encounter with your app, so make it count. A seamless process can set the stage for a positive user journey.

Tips to create a positive app download and installation experience;

Optimize app size: Large apps take longer to download and consume more storage space on a user's device. By optimizing your app's size, you can make the download process faster and more efficient, leading to a positive initial experience.

Clear permissions: If your app requires certain permissions to function, make sure to communicate this to the user transparently during the installation process. Ensure they understand why these permissions are needed and how they contribute to the app's functionality.

Error-free installation: Testing is crucial to identify and address any potential issues that might occur during the installation process. An error-free experience is key to retaining users right from the start.

By focusing on these areas, you can create a positive download and installation experience that bolsters user trust and sets a strong foundation for the subsequent stages of the user journey. 

Let's dive into the pivotal phase of onboarding . This is the first significant interaction your user has with your app after the initial download. It serves as the golden opportunity to make a positive and lasting impression, guiding your users through the functionalities of the app while demonstrating the value it can bring them. 

Optimized onboarding: A win-win  

A well-designed onboarding process can make or break an app's success. Why? Because it's all about user retention. The more comfortable a user feels during their initial experience with the app, the more likely they are to continue using it. Remember, a user who understands the app's value proposition is a user who'll keep coming back. 

The goal of onboarding is to convert users into regular users by demonstrating how the app fulfills their needs.

Key strategies for successful onboarding;  

Keep it Simple: Don't overwhelm your users with too much information at once. Guide them through the basic functionalities first, and gradually introduce more advanced features.

Personalize the Experience: Allow users to tailor certain aspects of the app to their preferences during the onboarding process. This creates a sense of ownership and encourages further engagement.

Highlight Key Benefits: Show users the unique value your app provides. Demonstrate how it can enhance their daily life or solve a problem they might have.

Get Feedback: Onboarding isn't just about instructing the user, it's also about learning from them. Use qualitative feedback from watching actual session replays during this stage to continuously improve the process.

Effective onboarding is like a friendly guide, gently ushering users to realize the value and usability of your app. It’s an investment that, when done right, yields high user retention rates and contributes significantly to the success of your product.

Engagement is the lifeblood of any app. It is not just about the number of users who download your app, but also about how often they use it, how long they stay, and how much value they derive from it. 

Let's delve into strategies to enhance engagement and ensure your users are not just hooked, but thoroughly satisfied. 

Use user data to tailor content and features: There's no better way to improve user engagement than tailoring your content and features based on user data.  For example, if you notice a user often uses a certain app feature, similar suggestions can be made. If a user has difficulty with a feature, customized tips can be provided. This level of personalization keeps users engaged and satisfied, showing the app meets their specific needs. But how can you collect, analyze and activate user data? I hear you ask. Enters UXCam .  UXCam is a mobile app analytics tool that allows product managers to understand user behavior by capturing and visualizing in-app interactions. This provides invaluable insights into how users engage with your app, what they love, and where they face challenges. With UXCam, you get to: 

Understand user behavior: UXCam records all touch gestures, screen transitions, and even device orientations to help you understand how users interact with your app.

Identify usability issues: With its unique user session replay feature , UXCam lets you watch user interactions as if you were sitting next to them. This makes it easier to spot usability issues and fix them before they affect user engagement.

Optimize user journeys: UXCam’s funnel analysis tool lets you visualize the steps users take within your app. This helps you identify where users drop off, so you can optimize these journeys and ensure a seamless app experience.

Keep in mind that a one-size-fits-all approach won't cut it. And with a tool like UXCam, you're well on your way to creating an engaging and personalized app user journey leveraging real user interaction data. 

Craft an intuitive interface: Your app's interface is the first point of contact with the user, and it can make or break the user's experience. An intuitive, easy-to-use interface encourages users to explore further and stay longer. Strive for simplicity and clarity, ensuring that navigation is seamless and features are easy to find. The goal is for users to be able to use your app effectively with minimal effort or instruction. 

Offer value: Users are more likely to engage with your app if they perceive it as valuable. This could mean providing unique features, delivering high-quality content, or solving a problem that the user has. Consistently delivering value will keep users coming back, and can also encourage them to recommend your app to others. 

Push notifications: Used wisely, push notifications can be a powerful tool for increasing user engagement. They can keep users informed about new content, remind them to complete actions, or alert them to special offers. However, be careful not to overuse push notifications, as this can lead to annoyance and app abandonment. 

Regular updates: Regularly updating your app can also enhance engagement. It shows users that you're actively working to improve their experience and meet their needs. Updates can include new features, bug fixes, or improvements to speed and performance. Always communicate these updates to users, so they know what's new and improved. 

Engagement is about building a relationship with your users, about understanding their needs and expectations, and delivering an experience that not only meets but exceeds them.

By focusing on engagement, you can ensure that users not only download your app, but continue to use it on a daily basis.

Let's dive into one of the most critical stages of the user journey: Retention . After the initial download, installation, and exploration of the app, the goal becomes to turn these first-time users into regular users. This is where the concept of retention comes into play. 

Retention is the process of engaging users consistently over a period of time, ensuring they return to your app again and again. The ultimate aim is to transform these regular users into loyal customers who rely on your app as a part of their daily lives. So, how can you achieve this? There are several strategies at your disposal. 

Offer value consistently: If your app consistently offers value, users are more likely to return. This could be in the form of fresh content, new features, or regular updates that enhance the user experience.

Personalize the experience: Users appreciate when an app aligns with their specific needs and preferences. Offering personalized recommendations, notifications, or features can significantly boost retention rates.

Engage with users: Engaging with users can take many forms, from push notifications to email newsletters. The key is to keep the communication relevant and not too frequent.

Listen to user feedback: User feedback is a gold mine of information. Use it to continuously improve your app and address any issues or pain points your users may be experiencing.

However, retention doesn't just happen overnight. It's a long-term process that requires continuous effort and adjustment. To guide your strategy, consider the following key metrics: 

A strong retention strategy can make the difference between an app that's a passing fad and one that's an integral part of users' daily lives. Remember, it's not just about getting users to download your app, but keeping them engaged and making them want to come back. 

Retention is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires a deep understanding of your users and their needs, as well as the patience to iterate and improve your app over time.

You've guided users through the initial stages of discovery, installation, and consistent usage of your app. But the journey doesn't end there. The final, and arguably the most critical stage in the app user journey is Advocacy .  When users love an app, they talk about it. They become brand ambassadors, spreading the word and bringing in more users.

But how do you transform everyday users into advocates? Here are some proven tips: 

Superior User Experience : Ensure your app delivers a top-notch user experience, addressing user needs efficiently and intuitively. A satisfied user is more likely to recommend your app to others.

