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The necessity of providing user satisfaction on every key touchpoint in your business is critical to your success.

The issue, however, is identifying those crucial touchpoints.

Customer journey maps could be an incredibly helpful solution in this area.

Borrowing from Service Design

Service design is an activity performed in the marketing and management departments of businesses.

In the context of website production, the closest analogy would be user experience design (UX).

In a nutshell, service design involves providing or creating positive feelings for customers while they are using the designed service (product), with the focus on the interactions that take place in a variety of channels (which encompasses both the online and offline world).

A well-designed website is not enough when the customer’s visit to your brick-and-mortar physical store is an unpleasant experience, or when her tech support call was not satisfactory. Thus, service design is a holistic business approach.

However, in this article, we’re going to talk about how to apply some service design concepts specifically towards website production and design.

What are Touchpoints?

Creating positive feelings for your customers all boils down to ensuring that their experience is great on all the places they see and interact with.

Places where the business and the customer are interacting with each other are often referred to as touchpoints.

For example, when we consider the touchpoints of a computer technology corporation, some of their touchpoints might be:

• call center
• showroom
• website
• newspaper
• TV
• radio

In a website, these touchpoints might be:

• email
• contact web form
• help desk/support
• phone
• live chat
• comments section of blog posts

The Problem to Solve

The question is this: How do we identify critical touchpoints in our websites?

The answer is to take advantage of one of the most important tools used in the service design field: customer journey maps.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

Customer journey maps describe a schema of the path traveled by a typical customer moving through our touchpoints.

At each touchpoint, we illustrate how the customer’s attitudes and feelings might change towards our company.

A hypothetical customer journey map.

Benefits of a Customer Journey Map

• We can identify crucial touchpoints that have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction
• It helps us focus our website towards the user (user-centered design)
• We are better able to identify the user’s potential needs and wants
• It can provide us with a clear presentation of the whole process carried out by the user (which can help with client presentations and pitches, similar to storyboarding)
• It can summarize the information that we already have about users and their behavior
• It helps us locate additional UX improvement opportunities, as well as the areas where there’s a risk of dissatisfying the user

Creating Customer Journey Maps

What follows are the general steps you’ll need to take in order to create customer journey maps.

Step 1: Gather and Assess Your Existing Knowledge about Your Users

The most important thing in this step is to gather and use the information you have already obtained through past user research and studies. This will help eliminate the subjective approach to the problem; it helps us avoid drawing conclusions based on hunches and loose deduction.

If your user data is lacking, or if you simply don’t have any, there are plenty of usability tools that will help you gather the appropriate user data.

Results and Deliverables:

• A collection of preliminary insights gained from user research and studies
• A list of touchpoints
• A list of activities that a user performs during the journey (e.g., researching about the product, buying the product through your online store, getting help/support for the product they bought, etc.)

Tips:

• Don’t draw conclusions based on hunches that are not supported by reliable, solid data.
• Include employees/staff members that have regular contact with your customers in the data collection process (e.g., help desk staff, client relationship manager, social media manager, etc.).They often have the most valuable information about your users’ needs and their actual level of satisfaction.
• Include decision-makers in the process. The customer journey map, and its results, could have a very strong impact on the overall product and brand strategy of the company, so it’s important to include decision-makers at the early stage.

Step 2: Fill Your Knowledge Gaps

Find out what you don’t know and also identify things you’re unsure about. For these things, you can gather, test, and verify them with additional user studies.

Results and Deliverables:

• Reports on the results of the additional studies containing answers to questions we have.

Tips:

• Don’t focus excessively on demographic/statistical data. Instead, focus on ethnography and the users’ voice.
• Analyze the collected data and test your assumptions.

Step 3: Create User Personas

At this point, you should have enough data points to create an accurate user persona.

A user persona is a fictional character that represents the goals and behaviors of your average user.

Source: boagworld.com

Creating user personas is beyond the topic of this article, but here are some detailed tutorials, guides, tools, and books that will help you create user personas:

• Develop Personas (usability.gov)
• Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience (uxmag.com)
• An Experience with User Personas (boagworld.com)
• Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design (boxesandarrows.com)
• Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus (jnd.org)
• Usable Personas is a database of pre-built personas you can use (sites.google.com)
• Persona Template is an MS Word template for helping you develop user profiles in projects (sites.google.com)
• The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (amazon.com)

Results and Deliverables:

• Gain insights related to the expectations and concerns of the users
• Visualization of the representatives of the target group as a set of personas

Tips:

• Don’t automatically reject data that aren’t statistically significant. It can often be the basis for the creation of additional hypotheses that should be tested further in additional user research studies.

