What is a user experience?

User experience starts well before the first visit to your website. The user experience is closely linked to the user journey.

User Journey describes the path from the first moment a potential prospect comes into contact with your company in any form. This encounter can be digital or in the real world, it doesn’t matter here.

An example of user experience and the user journey:

You see a nice car on the street. This car has a logo and you ask a friend about the brand name. Before you buy this car directly, you will want to find out. Nowadays, that means googling the brand. You’ll find a blog post which takes a closer look at this specific car and illustrates its benefits. (Ideally, it’s the car company’s own blog. If not, that’s no big deal either.) After that, you’ll search many more times for reviews and pictures of the car, with many touch points with different blog posts. This takes place mostly on your smartphone, but also on your computer/laptop. At some point, you decide to test drive the car. You Google the brand again and look for the relevant offer on their site. Ideally, you’ll find a test drive request form. You fill it out and receive a shipping confirmation and wait for the car dealer to call you back. He already knows all the important details and can therefore advise you very competently and make an appointment for a test drive. After the test drive you are excited and want to get more information about the specifications of the car. You go to the dealer’s site and read through the descriptions and technical data of the car. After saving up for a while, you can afford the car and don’t have to just look at it on YouTube or the website. Again, you search the website for the offer and fill out a form. You will be called back and an appointment will be made. The salesperson already knows exactly what type of car you have in mind and therefore doesn’t have to waste time on the basic issues, but can go straight to the interior.

The User Journey and its different forms

Of course, there are countless different processes leading up to the final purchase, but some occur more often than others. It’s a matter of isolating these and optimizing your website for them.

You have to be aware of this in order to provide all visitors with the most pleasant and memorable stay on your website.