Incentivize Referrals : Offer incentives such as discounts or premium features for users who recommend your app to their network. This not only encourages users to spread the word, but also fosters a sense of loyalty.

Personalized Communication : Regularly interact with your users through personalized messages, emails, and notifications. This helps build a relationship with the user, making them more likely to advocate for your app.

While these strategies can foster advocacy, it's also crucial to track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Use metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge how likely users are to recommend your app. 

A user who advocates for your app is not just another download number. They are a valuable asset, helping to grow your user base organically, improving your app's reputation, and ultimately driving the success of your product.

Challenges in mapping the app user Journey

Navigating the intricate maze of the user journey can sometimes feel like trying to solve a complex puzzle. For product managers, understanding this journey is crucial, but it's not without its challenges. Let's dive into some common pitfalls and how to sidestep them, and also explore the indispensable tools of analytics and user feedback.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Every product manager has been there: meticulously crafting a user journey map, only to discover that it doesn't quite align with the real-world user experience. Here are some common missteps:

Overgeneralization: It's tempting to create a one-size-fits-all map. But remember, each user is unique. While broad strokes might capture a larger audience, they might miss out on the nuances of individual experiences. Tip: Segment users based on behavior, demographics, or other relevant criteria. Tailor the journey for each segment.

Ignoring the Outliers: While it's essential to focus on the majority, sometimes the outliers – those who use the product in unexpected ways – offer invaluable insights. Tip: Don't dismiss unusual feedback or behavior. Investigate and understand the reasons behind them.

Overlooking Micro-Moments: It's easy to focus on the significant touchpoints and miss the tiny, seemingly insignificant moments that can make or break a user's experience. Tip: Pay attention to the small details. Sometimes, a minor tweak in a micro-moment can lead to a significant improvement in the overall journey.

The role of analytics and user feedback

Imagine trying to find your way in a new city without a map or GPS. That's what crafting a user journey without analytics and feedback feels like.

Analytics - The Power of data Most analytics tools provide quantitative data, offering insights into user behavior, preferences, and pain points. However, you are better off with a solution that offer the best of both quantitative and qualitative analytics like UXCam. They show where users spend the most time, where they drop off, and which features they engage with the most. Practical Tip: Use heatmaps to understand which parts of your app or website users interact with the most. This can guide design and feature prioritization.

User Feedback - The voice of the user While analytics offer the 'what,' user feedback provides the 'why.' Direct feedback through surveys, reviews, direct interactions, or indirect feedback through analyzing actual session replays, gives a voice to the numbers. It helps product managers understand the emotions, motivations, and frustrations behind the data. Practical Tip: By analyzing session replays of users who abandoned a purchase or sign-up process, you can identify barriers or friction points in the conversion funnel and make necessary adjustments to improve conversion rates. This helps you understand user preferences and behaviors in real-world scenarios.

A well-optimized app user journey isn't just a nicety; it's a necessity. As a product manager, your priority should always be to deliver an engaging, seamless experience at every stage of the user journey, from the initial download to daily use. 

Understanding the user journey, and making enhancements based on user behavior and feedback, can significantly improve user retention and drive your product's success. Remember, it's not only about getting the app into the user's device but ensuring they return to it day after day. 

Consider choosing UXcam to provide you with valuable insights into user behavior that would otherwise be tough to uncover. Visualizing the user journey could be the game-changer your product needs.

If you’d like to try out UXCam, sign up for a free 14-day trial and access all our features. 

You may also be interested in the following;

How to analyze session recordings

5 best user journey mapping tools

UX optimization: 4 Steps to deliver a better user experience

How to increase mobile app retention: Ultimate guide

Your guide to the mobile app customer journey

Customer journey optimization: 6 practical steps

Ardent technophile exploring the world of mobile app product management at UXCam.

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How to Map User Journey for Mobile App?

User journey or customer journey, maps how the users interact with the app and take a desired action. Find out how to map user journeys for mobile apps.

Knowing your customers is an important part of creating a successful mobile app . With your potential customers in mind, you can build an app that is relevant and useful to them. 

You may spend a lot of your resources and time making an app with great features, but if it’s not personalized for your users, you may not see any positive results. If you want the users to care about your app, then you need to build it keeping your user personas in mind.

The mass usage of mobile phones has amped up the use of apps worldwide and has become a major source of revenue for IT companies. It was reported in 2022, that 89% of Americans check their phones within 10 minutes of waking up in the morning.

When you map your user’s journey , you gain valuable insights that can help you create a better experience for your users. 

User journey shows you how the users interact with your app and convert. It shows all the touchpoints that helped users reach the final decision. This post will discuss how to map user journeys for mobile apps .

What is a User Journey?

User journey, also known as customer journey, maps how the users interact with the app and take a desired action. It tracks the user’s journey from when they first discover the app up until they download it and get converted. 

It shows every interaction the user has with the app . User journeys show a visual timeline of customer interactions and are presented as infographics. This helps teams better understand all the phases a user goes through while engaging with their app.

Stages of the Mobile App User Journey

1. discovery and awareness.

This is the initial phase where users become aware of the mobile app's existence. They might discover it through various channels such as organic search, social media referrals, or app store browsing. 

It is a crucial stage as it creates a positive first impression and sets the foundation for user engagement. Effective app store optimization and targeted marketing campaigns can capture user attention efficiently. 

The usage of clear and compelling app descriptions, screenshots, and reviews can help captivate users during this stage and ensure that they proceed to the next phase.

2. Consideration and Engagement

Once users have discovered the app, they move into the consideration phase where they evaluate whether the app aligns with their needs and preferences . They might compare the features of the app with similar apps and read user reviews for better insights.

Thus it is crucial to ensure that your app has an intuitive and user-friendly interface to make navigation easier. Moreover, personalized push notifications can re-engage users who have shown initial interest which can help them actively engage with the app.

3. Conversion and Onboarding

This is a critical stage where users decide to download and install the app . It is best to optimize the onboarding process to ensure a user-friendly experience. This includes providing clear instructions, guidance for key features, and a smooth sign-up or account creation. 

Furthermore, you could use in-app messaging to guide users through the onboarding process to help them realize the app's value quickly. A well-executed conversion and onboarding experience sets the stage for long-term user retention.

4. Retention and Loyalty

It is essential to retain users for the long-term success of a mobile app. You can maintain ongoing engagement through regular updates, relevant content, and personalized experiences to encourage user loyalty.

The best way to continuously look for areas for improvement is to regularly monitor key retention metrics like Daily Active Users (DAU) and user behavior to identify pain points. 