Step 4: Draw Your Customer Journey Map

Map out the highlights of the results you have gathered during the previous steps.

Start by defining the principles governing the purchase process.

For example, if you’re selling a technical book on JavaScript or PHP, one defining principle in your service design is the fact that a purchase will probably not be impulsive since these books are for professionals already intent on learning.

Source: Amazon.com

Compare that to items that are typical impulse-purchase items like shoes, junk food or items marked on sale, and the principles governing the process drastically changes.

Results and Deliverables:

• A customer journey map illustrating the processes, needs and user experience during the contact with the product.

Tips:

• Spend your time wisely by focusing on important content. Focus on the content, not on the details and the aesthetic of the map.
• Use more than one map if you have more than one user persona. Customer journeys can differ between different user personas.
• Don’t neglect the graphic layout of the customer journey map. Though the content is more important, the layout is also critical. The map should be printed and placed in a publicly accessible and conspicuous place so that every employee can become acquainted with it.

Components of a Customer Journey Map

For inspiration, here’s what the contents of our customer journey maps include:

Here are other examples of customer journey maps:

Source: uxmatters.com

Source: adaptivepath.com

Source: heartofthecustomer.com

What’s Next?

Obviously, the creation of your customer journey map is not the end goal; the key is to draw appropriate conclusions from it in order to improve the user’s experience.

The first step is to identify the areas that need immediate improvement, mostly because they reduce the overall level of user satisfaction.

Once you’ve patched the holes, you should be able to tighten the screws and start looking for points where the level of satisfaction can be further improved.

Finally, keep in mind that the use of the customer journey map is an ongoing process. It’s a tool that should be used for periodic monitoring of the current level of satisfaction of your users, and for quickly identifying opportunities for development.

Related Content

• Quick Overview of User Experience for Web Designers
• Creating a Timeless User Experience
• Lessons We Learned from Our Biggest UX and Design Mistakes
• Related categories: User Experience and Usability

About the Author

Jacek Samsel is the UX Senior Specialist at Symetria. He’s a graduate of the Poznan University of Economics with degrees in Trade and Marketing. He has worked in the area of web design since 2005. He specializes in designing web portals, desktop software, and mobile app interfaces.

In the first part of this article about CoffeeScript, you saw its basic capabilities; but let’s be honest, most of the time we use the jQuery library to help us write our JavaScript and what I showed you in the first part was just vanilla JavaScript.

In this part we will join CoffeeScript, LocalStorage and jQuery to create a simple contact manager where we can save someone’s number, name and also check if that person is a friend, and with the help of LocalStorage this contact manager will save your contacts when you refresh your page.

You can see the demo of what we will be creating in this demo I built.

The HTML

As you saw in the demo, our HTML will be the form and a simple empty <ul> that we will fill later with the names and numbers:

<form action="#" method="POST">
 <label for="name">Name:</label>
 <input type="text" name="name" id="name" required autofocus />
 <label for="number">Number</label> 
 <input tpe="tel" name="number" id="number" required />
 <label for="friend">Is he a friend?</label> 
 <input type="checkbox" name="friend" id="friend">
 <input type="submit" id="submit" value="Add" />
 </form>
 <ul id="numbers"></ul>

Even though this form has a method and action we will later block the default action with JavaScript to stop it actually reloading the page and jumping when it is submitted. Instead we’ll just fill the numbers unordered list with what is in the form’s inputs.

The CoffeeScript

Now we will get into the best part of this article: talking about CoffeeScript and jQuery together, two tools that were made to make our JavaScript development simpler and more productive.

Let’s think about what we want this app to do in bullet points before the coding:

• Add the class checked if the checkbox is checked and remove it if not;
• check for a click event on the submit button;
• get the values of the number and name;
• place these values on our page;
• add all the names and numbers to LocalStorage;
• delete everything we have typed into the form;
• prevent the form submitting;
• read and display any data held in LocalStorage.

Now we’ve got all of this straight we can start from the top. To add the checked class we need to check for a click and then toggle the class on every single class, we have already seen how to construct functions in CoffeeScript in part 1, so:

$('#friend').click -> $(this).toggleClass 'checked'

The next thing we need to is check for a click on the submit button and store some variables that we will be needing further down the road: 

$('#submit').click ->
       ul = $('#numbers')
       number = $('#number').val()
       name = $('#name').val()

In this step we have defined our function and the variables we need later, the ul variable holds the unordered list that will contain all the names and numbers and the next two will store whatever we type on the inputs.

