User Centricity: a Service Lens or a User Lens?

Customer journey mapping is known for decades as one of the main tools for service and UX designers, who want to understand customers and their interaction with a certain service or product. This is the way to look at your service through the customer’s eyes.

It makes a lot of sense and I’m not here to argue the idea. But nothing is cut in stone and there is always a space for improvements.

Let’s look at the customer journey mapping like if you see it for the first time and keep in mind that this is the user-centered tool. Do you have any cognitive dissonance so far? Let me explain what I see.

When designers create a customer journey they frame it to the service touchpoints, which makes it service-centered and not user-centered. You may say that it was the initial purpose of the journey mapping to remove unrelated events and only focus on a customer↔service interaction. But what if the customer experience starts earlier than an actual interaction? And it certainly does.

Since designers want to understand customers, they need to know customers’ reasons and motivations of every taken step. It’s not possible with the current mapping, because the journey that we have now only depicts service touchpoints.

Personal life represented as a journey is a constant sequence of decisions, based on the current situation, personality and a context. We don’t measure our lives in touchpoints, but in actions and behaviors.

Many things are happening in-between the classical journey steps, which are just overlooked. It was quite a big step forward when designers added the Before phase to the journey, where potential users are only thinking if they want to become customers of a certain service or make a purchase. That phase helped explore the decision making process and affect it. I see this as an evidence of the need to understand the real events that can affect the interaction with a service or product.

What happens when designers ignore the context? A lack of a deeper information leads to a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding of what’s going on and which way to go for an improvement.

In such cases companies are pushing their services into the customer lives or trying to guide them.

It makes more sense to do the opposite:

1. Understand customers journeys/routines/habits.
2. Make your service flow in the natural behavior of a customer.

What conclusions can we make here?

1. For a person, a daily life is a sequence of performing various behaviors.

2. Using a service is also a behavior, which means that service and UX designers are designing behaviors and habits.

3. For better understanding your customers it makes sense to include other behaviors in the customer journey mapping.

If the first two points are quite logical, then the idea of mapping the whole life of a person may sound absurd. There are way too many variables to map. In the perfect world knowing everything of course will give us all the answers, but do we really need everything?

Imagine navigating a ship in the sea. The exact movements of waves and air are unpredictable, but there is no need to calculate every molecular movement to navigate from point A to B. Just focus on the relevant data, in our case — on a touchpoint and the prior events and behaviors.

Types of user’s goals

What I like about service design and design thinking is that the approach is based on a common sense. I don’t even think that we need to glorify enormous amount of tools and canvases and religiously use them, because they look like they are cut in stone or very academic. They make life easier, but they must be adjusted every time to the actual process or maybe even recreated.

There two types of services, that I want to focus on here. One is based on a more or less urgent customer requests. They need to do something the most fast and easy way. For example make a bank transfer, send a message, check something online, order flight tickets, book a hotel and etc. The job should be done, the less experience (time spent) the better. It’s a one-time behavior with a strong motivation.

The other type of services is focused on a process itself. In these services the desired goal is only reached when users do something regularly. For example therapy apps, sport training, meditation, health related services and etc. Such services or products need to create a habit of using them. In this situation the motivation is quite low (it can be high in the beginning), because “the reward” only comes later. You can imagine how inspired could people be when signing up for a gym, but then going there regularly becomes a problem.

The problem is that the majority of tools and canvases are focused on the first type of services (high motivation, one-time goal) by default. But they don’t work with the second type (low motivation, long-term goal).

You might have heard phrases like “I know that people will use it, our solution definitely helps. It’s even proven by studies”. And then it’s just not used. The problem is not the product or it’s functionalities. It’s just the wrong approach.

Like the behavior economics has ruined the myth of a rational man, so must designers do the same. People are not using your service because the created value is worth the price, but because it fits in their behavior pattern.

It’s very clear why the first type is used. Customers have a job to be done whatever it takes. It doesn’t even matter how good or bad it is designed, they will find a way to use it.

I’d like to focus more on the second type of services. Do we have the right tools or canvases for them? Of course we do, we just need to adjust them.

Here is how I suggest to approach them.

1. Focus on a certain persona and a touchpoint.
2. Have an internal brainstorm session and list your assumptions about user motivations, abilities and triggers to use your service in the selected touchpoint.
3. Conduct the user research and dig deeper into the events and behaviors coming before the desired interaction with the service. Understand the context.
4. The information you need is: behavior patterns, that lead to the desired behavior; intrinsic and extrinsic motivations; one’s ability to perform the behavior.
5. You might find some unexpected insight when digging that deep. Like some surprising patterns or an influence of some people or events and etc.
6. Ideate on how to build in your service in the customer flow. Focus on implementing a habit and design daily small rewards.
7. Prototype, test, repeat.

Case example

When I worked in a research project, we offered pregnant women to do some daily therapeutic exercises with our mobile application. We were sure that our exercises were a perfect fit for them. The tests and a science behind proved it. So we ran the study and shared our app with a number of participants and started gathering data.

After the study, I have conducted a series of feedback interviews and found out, that people, who first established a routine of using our app used it more regularly (obviously) and as a result it was more effective, so they have got the positive impact from it. People who didn’t manage to organize themselves used the app spontaneously and didn’t feel that it helped them.

The only way to succeed here is using the service regularly. If there is no external motivation/urge to use it, then you have to start from building a habit of using your service first and only when it is established start implementing the actual service journey, in our case the therapeutic exercises.

How could we make it the right way?

How to implement a new behavior? In other words how to create conditions for people to start using your service.

Now, as we know that we’re dealing with habits, we could exploit any existing approach to habits. For example the BJ Fogg’s motivation theory.

The theory is easy to explain. A certain behavior is likely to happen if it’s triggered in the moment when a person has enough motivation towards the behavior and it’s subjectively easy to perform. James Clear also emphasizes the importance of focusing on identity-based habits, which are rooted in one’s sense of self and values. This is why we are conducting a research.

BJ Fogg behavior model

First, understand what does your service require to be used. Then find out what is the best suitable environment for people to use it. Does this context already exist or we have to help creating one?

Trigger the action!

In the mentioned case we wanted pregnant women to sit and relax for half an hour, focus on themselves with the help of our app, that included meditations, simple exercises and some short stories. They already signed up for the study and had an intention to do the course.

The needed conditions were: 30 min time, no distraction, sometimes pen and pencil.

Based on the detailed journey of their daily routine we found out that the most popular timing was in the evening before going to sleep (the context). It was the right moment to set up a reminder (the trigger).

Take-aways

• Understanding the behavioral context of your service/product gives you a lot of power to implement it in the right place and time.
• Seeing services as behaviors allows designers borrow methods from behavior science and be more effective.
• This also requires new tools. More detailed customer journey mapping infused with behavior data is the tool that would answer more questions.

Mature designers are actually doing it. They are modifying journeys, adding behavior context. I also see that behavior designers are doing the same from their side. I’m expecting to see new approaches in the next years.