How to Create User Journeys to Encourage Behavior On Your Website

Your Page’s Big Argument

Every page of your website can be approached from the meta-perspective of “what do I want the user to do?” The corresponding page then acts as a way to convince the user that you are the best company to perform the answer to that question on the internet, and that they should then entrust you with their dollars instead of some other store. A user’s time on page is precious, and if your argument is not succinct, linear, and clear, the user will happily spend their money elsewhere.

These arguments may vary from page to page. For most jewelry store homepages, the answer to this question is “I want the user to know what my store is capable of and that we are the best.” For an interior page about Custom Jewelry Design, it may be “I want the user to see how skilled I am at custom design, and to realize that they want a custom piece of jewelry.”

Starting with what the end goal argument should look like makes laying out your page’s sections and flow much easier. Once this is laid out, we can start creating sections and widgets that impact the user’s decision making to hopefully buy with you.

Goal By Goal Arguments

If you are building a landing page for your bridal jewelry, the big argument is that your store carries the best bridal jewelry, regardless of the shoppers budget, fashion style, or level of confidence. 

To begin winning those arguments, consider presenting your shopper with some examples of what it is you could sell them. I like to think that a good start is with a banner of a model wearing a piece of jewelry in an aspirational way. By using well-lit and beautifully photographed images, it generally reflects quality in your offerings. Furthermore, many younger online shoppers see evidence of luxury and quality in images that are crisp and well photographed and are more willing to trust a store with a first time buying experience.

Site Depth and Terminals

Following up with subcategories that are related to the page’s argument is a way to increase page depth. A website can be viewed in layers, like a parfait or onion (or ogre). The surface level has routes that range from more generic hooks (Shop Our Beautiful Jewelry) that moves the user to a slightly more narrowly tailored product offering, to “deeper” pages (Our Custom Jewelry Gallery, Shop Our Earrings, etc.) and finally to terminal pages.

Terminal Pages are the deepest possible pages. These can be pages with call to actions such as “checkout” or “start a project”, or they can be pages that gather information for lead follow-up such as “Privacy Policy” or “Contact Us”.

Ideally you want every user to follow a unique journey through your website that culminates in a terminal page with a convincing enough call to action (CTA) that the user follows through. 

Helping Users Take Action

Creating clear and direct calls to action or page hooks tightens your website’s loop. Some websites have very shallow and linear sitemaps, and do not include any page hooks, which can decrease your site’s Time on Page as well as Bounce Rate.

Here is an example of a website with a shallow site map and lack of looping CTAs.

As you can see, from the homepage there are four links, three of which would go directly to a product grid, and one going to a services landing page. On first blush, you may think that this would be successful; after all, you are presenting the shopper with products to shop from immediately! However, this is a very hollow experience. When making big purchases (as jewelry tends to be), some storytelling around your store, the brands you carry, and the lifestyle of owning a piece of jewelry you own can help lift your conversion rate.

Above is an example of what a more successful jewelry website’s map and flow would involve. The first thing to notice is that the Category Landing pages each act as sudo-homepages and do just as much filtering and directing as the homepage does. This helps users find what they are looking for without even knowing what they are looking for. This is without even mentioning the valuable SEO you’ll gain from having more pages about jewelry-related keywords indexed by Google.

Secondly, we’ve introduced another call to action in the form of the custom jewelry "Start a Project" form. By opening up an alternative route to success, especially if it is something that does not require the user to open up their credit card right away, this will increase your rate of success drastically.

Writing Good Button Copy

Finally, it is important to inform your user of what will happen when they click a button. Uncertainty can lead to them bouncing from the page or even clicking nothing at all. All button copy should answer the simple question “I want to…” in as few words as possible.

Your Takeaways From This Article

• Keep your website’s goals in mind so that you can create succinct and effective arguments that lead to successful user experiences on your website. 
• Feature high resolution product photography, and multiple variants if possible.
• The longer you keep a user shopping and exploring on your website, the better.
• Have a good call to action on terminal pages.
• Your buttons should answer the question “I want to…”

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This post was written by Michael Burpoe, Lead UI/UX Designer at Punchmark. He’s originally from Saranac Lake, way up in the Adirondack Region of New York State. He is detail-oriented and loves breaking down complex tasks into approachable pieces.

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¹ https://www.salsify.com/blog/what-types-of-product-imagery-earn-ecommerce-sales