This is the part where we grab all the values we have and prepend a list item for each number we have. Remember we want to style things a little bit differently if the contact is a friend, so we will check the class of the checkbox and add different classes to our list items accordingly. For that we will use a simple if statement as described in part 1: 

if $('#friend').hasClass 'checked'
 $(ul).prepend '<li class="friend"><span>Name: ' + name + '<br/> Number: ' + number + '</span></li>' 
else
 $(ul).prepend '<li><span>Name: ' + name + ' <br/>Number: ' + number + '</span></li>'

The base of our app is ready but if you reload the page you will see that all the numbers are gone, so we need to add the contents of the numbers to LocalStorage and we will call it contacts:

localStorage.setItem 'contacts', $(ul).html()
    

What we are doing is naming what we want to save first, and then after the comma we declare the value to be saved. in this case we will save the contents of the unordered list. 

With this line done, we have all the numbers and names in LocalStorage so let’s add the final touches to the function by resetting the form and then returning false to ensure the page doesn’t reload:

$("form")[0].reset()
    return false 

The function is now complete and all we need to do now is check if we have something in LocalStorage with the name of contacts and if we do we just need to place that on the page:

if localStorage.getItem 'contacts'
       $('#numbers').html localStorage.getItem 'contacts'

All we are doing is checking and then placing the contents of that item on the page. With this last touch our little contact manager is done and the full CoffeeScript code used was:

$('#friend').click -> $(this).toggleClass 'checked'

$('#submit').click ->
ul = $('#numbers')
 number = $('#number').val()
 name = $('#name').val()
 if $('#friend').hasClass 'checked'
 $(ul).prepend '<li class="friend"><span>Name: ' + name + '<br/> Number: ' + number + '</span></li>' 
 else
 $(ul).prepend '<li><span>Name: ' + name + ' <br/>Number: ' + number + '</span></li>' 
 localStorage.setItem 'contacts', $(ul).html() 
 $("form")[0].reset();
 return false

if localStorage.getItem 'contacts'
 $('#numbers').html localStorage.getItem 'contacts'

And if we run this code through the compiler we end up with the following JavaScript:

$('#friend').click(function() {
 return $(this).toggleClass('checked');
});

$('#submit').click(function() {
 var name, number, ul;
 ul = $('#numbers');
 number = $('#number').val();
 name = $('#name').val();
 if ($('#friend').hasClass('checked')) {
 $(ul).prepend('<li class="friend"><span>Name: ' + name + '<br/> Number: ' + number + '</span></li>');
 } else {
 $(ul).prepend('<li><span>Name: ' + name + ' <br/>Number: ' + number + '</span></li>');
 }
 localStorage.setItem('contacts', $(ul).html());
 $("form")[0].reset();
 return false;
});

if (localStorage.getItem('contacts')) {
 $('#numbers').html(localStorage.getItem('contacts'));
}

Compare both we can see that the CoffeeScript has 587 words and 14 lines while the Javascript one has 662 words and 21 lines, and if we compare legibility we can see that the CoffeeScript is substantially more legible than the JavaScript equivalent. If in this type of simple application CoffeeScript can save you 7 lines of code imagine how much it would save in full blown application!

Conclusion

I hope this article has given you a better idea of CoffeeScript and how it can improve your day-to-day JavaScript coding. The code written in this article isn’t meant to be cleanest or easiest JavaScript, rather it was intended to illustrate using CoffeeScript. I hope now that you can see how powerful it is with jQuery and you consider using this great little language in your daily coding because it will most definitely save you hours of typing.

Do you use CoffeeScript? How useful do you find it day-to-day? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, coffee image via Shutterstock.

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A computer two millimeters square is the start of an effort to make chips that can put computer power just about anywhere for the vaunted “Internet of Things.”

If the Internet is to reach everywhere—from the pills you swallow to the shoes on your feet—then computers will need to get a whole lot smaller. A new microchip that is two millimeters square and contains almost all the components of a tiny functioning computer is a promising start.

Firefox 22 has big news, WebRTC or asm.js, which is big news depends on your perspective.

On May 24th, WEAA’s Marc Steiner Show featured guest Jeffrey Davis, associate professor and chair of political science at UMBC, to discuss the recent guilty verdict for former Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, its overturning, and possible implications for the U.S. Davis appeared alongside Anita Isaacs, associate professor of political science at Haverford College.

Contextualizing the court cased, Davis told listeners, “This is a trial based on a genocide that took place during Guatemala’s 30-year civil war. During that war more than 200,000 people were killed. 40,000 or more were disappeared. That’s around 3% of their population. To give you an idea, that’s about 8 million Americans if you put it in our terms.”

Davis is the author of Justice Across Borders: The Struggle for Human Rights in U.S. Courts (2008) and the forthcoming Seeking Human Rights in Latin America: Truth, Extra-Territorial Courts and the Process of Justice (Cambridge Univ. Press, Nov. 2013).