The Client
The client is The Beer Store, a company in Ontario/Canada that sells beer for home consumption. I tried to create customer experience journey maps with an engaging graphical treatment. The maps show what a customer experiences with a retailer and what the pain points and pleasing points are.
Requirements and Scope
I had a total of 2 weeks to collaborate with the stores’ team to do this analysis and come up with a design proposal.
The first map will be for buying beer, the second map is for returning empty bottles (called empties). It’s important that the map should looks good as well as communicates the research findings. It’s a lot of information to capture graphically in an engaging way though.
Approach and Process
Customer journey map is like a persona. It is representative of a typical experience that focus more on tasks and questions. It also express the customer’s experience over time, rather than as a snapshot. That means the two work well together. A persona focuses on the person, while a customer journey map focuses on their experience.
Research Process
I first began by crafting out a research plan. This started with research and heuristic evaluation to give us a better insight into the store’s business goals and existing gaps. I also included contextual observations with users interviews. From the information gathered, we created a persona and his customer journey map which would guide our design strategy.
The Beer Store has already have some information about users. That is why gathering existing research is a good start.
Field observations were first carried out at the store level to observe the main demographics of the customers. This was also critical to understand what the pain points customers are facing at the store.
Field observations at the store: customers waiting at counter
We then conducted user interviews with actual customers to understand and the pain points the customers faced in using the store. It was important to know their goals and what their key concerns were. We also better understood the behaviour and attitudes of the users.
Our initial hypothesis from in-store contextual observations and user interviews at this point was to focus on creating a solution to manage waiting time in the queue.
We decided to proceed with persona and creating customer journey maps to see if we could refine it to a more relevant problem.
Our data findings: understand what the pain points customers are facing at the store
The information from contextual observations and user interviews was synthesised through affinity mapping and used to create a persona of the customer.
The creation of persona here is intended to help us understand the users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. This creates empathy with the users and understand what the actual problem is what we assumed it to be.
The persona for 'Mark' the our guy!
We took a walk with our persona through to identify the existing gaps and identify the opportunities.
At this juncture, with our persona and customer journey mapping created, more user interviews and further affinity mapping, the true problems we had to solve begin to be more apparent.
It was critical at this point to relook at how we can align The Beer Store’s business goals with user goals.
‘Accessibility’ was the key to align both sides. For the store’s business, the solution will help it gain access to users to build the relationship needed to drive new revenue. For the users, the solution should allow accessibility to the stores, accessibility to shopping & making payments quickly and accessibility to rewards (for example; refunds):
Alignment between Business Goals and User Goals
Through the above lens and using an Impact/Effort matrix, we decided to focus on the 3 keys of user goals. Also, there were 3 store formats:
1. Conventional – these stores have 1 line for returning empty bottles (people get 10 cents for every bottle they return) and 1 line for buying beer. The way you buy beer here is that you tell the cashier what you want, pay for it, and then it rolls out on a conveyor belt.
2. Self-Serve – these stores are like a regular shop with beer on shelves in a refrigerated room. So people walk in, browse, take the beer off the shelf and then go line up to pay
3. ICE – these are a combination of the two. There is 1 shelf with some beers for people to grab and pay and there is also a counter for you to request beer that isn’t on the shelf to roll out.
The very early sketch for Map 1... It'll be very detailed at final stages.
The pain points are the most important so should have the most share of the space on the page – it really needs to communicate “these are all the things wrong” with the experience.
Needs improvements and some typography, of course..
The Result
With the use of the map presented below we can easily identify what opportunities and threats to the positive customer experience we can find in our customer service process. We created value for the customers based on their needs which will in turn drive value for the business.
The art of customer journey map 🙂
Being a UX designer helped me to create that spot between business and user goals. Also, my past experience in UI and Graphic Design definitely helped me in this project when we were trying to show up with the problem statement by visually.
While there were several valid problems that users faced, focusing on the accessibility helped us to think on the solutions that will be most immediately effective to align both business and user goals.
After that, focusing on the user goals and experiences help us to work on the solutions that will be most immediately effective to align both business and user goals. Experience maps are a little different from journey maps and typically include other factors such as thoughts, feelings, touch points, technical dependencies and more. There’s really no limit to the level of detail you can visualize in an experience map.
Thanks for reading!
Some details from my work