User journeys
December 14, 2005, 11:55 am
One of the issues with dealing with functionality, especially when working on B2C web sites is that it does not always fit comfortably into the broader customer proposition. Functionality is only useful in the context of what a customer wants to do at a site and how they do it. Chances are customers won’t hit that functionality straight away, it will be but one component within their overall journey. For example a shopping cart is the final stage of the buying process. The customer has to firstly find a desired product to put in the cart. The cart’s value is only truly realised when the end to end process is considered – what use is great functionality if the path to reach it is broken? So by thinking about customer journeys, (scenarios by which different customer types will come to the web site and the paths they will take to accomplish their goals) we can ensure that functionality we write cards for has demonstrable value and contributes to a usable and compelling experience. And this helps better prioritisation.
During prioritisation exercises we shuffle the cards according to their business value. Rather than trying to find business value on individual cards, taking this end to end approach will helps us to better estimate the business value of what we are building. And it might make for surprising decisions.
This is something that I tried at a recent financial services client. When we began scoping the work for the forthcoming releases we had a list of important sounding requirements that were to be migrated to their new platform. But how do you prioritise “set income flag” against “capture Debit card details”. Answer was you don’t. Each is part of a customer journey – “existing customer wants to view her accounts” and “new customer want to buy an ISA”. And like a stuck record I interrupted every conversation with “yeah but…. Customer journey” and soon our roadmap for the future was built around journeys. It was the journeys themselves that were prioritised rather than a random bunch of requirements. And what a sexy, customer-centric roadmap it was. Sadly it was later torpedoed by functional requirements that we had no control over and the journeys lost their strong flavour.