Delivery value and addressing user needs can build a loyal user base that not only continues to use the app but also recommends it within their networks.

Why Do You Need a User Journey?

User journey can help business teams understand user behavior . When you break down a customer’s journey step by step, it can help you improve your overall app design, strategy, and retention.

Here are some ways in which a user journey is useful.

Improved User Experience

Getting to know how users interact with your app can help you improve their experience. You can track the user journey to understand how your app is solving user’s problems or helping them achieve their goals. 

You can see if certain features of your app are valuable to them. Are your users finding the app easy to use and seamless? These things matter to help you create a better app for your users that they find valuable .

Targetting the Right Users

Sometimes businesses fail to understand their target users. This can be a major setback for your app's success. Trying to target a wide range of audience without clearly understanding them is a waste of time. 

Researching the goals, and challenges along with the user journey is a good way to better know your customers. This gives you clarity about who your customers are and how your app can help solve their problems .

Increased User Retention

User journey shows you areas where you need to make improvements . If customers are leaving more often after downloading an app, then maybe the onboarding process is not smooth enough. 

Based on these analyses you can optimize specific areas to improve user experience. Pay close attention to your users and make your app user-centric to increase user retention . When customers find your app useful in achieving their goals, they are going to stick to it

Journey maps can be shared with different teams in the organization to allow them to create a user-centric app. It is useful for all teams such as product development, sales, and marketing. 

Teams can have a clear vision about the type of users they are targeting and use these insights to build an app that resonates with the targetted users.

How to Create a User Journey Map?

1. define objectives.

Before getting started with mapping your user journey, first define your objectives. Figure out what you need to track and how you want to improve your app . This can give your research a good direction. 

When you research a customer to create a user persona , you need to be asking the right questions. Along with their demographics and psychographics, what else do you need to know about them? 

Defining your objectives can help you get started in the right direction and find the answers you are looking for.

• Demographic Information

You can effectively segment your user base by understanding their demographics such as age, gender, location, and income level. You can tailor marketing messages , features, and content to specific groups through the analysis of this data. 

This can help your app resonate with the intended audience and can increase the likelihood of user engagement and retention. 

For instance, 

If your app targets a younger audience then incorporating trends and visuals popular among that demographic can enhance its appeal .

• Behavioral Patterns

User behavior provides valuable insights for segmentation. Analyzing actions within the app, such as frequency of use, in-app purchases, and interaction with specific features can help identify distinct user groups . 

• User Goals and Pain Points

You can create meaningful segments by conducting surveys or gathering feedback to uncover what users aim to achieve with your app and where they encounter challenges. You can address specific needs within each segment by tailoring features accordingly.

2. Create User Personas

User personas are fictional representations of your target users. These personas reflect the characteristics and attributes of your target customers. To create user personas, you first must research your target audience in-depth. 

You can ask for feedback from your customers about their experience with your app through surveys or questionnaires. You can ask how they came across your app, various touchpoints, goals, challenges, and what influences their decisions.

After collecting all insights, create a user persona . Give it a name and even a face for more clarity. User personas should be shared with all the different teams to build a successful app.

• Persona Name and Description

When crafting user personas, it's essential to give each persona a distinct identity . This includes assigning a name and creating a detailed description that consists of their demographic information, preferences, and behavior. 

• Goals and Objectives

An effective way to tailor the app experience is to understand the goals and objectives of each user persona. Identify what specific outcomes or achievements users within a persona aim for when using the app. 

You can enhance user satisfaction and increase the likelihood of achieving positive outcomes if you align your app features and functionalities with these objectives.

• Pain Points and Frustrations

Identifying pain points by pinpointing the challenges and obstacles users may encounter while using the app can help address user frustration through intuitive design, clear communication, and user-friendly features.

This user-centric approach fosters satisfaction and loyalty , ultimately contributing to the app's success. It can significantly improve the overall user experience for that segment. 

3. Key Touch Points

Touch points are all the places your customers interact with your business . Based on the research of your target market you need to find out all the touch points that your customers use. 

This is important to map user journeys because it gives you insights into all the actions your users take . There could be more, or fewer touchpoints involved that can include your website, social media channels, paid ads, email marketing, and more.

You can also run a Google search about your business or app to see all the places they have been mentioned on the search results page.

Some common touchpoints where your customers find entry points into your app include:

• Organic Search: It is the process of users finding a website or app through a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo without any paid promotion. It is based on the user’s search query.
• Paid Advertising: It involves investing finances to promote a website or app. This can be done through various channels such as search engines, social media, or display advertising. It provides immediate search results to the targeted audience in exchange for a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression fee.
• Social Media Referrals: These occur when users discover and visit an app through links shared on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. This traffic is generated organically as users engage with content shared by people within their social networks.

Touchpoints within the app include:

• Home Screen: This is the main interface of a mobile app or website that users see at the very beginning when they first open the app. It usually consists of important information, featured content, and access to key features or sections.
• Search Functionality: Users can find particular content, products, or information within an app or website by searching for specific keywords or queries. It helps users easily navigate and quickly locate what they are looking for.
• Product Listings: These are the organized displays of items or services available for purchase within an app or website. They often include details like product names, images, descriptions, prices, and options for customization or selection.
• Checkout Process: The checkout process is a series of steps a user follows to complete a purchase or transaction within an app or website. A smooth checkout process is crucial for reducing cart abandonment rates.

4. Visualize the User's Journey

After the analysis of your target user, take into consideration how these users engage with your app . This is important for mapping user journeys. You can visualize the thoughts, emotions, and actions the user experiences when they come across your app, engage with it, and convert. 

This helps you estimate if the users have any troubles effectively engaging with your app. You can create customer journey map templates to carefully consider each element in the journey.

To start, visually represent each touchpoint where users interact with the app. You can include the user’s initial discovery, onboarding, in-app interactions, and potential touchpoints beyond the app.

An important aspect of mapping the user journey is to first understand the emotions and motivations driving user actions at each touchpoint. This involves empathizing with their needs, concerns, and objectives to design experiences that resonate.

Moreover, incorporate relevant data points and metrics to the journey map such as user engagement metrics, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). It will allow the journey map to provide helpful insights that refine the user experience for optimal results.

• Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

To monitor user engagement, you can measure the following KPIs for your app’s success:

• Daily Active Users (DAU): This metric measures the number of users who engage with your app in a single day. It indicates the app's popularity and its ability to retain a steady user base.
• Session Length and Frequency: This KPI will show you how long users have spent in each session and how often they return. Users who had longer sessions and made frequent visits showcased higher user engagement and satisfaction.
• In-App Actions and Events: You can gain insights into user behavior and preferences by tracking specific actions users take within the app, such as clicks, purchases, or content interactions.
• Identifying Drop-off Points: These points demonstrate the areas of friction or dissatisfaction where users usually exit the app or abandon certain processes. You can analyze these areas for targeted improvements.
• Implementing Re-Engagement Tactics: To recapture user interest and bring users back to your app, you study user behavior and use certain re-engagement strategies such as personalized notifications, special offers, or reminders.

5. Put Together Your User Journey

After gathering all the information, put together your user journey. Use visual elements to create journey maps. Infographics can also be used to make these maps more visually appealing and interesting. 

There are also various templates available that you can use to create journey maps. Each business will have journey maps that look different based on your app. Customize these templates based on your needs and share them with the different teams in your organization.

6. Continuous Improvement Strategies

Simply mapping the user journey based on research is not enough. You need to test this for yourself to get a first-hand experience. When you enact the user journey , you have more clarity about what your users go through. 

You can test different strategies by following these steps to find areas for improvement:

• Track User Behavior Trends : Monitor how user behavior trends change by observing how users interact with the app over time. It helps identify popular features, pain points, and usage patterns. 
• A/B Testing: This process compares two versions of a feature to determine which performs better in terms of user engagement or conversion. Experimenting with different versions helps make data-driven decisions.
• Responding to Market Shifts: The app market dynamic changes constantly in terms of trends, technologies, and user preferences. Quickly adapting to these shifts allows app developers to adapt their strategies to remain competitive in the changing landscape.
• Optimizing for Long-Term Success: Adopting a continuous optimization approach can help developers gradually refine the app based on user feedback, changing market conditions, and evolving technology to ensure sustained user satisfaction and engagement.

User journeys help you understand you’re the actions, needs, emotions, challenges, etc. your users go through when interacting with your app. 

To create user-centric apps you will need to map user journeys. The steps discussed above can help you get started to create a successful user journey for mobile apps. 

Focus on your target users to gain valuable insights that can help you make improvements to your app.

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Making your app users complete an action that adds to your end goal is becoming increasingly difficult. The reason being, if they don’t associate with it, they would rather switch apps than do what you expect of them. In this post, we’re going to share how you should analyze the entire user journey to improve the user experience and get more conversions.

“How do you get your users to do what you want them to on your app?”  

This is one question that has been haunting app marketers forever, and we totally relate. You ask users to sign up after a download and they leave the app. You recommend a purchase to them and they abandon the app to look for an alternative. Basically, if there’s anything you want them to do – it’s rarely going to happen.

That’s where the importance of a user journey comes in.

What Is a User Journey?

A user journey is defined as a series of steps that represent how you want users to interact with your app. It involves the analysis of how users are interacting with the app to identify the weakest points in the path to conversion.

It could be hesitance in making an in-app purchase, trying out a new feature, or simply not being able to understand how to use one. Mapping the user journey from the time of download and their first session is important for your app’s growth.

What Are the Stages of App User Journey?

Here are the core steps of an effective user journey that maps the user activity from discovery to purchase.

App discovery / App awareness

Hundreds of apps appear in the app stores on Android and iOS every day. App developers need to focus on app store optimization on priority and create referral marketing campaigns that encourage the users to share the app in their circles.

App download / User acquisition

This stage in a user journey looks into what made a user download the app after discovery. Is it because there were no other options available to them, the reviews of the app, what the app had to offer, or any other reason?

Knowing the motive and the source behind an app download is important for marketers to optimize their  user acquisition strategies . When you know what people are looking for, why, and how you can offer the same to them, you can personalize your marketing campaigns better. The higher the level of your personalization, the greater the conversion rates.

App developers also need to establish their brand names in the target market. They must maximize their online presence across social and other digital channels, get their apps featured on media sites popular with their users, and make sure that their potential users see the app’s value.

App onboarding / App exploration

Let’s face it, you and we don’t have to think the same way. While you might want us to write an article only in pointers, we may be the kinds who prefer in-depth posts or vice versa. The same holds true with your app users.

When a user downloads your app, they have the freedom to explore it on their own, at their own pace. Now, this may lead them to explore the features that are a unique selling point of your app or they may miss them. Giving the user entirely free reign and absolutely no  in-app guidance  can also result in them getting a little too overwhelmed or confused with what the app has to offer.

This is where the user onboarding flow steps in.

Onboarding is like giving your users a quick walkthrough of your app. From the features, it offers to how they can make the most of them, in a step by step manner. It makes exploration of the entire app a breeze for the user and assures the developers that none of the features are ignored.

For example, here’s how Slack introduces its users to the app’s features:

App reuse and purchases

According to Localytics , the average mobile app retention across all industries is 25% after 90 days. Yes, most apps have a large churn of 75% – irrespective of how good the app is or what it has to offer. Getting your users to the app after their first session is a challenge that app marketers still face. Yes, user retention problems are for real!

The primary reasons for a churn being the users found another app that seemed better to them, the app was unsuccessful at becoming their break time companion, or it could simply engage the user at the right time while they were away.

We have spoken about how in-app and outside the app communication as well as engagement are important to keep the users hooked. Be it using in-app chats, activity feeds, or  push notifications , app developers need to ensure they remain at the top of their user’s mind amidst all the market competition.

App monetization

While there are apps like Candy Crush and Game of War making millions out of their users, most apps face a challenge when it comes to converting their users into paying users. The first way out that a lot of users see is to look for another app that offers similar features for free – and that’s where the first app experiences a churn.

Now one way of monetizing your app is running multiple in-app ads – but then that puts your app at the risk of not being able to deliver a great experience. Another tactic that apps take to monetize from their users is blocking out a few features from the freemium model – this doesn’t interrupt the user’s experience and if implemented properly, converts higher.

In a previous post, we discussed 10 in-app tactics that can help you monetize from your users:

• Keeps your users engaged constantly
• Work on a lite freemium model
• Personalize in-app purchase recommendations
• Use the power of social to drive conversions
• Create customer loyalty programs
• Create a dynamic pricing model to suit all users
• Cross-promote your in-app purchases
• Incorporate a subscription-based model
• Offer multiple payment modes 

Re-purchase

Okay, so you’ve successfully nudged a user to complete an in-app purchase. But that’s just once, and the same user will need the same or higher amount of persuasion to be reconverted. It means that they need to see more value coming from the app and their first purchase to be encouraged enough to make another.

About 38% of users make an in-app purchase based on personal recommendations and 30% when offered a special discount on the next purchase.

