Mapping the Customer’s Journey
Learn how to map the journey of the customer across stages.
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The path a customer takes while discovering, evaluating, and ultimately using our product is known as a user journey. A user journey map depicts the user journey in a visual format alongside the user’s activities, goals, touchpoints, and responses.
User journey maps are very useful in understanding how our customers connect with our brand, product, or service. User journey maps vary from company to company and might vary from industry to industry. However, they always show a timeline of the user’s trip that summarizes the most crucial steps.
As we apply the user journey mapping methodology for API products, we'll notice that “user” and “developer” are often used interchangeably. In the following illustration, we'll see how the user journey across discovery, evaluation, integration, testing, deployment, and observability is mapped to the various questions customers have, customer touchpoints, the activity customers complete in each step, and how they respond to the current offerings that enable them at each step.
Discovery
The first step is for a user to discover our product. This could happen through a number of channels, such as from a user googling our APIs, coming across our APIs as part of a YouTube tutorial about a project that uses our APIs, and so on. If we already have users and want to bring in new ones, we might already have ways for people to find out about our APIs. For example, we could use newsletters, events, social media channels, and so on. The discovery phase is very important for letting people know about our API and getting new customers interested in it.
During the discovery process, we'll often find different user personas interacting with all the content we publish. Product managers on our customers’ side would be looking for potential solutions based on a particular problem they are looking to solve. For example, a product manager at an e-commerce company might look for payment APIs that offer the ability to accept Apple Pay so that they can enable Apple Pay as a payment option for their customers.
At this stage, the focus of users is going to be on business use cases, and this is the top of the customer funnel for our product. As we start to think about how our customers find our APIs, we can also start to think about how developers start to learn about the capabilities and if there are ways we can enable this process.