Benchmarking User Journey

Analyzing & Optimizing UX

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital experiences, ensuring a seamless user journey within your app is paramount. Understanding how users navigate through your application and optimizing their experience can significantly impact aquisition, engagement, and retention. In this guide, we’ll explore steps to effectively analyze and enhance your app’s user journey. We’ll try to improve the onboarding flow of an app as an example.

Step 1: Screen-recording the User Journey

To begin, screen-record a video of a user interacting with your app. This step captures the real-time experience, allowing you to observe how users navigate, interact, and engage with different features and functionalities. Pay close attention to any areas where users may encounter obstacles or confusion. Screenshots can summarise your findings by capturing key moments, but you should always have a video that enables you to deep-dive into the actual flow. A screenshots may not be able to capture if a input field was auto-filled or manually input by the user.

User Journey Snippet

Useful tools

iPhones have an inbuilt screen-recording feature that can be used for this. For Android, there are a number of free apps available as well.

Step 2: Visualizing Key Steps in Figma

After recording the user journey, extract crucial moments or key steps and take screenshots. There are few mobile apps that let you do the same, but I personally used iMovie to do it quickly. Quicktime player also allows you to copy current frame easily from videos. Utilize design tools like Figma to compile these screenshots, arranging them in an organized and coherent manner. Figma’s following features come super handy:

1. Figjam files to make highly customized flows and journeys
2. auto-layout feature allows you to arrange the screenshots quickly in a clean way.

Documenting User Journeys in Figma

Step 3: Comparative Analysis with Competitors

Next, create a spreadsheet comparing your app’s flow with those of your competitors. Identify common stages such as onboarding processes and compare the inputs required at each step. Analyze the differences and similarities between your app’s user journey and that of competitors to gain insights into potential areas for improvement.

Competitor Analysis in Spreadsheet

Parameters for comparison:

1. Field-level (asked/not-asked/pre-filled)
2. Screen-level (#screens, #engagement-heavy screens)
3. UX style (crisp / verbose)
4. Authentication style (explicit / silent-login)
5. OTP Input (manual / auto-fill)
6. User consent-taking style
7. Native / Browser-based journey

By consistently evaluating and refining the user journey, you can create a more intuitive and gratifying experience for your app users.