So if you want to reconvert a user to monetize higher from them, we recommend implementing multiple personalized campaigns in your app. Some of them being retargeting, user behavior based purchase recommendations, socially driven purchases, referral campaigns, and user loyalty discounts.

The trick to higher monetization is to create a loyal community of your users. Keep them engaged and improve the experience your app has to offer to them, and you’ll be able to monetize higher from each of them.

User loyalty

Continuing on the last point above, user loyalty is also hard to achieve. Imagine yourself as your perfect user. You download an app that helps you edit pictures beautifully, but then you stumble upon an ad for another app that seems to offer better editing features. What do you do?

You instantly head to the app store to see if it’s available for free or the features it offers are worth paying for. You are no longer a loyal user of the first app. Now if you download the new app, there is a high chance you become inactive on the previous one and delete it altogether.

A great way to boost your app’s user loyalty is to create a community where users keep each other driven to get the most out of what your app has to offer. For that matter, you could use the opportunity to even keep feeding your users with relevant content that encourages another session.

For instance, Snapseed, a photo editing app by Google regularly interacts with its users through Instagram. They also reshare some of their work, making them feel special and at the same time showcasing to other users the possibilities of the app.

How to Create an App User Journey Map?

An app user journey map is a detailed infographic that reflects the entire path of interaction between the user and the app. The map helps to look at the app through the eyes of the user, to understand their goals, motives, expectations, and fears. Journey mapping helps make communication with the user more efficient and seamless. 

Having drawn up a map, you can find out the following: 

• Where the audience interacts with the product. This can be a company website, ads on third-party resources, social media, etc. 
• How various audience segments interact with your app. 
• What stages does the user go through before buying and what goals they have. 

The user journey map data should not be based on guesswork. For correct journey mapping, you need to do research and work with analytics systems. The process consists of several steps. 

Step #1: Research the target audience 

Begin with creating user personas that have clear goals, interests, and needs. You need to analyze the target audience and form a generalized image of a potential client based on this data. 

Often completely different people buy the same product, which means there will be several characters for the path map. An 18-year-old student and a 35-year-old real estate agent may go to the same fitness club, but their goals, pricing, and service experience differ. 

You need to collect detailed data on each of the characters: how they find out about the app, which competitors they turn to, why they decide to cooperate with you or refuse the service, etc. Studying the interests and values ​​of each group in detail makes it much easier to attract and retain users. 

Step #2: Create a list of interaction points and channels 

At this stage, you should map all points at which the user comes into contact with your app. The more points appear on the journey map, the more detailed picture you’ll get. Examples of communication channels are push notifications, websites, search engines, other mobile apps, email marketing, social media, etc. To include all possible channels, you can do the following: 

• arrange a brainstorming session within the team; use the mind mapping technique in your brainstorming session and a  mind map maker  to create a mind map for organizing your thoughts and ideas;
• communicate with the target audience directly; 
• run online surveys; 
• perform competitor analysis.

Step #3: Identify obstacles and remove them 

Next, you need to move on to the difficulties and list the critical points that prevent the user from moving between the journey stages. For example, a user wants to make an in-app purchase. They are ready to enter the card number, but then they are asked to sign up. The user gets angry at the sudden difficulty, drops the purchase, leaves, and never returns to the app. An inconvenient registration process is an obstacle. 

Having drawn up the list of obstacles, you need to find ways to remove them. If the user journey has changed after the implementation of new solutions, create a new journey to evaluate the result.

Step #4: Design the final user journey map

Now it’s time to combine the collected data into a single map, which may look like a table with the following data: 

• a list of steps that the user takes; 
• success criteria – what counts as reaching each user step; 
• retention rate, i.e. the rate of returns provided that a specific step is achieved; 
• conversion when moving between the steps; 
• interaction point – mobile app, website, email, push notification; 
• audience size at each step; 
• description of the emotional state (“I seem to be confused”, “Is it possible to give up everything?”, “I am close to the goal”, etc.); 
• obstacles; 
• ways to remove obstacles for different interaction points.

User Journey vs Sales Funnel vs User Flow

A user journey may look similar to a sales funnel but there are significant differences.

The marketing funnel scheme depends on a specific sales business model and can have a different number of stages. In the classic version, the sales funnel corresponds to the AIDA model, which combines the four key elements: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. According to the AIDA funnel, you need to attract the attention of a potential consumer, arouse interest in the offer, awaken the desire to own the product, and motivate to buy. 

Sometimes the AIDA formula is supplemented with one more stage: S – Permanent Satisfaction. This means that the user was satisfied with the purchase, became a regular customer, and/or shared their experience with friends. In practice, the number of stages in the sales funnel can be either up or down. However, in any case of transition to the next stage, the consumer must go through the previous one.

The user journey is not that linear. A potential client can skip certain stages and repeatedly return to previous stages. The app user journey does not end with the conclusion of a deal – it also encompasses post-sales interaction with the brand. At the same time, the goals of the consumer and their emotions are important throughout the journey. 

The user journey can be illustrated by the example of a person interested in a particular product. They have done the following: 

• Asked friends who have already purchased this product. 
• Based on the survey, identified a suitable brand and model. 
• Found an online product description and analyzed the specifications. 
• Visited the forum and asked for the opinion of users. 
• Found the product at the lowest price in the search results. 
• Went to the online store, but did not understand how to purchase the product. 
• Contacted customer support and clarified the details. 
• Made a purchase and got a discount. 
• Was satisfied with the product and can recommend it. 

At any of the above stages, the user journey may be interrupted – the friends will express their dissatisfaction with the product, the online description will not be complete enough, the online store will not open, the customer support will not answer, etc. The user can also repeat the previous steps over and over again. When building a user journey, the brand’s task is to identify the weak points of the sales cycle and strengthen them.

User flow is another term that is similar to user journey but there are also differences. A user flow is rather a part of the user journey. It describes certain user actions taken to achieve specific goals at specific journey stages. Unlike the user journey, which considers the user’s emotions, user flow would focus on technical details. For example, at the installation stage, the user flow will refer to the sequence of the app screens, the information they contain, and the UI element that the user has to tap to proceed further.

Examples of User Journeys

We have collected some examples that can illustrate the journey maps for famous brands.

 Amazon Customer Journey Map – from the login to the customer feedback:

Starbucks customer journey map showing the main communication points and psychological markets that are a priority in a given situation:

First Uber ride experience from the point of view of a user persona – Jen Ashburn, a 32-year old full-time student with a part-time job:

No matter what stage your user is on, it is important to note here that just the app’s design and offering are no longer in the first place. It is about the experience your app can offer to its users and how consistently you can improve those over time.

The next market battleground is user experience. Is your app ready?

