Ask most business owners to describe the user journey on their website, from finding it to sending an enquiry, and you’ll get a confident answer. “They land on the homepage, look at our services, then get in touch.” Ask them to try it on their own phone, as a stranger, and the confidence fades quite quickly.
A user journey is the route a real person takes through your site to get something done. Mapping it is a simple exercise, it needs nothing more than paper and an hour, and it tends to find problems that no amount of staring at the homepage will.
What a user journey is, and isn’t
A user journey is not your menu. The menu is how you’ve organised the site. The journey is how one type of visitor, with one aim, actually moves through it.
That distinction matters because people rarely arrive where you expect. Someone searching for a specific service lands on that service page and may never see your homepage at all. Someone clicking an advert lands wherever the advert sent them. Each of those is a different starting point with a different journey.
Start with who and why
Pick one type of customer and one goal. Be specific. “A homeowner who needs a quote for a new boiler this month” is useful. “Our customers” is not.
Then write down three things about them:
- Where they’ve come from: a Google search, a recommendation, an advert, your van.
- What they already know: someone who was recommended to you needs less convincing than someone comparing five firms.
- What would stop them: price worries, not knowing if you cover their area, not being sure you do the exact thing they need.
Two or three of these pairings usually cover most of your enquiries. Start with the most valuable one.
Map the user journey step by step
Now walk the route yourself, on a phone, and write each step on a separate line or sticky note:
- Entry. Which page do they land on? Search for your own service as a customer would and see what comes up.
- First impression. Without scrolling, is it clear they’re in the right place?
- Questions. What do they need to know before they’d contact you, and where is each answer?
- Proof. What reassures them: reviews, examples of work, accreditations, guarantees?
- Action. What do you want them to do, and how many taps does it take from where they are?
- After. What happens when they’ve sent the form? Do they know when they’ll hear back?
Against each step, note what the person is thinking and what could go wrong. You’re looking for the gaps between what they need and what the page gives them.
Where journeys usually break
The same handful of problems turn up again and again:
- Dead ends. A page that finishes without telling the visitor what to do next. Blog posts and “about” pages are frequent offenders.
- Detours. The answer to an obvious question lives on another page, and getting there means losing your place.
- Too many choices. Five buttons of equal weight is the same as none. Each page needs one main action.
- A late ask. The enquiry form only appears on the contact page, three clicks from where the visitor decided they were interested.
- Silence afterwards. The form submits and nothing confirms it. People wonder if it worked, and some go and enquire elsewhere to be safe.
Every extra step between “I’m interested” and “I’ve enquired” is a place to lose someone.
Check your map against real behaviour
Your map is a guess until you test it. Two cheap ways to do that:
First, watch someone do it. Hand your phone to a friend who doesn’t know the business, give them the customer’s goal, and say nothing while they try. Where they hesitate, scroll back up or ask you a question, you’ve found a gap.
Second, look at your analytics. Which pages do people land on most, and which do they leave from? A page with lots of entries and lots of exits is a journey that ends before it starts. That’s the one to fix first.
Turning the map into changes
You don’t need a new website to act on what you find. Start with the smallest fixes that remove a step: put a short enquiry form on each service page, answer the most common question where it’s first asked, add a clear next step to the bottom of every page, and write a confirmation message that says when you’ll reply.
If the map shows the structure itself is the problem, that’s a bigger job. It’s the first thing we look at in our website redesigns, and it’s why our landing pages are built around a single visitor and a single action.
