Journey Paths: A New Way to Uncover the Paths Your Customers Take

Journey Paths are visualizations of how users move through your application that uncover user flows, pinpoint page abandonment, and turn qualitative into quantitive data.

Starting from any page or feature, where do users go next?

Journey Paths are a powerful tool to help you explore behavioral trends and discover key issues that may not be apparent from usage analytics or feedback surveys alone. Friction points in onboarding or poor user experiences that result in unnecessary, repetitive work are now easy to identify and quantify.

Journey Paths are another exciting addition to the UserIQ intelligence suite—giving you a new way to visualize how users progress through your application.

How do I create a Journey Path?

Journey Paths live under the Intelligence drop-down in UserIQ. To get started, navigate to Intelligence -> Journey Paths, and click on "Create New Journey Path".

Give the Path a name, and fill in the following fields:

• Segment: This is the audience for your Journey Path. You can select a Segment from the list of your existing Segments in UserIQ. Or, if you have not created a segment yet, you can create one here: Create a Segment, before returning to Journey Paths to create your path. If you would like to understand the Journey Paths for all of your users, you can select Everyone as the audience segment. You can also drill-down and limit the audience to a single account/user. To do this, create a new Segment and utilize the "User Attribute" audience filter to filter down your audience to 1 account or 1 user.
  
  
• Feature: Your chosen page will define the starting point of your Journey Path. In the example above, we have chosen a starting point of our Dashboard, which also happens to be our landing page after a successful login.
  
  
• Start Date and End Date: This is the date range for which you are generating a Journey Path. Please note that we are limiting the Start Date to January 1st, 2017. The end date can be any date prior to the day you are generating the Journey Path.

Once you have selected these fields and hit Create, a task will be created in the UserIQ backend to generate your Journey Path. Completion time depends on the number of days and the number of users in the Segment that you have selected. You can track the progress of your Journey Path creation by clicking into the Journey Path name (there are four different phases for its creation, and we will automatically update the phase until the path is fully created). Once your Journey Path is generated, an automated email will be sent to the user that created that path.

As a best practice, we recommend you to create only one Journey Path per site at a time i.e. it would be best to wait until a newly created Journey Path is fully generated, before creating a new one. Keep in mind that paths are snapshots of your user data – create them once, and once fully generated, you can access them in seconds.

What useful insights can you obtain from a Journey Path?

Journey Paths provide unique insights to inform different areas of your business. For example:

Product teams – Product Managers can pinpoint user experience issues like repetitive or inefficient workflows. Perhaps more importantly, you can identify trends that suggest a confusing UI for your users. For example, when a user is confused about what to do next and leaves the page, they will be reflected in the Journey Path as having ‘No Next Step’. A trend of ‘No Next Step’ before milestone completion is a key indicator that product iteration is needed.

Customer Success teams – Customer Success Managers will love Journey Paths because they can explore how new users are using the system during their onboarding phase. Journey Paths would help CSMs answer certain key questions like:

• How are the new users progressing through the app? Is this expected?
• Are they finding and using the key features that drive value in your application?
• Are trial customers moving through your product or are they abandoning a page before they reach important milestones?
• How do my most successful accounts move through the product vs. my accounts that are at risk?

Each block in the Journey Path represents a named page on your app and each line between blocks represents a path.

• If you see a path connecting two features with the same name ("Dashboard" to "Dashboard"), this means the user engaged with something on the page and stayed on the page
• Unnamed Feature means that the user navigated to a page that is not yet tracked in UserIQ. If you see a large percentage of users on that path, this could indicate that you have not tracked a vital feature within your platform.
• No Next Step means that the user ended their session, closed the page, or left the platform after the previous step.

Per the example above, you can get the following insights:

1. Percentage Breakdown of all of the users that have started from a named page and ended up on another named page

2. Understand transition points between two named pages by clicking on the line between milestones to show all users who went from one page to another

3. See all users who reached a particular page on a path by clicking on a page