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User Journey Mapping to Improve UX

• Published on October 20, 2020
• Reading time 12 min read
• Views 67.28k

We thrive on stories. We’ve been telling them for generations. Stories are tools for communication. But more importantly, they’re a means of building community. When people gather round the fire to weave stories, they do so to convey information, to entertain, and to build a sense of unity. In essence, that’s what a user journey map is for. It tells a visual story of how a user or customer (we refer to them interchangeably) interacts with your brand. The ultimate goal is not just to inform, but to build stronger bonds between you and your customers.

What is a User Journey Map?

What is the Purpose of a User Journey?

The user journey helps you visualize your product from the customer’s point-of-view via a user journey map. It helps focus the lens on how customers experience your product or service. Creating journey maps may be more common in the marketing industry. But they do have an important role to play in your work no matter what industry you’re in. As brands, we can get caught up in a flurry of new features. It’s a quest to improve the product – but from our point-of-view. We forget that customers don’t always ask for the features we release. The user journey map is a reminder that users have varying expectations. And some of these may intersect with your actual business objectives. It’s also a tool that forces us to look at areas of the user experience that need improvement. The goal, after all, is to engage and ultimately retain our customers.

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What is the Difference Between User Journey and User Flow?

A common area of misunderstanding is user journey vs user flow. Is a user journey identical to a user flow? Not at all. To understand what is the difference between user journey and user flow, the key word is “emotion.” User flows are simply the listing of steps that a customer takes to achieve a goal within your app. No emotion involved. The term “flows” comes from flow charts, where each action leads to a result. User journeys on the other hand map out the customer’s feelings, expectations, and questions as they use your app. Here, it’s all about emotions. How does a customer feel as they use your product or interact with your company? Elated? Frustrated? Entertained?

User Journey Maps Show How Customers Experience Your Brand

What a User Journey Map Looks Like

How Do You Analyze User Journey?

It’s important to note that user journeys are unique to your product and to your customers. There is no one-size-fits-all process for looking at your journeys, but there are a few common elements to pay attention to. How do you analyze user journey? By looking at:

• Unneeded interactions : You don’t need to bombard your customers with extraneous touchpoints. Optimize! Lessen the steps needed to accomplish something.
• Negative experiences : Low points are areas where expectations are not met, or where users had negative experiences with your brand. Figure out which of those low points to prioritize and work at reversing these negative experiences.
• Successes : Just as valuable are the areas where your app met or even exceeded expectations. What did you do right? How can that success be duplicated in other areas of the user journey?
• Omnichannel friction : Because user journeys often jump from device to device, you have to look at those times when shifting to a new channel breaks the journey, for example: an email offer leading to your brand’s homepage instead of a landing page, or a coupon in a push notification that merely launches the app instead of showing the same coupon within the app.
• Time spent at each stage : As users move from experience to experience, see how long it takes them to move forward and whether this timing is ideal.

User Journey Template

A good template for any customer journey map will involve around five basic elements: personas, timeline, actions, channels, and feelings/expectations/questions. These elements allow you to pinpoint the complete experience a user undergoes. In creating your customer journey map template, note that the focus is NOT your product. Once you settle into that idea, building it becomes much easier.

This map is about your users. But which ones? This is where customer personas come into play. Personas allow you to generalize about certain groups of users. But they also give you enough specific details (e.g. demographics and psychographics ) to help you understand their needs and expectations.

The second element is a timeline. Remember that this map has a specific duration, with a beginning, middle, and end. The end will be a conversion, purchase, or installation of your app. You map out the interactions that a user has with you over this duration.

What is the user doing at every interaction with your app or brand? Watching an onboarding video? Clicking a push notification ?

Feelings, Expectations, and Questions

At every interaction, you need to chart the emotional state a user is in. On the chart, split the y-axis of your timeline into positive and negative emotional states. The x-axis should be time. Are users annoyed by a popup? Or are they happy with a download? Use customer feedback as well as your behavioral analytics to note the moods they experience. Look for the events in the user journey that confuse your customers or anger them. This will give you a chance to focus on the problem areas. Improving these will affect the total user experience for your customers. Also, don’t forget to figure out what the expectations were during an interaction, and what questions could be running through their minds. This extra data will give you a more complete picture of why users behave a certain way.

What are the 7 Steps to Map the Customer Journey?

Now to build it. A good customer journey map will involve 7 basic steps:

• Researching your audience
• Building personas
• Identifying pain points per persona
• Mapping the timeline and touchpoints
• Optimizing your interactions
• Finding the insight
• Revising based on insight

Putting all these elemnents together entails a good deal of collaboration with your various teams: everyone from marketing and customer success all the way to data analysis and development. But the idea is to put all the information together so you can lay it out into a document or whiteboard.

1. Researching Your Audience

Begin with the existing data you already have about your user journey. Grab it from:

• Your mobile analytics tool
• Website analytics
• Your customer service team
• Existing customer interviews

But also, go out and gather new research you need to make a useful journey map:

• Ask for feedback via interviews
• Schedule focus group discussions
• Look through comments on social media
• Send surveys to users

2. Building Personas

User personas are nothing more than fictitious representations of your ideal customers. We suggest you create no more than four personas. Don’t get carried away. What you simply need is customer representations that capture the background, demographics, lifestyle, personality, and app preferences of your four most common buyer segments.

3. Identifying Pain Points Per Persona

Here’s where the exercise puts into perspective the data you’ve gathered about your ideal customers: what are their pain points? Why would they look at your app to solve them? How can your app and your company solve their problem?

4. Mapping the Timeline & Touchpoints

Next you will need to map out all the various touchpoints. This can happen after the research phase, or simultaneously. Gather the various stakeholders of this project in a room or a virtual communication channel (e.g. Slack channel, Wiki, etc.). And list out all the times when your customer personas touch your brand. What are these touchpoints? Where and when do they happen? List everything including:

• Landing pages
• In-app notifications
• Support chats

They can be as simple as a scheduled notification or as complicated as downloading your app’s SDK. Next, add the feelings, expectations, and emotions that your personas undergo at each interaction.

5. Optimizing Interactions

As mentioned in an earlier section, after you’ve mapped out all the different ways a customer interacts with your company, the next step is to figure out how to optimize and streamline these interactions. How can you make things easy for your users? How can you take away possible roadblocks to them becoming lifetime customers? How can you engage them so they continue to use your app and rely on your brand in the months to come?

6. Finding the Insight

After it’s all been built, analyze the user journey and find the insight, particularly where your app’s Aha! Moment is. How can you more efficiently move a new user toward that aha moment? What actions can your company take to improve the user experience for your app users?

7. Revising Based on Insight

As in everything related to development and improvement of a product, the cycle is never ending. You glean new insights, you then implement them back into your product and keep refining the user journey and the entire UX until everything is streamlined.

When to Build a User Journey Map

When is the best time to start building this map? Obviously, you can’t begin until you have users. It will be more beneficial to wait until you’ve collected enough users to have varying experiences. And this number will depend on your industry and the type of app. Ideally though, you should begin mapping in the early days of your growth – before your user base grows into the thousands, before any viral success comes your way. Why?

• To understand every touchpoint where you interact with customers
• To ensure your customers are happy with how they’re experiencing your brand before you get too big
• To uncover opportunities you may not see any other way

How Your User Journey Map Plus CleverTap Increases Engagement

This user journey charted on a timeline is now a tool that allows you to step into your customers’ shoes. Use it to empathize with them. Wherever there is a problem area, take a look at what improvements you can make. Wherever they experience frustration, optimize the experience or get rid of stumbling blocks. Make things smoother. Make communication clearer. Meet their expectations. Engage them. CleverTap lets you turn all this insight into action. CleverTap’s Journeys lets you use visuals to build omnichannel campaigns to engage and delight your customers. This feature makes it easy to get users to increase usage of your app, and further, to move them toward conversion.

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Founder of Vyten , a mobile app development agency, 3x Chief Marketing Officer, and NBJ 40 Under 40.

Ten years ago, businesses had a limited digital presence, usually consisting of a website and a basic social media profile. Digital marketing wasn't seen as a necessity. Nowadays, having a website is considered essential for launching a business. However, a new trend is set to redefine the playing field again: the rise of mobile apps as a critical tool for business growth.

Consumer behavior and technology adoption have revolutionized over the years. People spend over 3.5 hours daily on mobile devices, and 88% of that time is spent on mobile apps over mobile websites. Consumers are 50% more likely to make an appointment or book through a mobile app than other digital channels. This pivot toward mobile apps represents a shift in technology usage and a fundamental change in consumer expectations.

Integrating Mobile Apps Into The Marketing Flywheel

For local businesses, from med spas and fast-casual restaurants to chiropractic offices, integrating mobile apps into their marketing strategy offers a unique opportunity to engage with customers on a more personal and practical level. Utilizing the marketing flywheel framework—comprising awareness, acquisition, experience, retention and referrals—mobile apps can drive sustained growth and customer loyalty in ways traditional digital platforms cannot.

Awareness And Acquisition

In the flywheel's early stages, mobile apps are powerful tools for increasing visibility and attracting new customers. Through app store optimization (ASO) and targeted push notifications, businesses can cut through the noise and reach potential customers directly on their most used personal device—their mobile phones.

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Apps genuinely shine by offering a faster, more responsive mobile experience. They provide personalized content, streamlined booking processes and instant communication, elevating the customer experience.

Retention And Referrals

Mobile apps can significantly enhance customer retention and encourage word-of-mouth referrals by offering tailored rewards and making it easier for satisfied customers to leave a review or share their experience with a friend.

The Future Is Mobile

As we envision the future of local business growth, it's clear that mobile apps will play a pivotal role. Businesses without websites today find themselves at a significant disadvantage, but those without mobile apps are poised to face similar challenges soon. The consumer preference for mobile apps over mobile websites is a trend that's only gaining momentum. This preference is rooted in the convenience, speed and personalized experience that apps provide—a trifecta that mobile websites struggle to match.

For local businesses, the message is clear: Adopting a mobile app is not just about keeping pace with current trends but positioning oneself for future success. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the businesses that will thrive are those that recognize the shifting preferences of their customers and adapt accordingly.

Small businesses often grapple with several key concerns when contemplating the development of a mobile app. Chief among these is the daunting specter of cost. Understandably, smaller enterprises with limited budgets may hesitate due to the perceived financial burden associated with app development. From the initial investment required for coding and design to ongoing maintenance costs and marketing expenses, the financial commitment can appear prohibitive. A mobile app helps with retention marketing, making customers more loyal and more likely to refer friends. While the upfront costs may seem daunting, businesses can view app development as a strategic investment in customer engagement and brand visibility, potentially leading to increased sales and loyalty over time.

Moreover, the challenge of limited resources and expertise presents a significant barrier for small businesses eyeing the mobile app landscape. Without in-house developers or designers versed in app development, the prospect of outsourcing these tasks can be daunting both in terms of cost and time. By tapping into development agencies that specialize in mobile apps, small enterprises can access the necessary expertise without overextending their capabilities or budgets, thereby making the prospect of launching a mobile app more feasible.

Looking Ahead

As we stand on the cusp of this digital evolution, the imperative for local businesses to develop and integrate mobile apps into their marketing strategy has never been more critical. The companies that invest in mobile app development today are not just setting themselves up for success in the present—they're paving the way for sustained growth and competitiveness in the digital future.

More prominent brands and franchises have already implemented mobile apps in their retention strategy. In a world where consumer preferences increasingly lean toward mobile app interactions, those who fail to adapt risk being left behind. For local businesses aiming to flourish in the coming years, embracing mobile apps is not just a strategy; it's a necessity for survival.

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The AI assistant by Anthropic

Anthropic pbc.

• #53 in Productivity
• 4.7 • 563 Ratings
• Offers In-App Purchases

Screenshots

Description.

Get help on a variety of tasks whenever inspiration strikes—on everything from writing to analysis to math—from Claude, your trusted AI assistant. INSTANT ANSWERS With Claude you have a world of intelligence right in your pocket. Just start a chat, send Claude a photo, attach a file—and ask away. FASTER DEEP WORK Collaborate with Claude on critical tasks, brainstorming, and complex problems to make significant progress while you’re on the go. LESS BUSY WORK Claude can help draft your emails, summarize your meetings, and assist with all the small tasks you don't want to do. INTELLIGENCE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Claude is powered by the Claude 3 model family—powerful AI models built by Anthropic—giving you instant access to knowledge on every subject. TRUSTED PARTNER Claude is designed to be reliable, accurate, and helpful. It's brought to you by Anthropic, an AI research company dedicated to building safe and dependable AI tools. Claude is free to use. If you want access to 5x more Claude usage and our most powerful model (Claude 3 Opus), consider upgrading to our paid Pro plan. Terms of Service: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms Privacy Policy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy

Version 1.0.3

Improvements & bug fixes

Ratings and Reviews

563 Ratings

Good work + Feature Request

Nice work on the app guys. What I’d love is if you would allow the iPad version to be installed on apple silicon mac devices. The ChatGPT app disallows this currently and I really believe that Claude would appeal more to technically-savvy users (hackernews demographic certainly) if you simply flip the switch and enable your official app on macOS. Using the iPad version on macOS would be particularly tolerable for this type of application. Moreover, typical mac users would not stumble upon your app because the macOS store search is awful; you wouldn’t be dealing with complaints of how the designed-for-iPad app UX is lacking. Please consider enabling it 🙂

Good so far

It appears Claude does not know the privacy policy of Anthropic, when I asked it to summarize it. I recommend copying and pasting the policy into Claude and asking it to help you understand it, if you’re interested in having an idea of what data is collected and shared to third parties. It’s almost a given that reading the various policies doesn’t occur enough by the average user, not the user’s fault. However, using AI, it’s now possible to understand what the end user is agreeing to without spending an hour on the toilet trying to decipher legal/policy jargon. Happy learning!

Amazing just like the web version

I have been waiting for the app publisher to release an iOS app version of this and now that it’s here, I am more than happy. Was so intuitive to use on the web and I can confirm that you get the same experience on the app. Response time to chat inputs is so fast and the accuracy I’m used to is still there. 10/10 I would recommend!

App Privacy

The developer, Anthropic PBC , indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

• Contact Info
• User Content
• Identifiers
• Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

• Claude Pro $20.00
• Developer Website
• App Support
• Privacy Policy

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The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy

It’s faster and more customizable, sure, but sonos shipped it without a number of features that were available in the previous s2 app..

By Chris Welch , a reviewer specializing in personal audio and home theater. Since 2011, he has published nearly 6,000 articles, from breaking news and reviews to useful how-tos.

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Last month, Sonos announced a complete overhaul of its mobile app for iOS and Android. It was supposed to meaningfully streamline the previous version, “bringing services, content, and system controls to one customizable homescreen.” Sonos wanted the app to feel more personalized and more modern and to make “tab to tab jumping a thing of the past.”

I didn’t get a chance to use the new app firsthand in April; Sonos only gave the press an overview and short demo that covered the basics. But even then, I had some sources warning me that a lot would be missing from the initial release.

Yesterday, the new app rolled out — widely for iPhone users and somewhat sporadically for those on the Android side. (I still haven’t received the update on a Galaxy S24 Ultra.) Judging by the reaction on Sonos’ very active subreddit, yep, the company took a scalpel to things and left a ton of stuff out. The new app moves backward in certain areas, but Sonos has succeeded at some of its over-arching design goals. Whether you’re a fan of the new app will vary depending on how you use Sonos products in the first place.

Features related to local music libraries are a mess — especially search. The app’s accessibility has regressed, something Sonos says it’s aiming to fix by June. Sleep timer functionality is totally gone, and the company is advising customers to use the Sonos Windows or Mac desktop apps to set sleep timers until they’re eventually added back. Something as simple as editing the upcoming queue from inside the app? Even that’s not available at the moment.

And that’s led to the subreddit being flooded with complaints. Just go take a look for yourself .

That’s never the feedback anyone’s hoping for after a comprehensive app makeover.

In fairness, not everyone is disappointed. I’m seeing a number of positive comments about systems — especially large ones — being more responsive post-update. And the revamped design has felt more intuitive to some users, which is exactly what Sonos was aiming for. It’s objectively more customizable than before, too. System control has taken somewhat of a backseat to music control, but there are people willing to give Sonos some time (and several updates) to work out the kinks and get back to parity with S2.

Still, if you consider yourself to be a Sonos power user, it might be best to hold off on hitting the update button. There’s no way to downgrade back to the previous S2 app — not on iPhone, at least. So make sure you know what you’re getting into and that you really want the new design, even if it means losing out on features both big and small for a few weeks. Hopefully not months.

The Verge has reached out to Sonos for comment.

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TikTok: How to block a user

As the fastest growing social media platform, TikTok is home to a lot of diverse ideas and opinions. TikTok typically provides hours of entertainment from various creators on the For You Page (FYP). For the most part, mindless TikTok scrolling is great, but sometimes you'll find a trending topic or creator who you simply don't want to deal with.

Whether you're tired of those strange 12-part skits of a CEO going undercover as a janitor — (which are always missing part 12 — or you need a break from political news, this step-by-step guide will teach you how to block a single TikTok account, or many accounts at once.

Never watch a multipart skit about people being rude again

How to block a user in the TikTok mobile app

Although we've used an Android for this tutorial, Apple users should be able to follow along without a problem. The TikTok mobile app for iPhone is very similar.

When you use TikTok's block feature, the blocked user is no longer able to view, like or comment on your posts, nor will they be able to send direct messages. Duets between you and the person you blocked are also a no go, and you will no longer see content from the person you blocked.

Open the TikTok mobile app and find the TikTok account you'd like to block. You can do this by typing the user's handle into the search bar or by finding them in your followers list .

• Once you're on the user's profile page, look for the share icon in the top right corner. The share arrow looks like a curved arrow curving to the right.
• The Share to window will appear, and you'll simply need to tap the Block button . Close
• When the pop-up window appears, select Block to complete the process. Close

To unblock someone on the TikTok mobile app, return to the blocked user's TikTok profile and tap Unblock .

How to block someone on the TikTok website

Like the TikTok app, you can block a TikTok user from the website. Check the steps below to learn how.

• Open your browser and head to TikTok .
• Click a TikTok profile and select the three-dot icon.
• Click Block .
• You'll see a pop-up window appear, and you'll just need to tap Block to confirm.

To unblock a TikTok user, return to the blocked user's profile, click the three-dot icon , and click Unblock . Alternatively, click Unblock underneath the blocked username.

How bulk block TikTok accounts Consider blocking in bulk if you have several users to block. Bot accounts can contribute to spam, which can quickly get out of control. Report these accounts to TikTok before using the block function.

The block option might not suffice if the spam and harassment came from someone else's TikTok video. In such cases, untag yourself from these TikTok videos to avoid unwanted attention.

• Navigate to a TikTok video and tap Comments .
• Tap and hold while hovering over a user in the comments section and select Manage multiple comments . Close
• Select the users you want to block (a maximum of 100) and tap More .
• Tap Block accounts . Close

You can access your block list by heading to Settings and privacy and select Blocked accounts in the Privacy section.

Level up your TikTok presence with livestreams

After gaining a handle on this popular platform, you can use TikTok to share your content. You might stumble upon some challenges when you decide to go live on TikTok . Unlike Twitch and YouTube, the platform has restrictions in play. TikTok requires 1,000 followers for the live feature to unlock, meaning increasing your follower count may be tricky (for a hobbyist). With some research and planning, anyone can do it.