How to design a user website journey
You wouldn’t start a big project without some sort of a plan? Would you? The same goes when designing a beautiful and minimal website. But the focus should be on the user journey and experience.
Before you build, you need to define your website user journey, or pathway, to know exactly what steps you want your visitor to take once they have landed on to your homepage.
In this post we’ll explain why this is important (especially in minimal website design) and how to build your user journey. There are some key steps you want to take in planning your site’s content strategy:
List your website goals.
Define your website route (the user journey).
List what content falls under each page of your site.
Define your Call to Actions!
As a minimalist, the website planning stage is crucial. Why? You need to design your journey to be clear, concise and to the point! Declutter, declutter, declutter.
What is the purpose of a website user journey?
On average, visitors will spend no more than 3 minutes browsing a website. The aim of a website is to get your visitor engaging with your business in some way and offline. Therefore your site journey needs to be to the point, and avoid any unnecessary content.
As an entrepreneur or business owner, before you build a website, you need to know what your site goals are. What are you hoping to achieve for your business from this website? What is the end goal?
This is your first task!
Grab your phone, iPad or, back to basics, a pen and paper. Jot down 1 - 3 of your own site goals.
Some examples of site goals could be:
Sell a physical product
Sell a professional service
Grow your email list
Increase podcast or YouTube subscribers
Grow a community
Once you have defined this, the website user journey that you design needs to be aligned with these goals. Just like any journey, it should be a strategic plan to help achieve your desired outcome!
There is no right and wrong as the user journeys will look quite different for different business types and industries. However, it should be kept as minimal as possible, and should be set out so that the end of the journey leads to your site’s goal.
For example if you’re a business selling professional services, e.g. an architect, the end site goal may be for your website visitors to contact you to schedule a meeting. Therefore your user journey should lead to, and stop at the ‘Contact’ page.
Website Design - User Journey
So the first thing we want to do is build the ‘road’, or your user’s journey, from start to finish.
Example - For a website designer this may look something like this:
Homepage > Portfolio > Pricing > Contact Page
Example - For an ecommerce business this may look something like this:
Homepage > Shop > Product(s)
These are the main pages of the website, and you can see how simple and minimal we’ve kept it.
So, here’s the second task!
Work out the user journey for your website.
Write the names of your main pages along the top of a large enough piece of paper as headers, leaving enough space underneath so you can list the content in this page.
Using post-it notes or on a separate piece of paper, list all of the content that you want within your website. Include the most important content most aligned with your site goals, as well as less important content. Perhaps use a different colour post-it note or pen/pencil to distinguish your most important content.
Examples of content could be:
Location of business (if applicable)
Hours of operation/work
Products/packages
Services
Reviews or testimonials
Pricing
‘About’ text
Opt-in gift or freebie
Blog post previews
Place this content under the different pages/headings on your main piece of paper. Once again, making sure that the most important content is being placed under the ‘Homepage’ header, or clearly linking from your homepage to the full page for that piece of content.
Less Important Pages or Content?
Every business and industry will be different! Of course ...
But in any case, for those pages that aren’t going to achieve your ultimate site goals, this is considered your less important page and/or content.
Using the earlier example of an architect selling their professional services, who may also have a Blog page. This page is highly unlikely to be considered on your website user journey, and certainly will not sit in your website’s primary navigation (check out our other blog post).
You can always move these pages or content to the footer of your website.
Call to Action (CTA)!
One very good way to do this is to make sure Call to Actions (CTAs) are very obvious and clear on the homepage, but also throughout your website.
The idea of these CTAs is to remind the user to navigate along the intended user journey.
For example, provide a CTA link/button within your homepage to your Portfolio page. This is indicating to your visitor, that this is the next step for them to take.
Primary Navigation
The primary navigation for your website is the main menu which will serve your website user journey. This is where you will include each of the pages which you decided make up the route to meet your ultimate goal.
Primary navigation website design - For user journey
We have written a whole other blog post on the primary navigation and how many links to include in it. Within minimalist web design, there is a maximum number which you don’t want to exceed - read about it here.
Get our Free Workbook
The whole idea behind a minimalist concept is to build a site that will need less maintenance over time, and to create a more effective online tool for your business.
If you’re keen on reading more about what it takes to build a minimalist website, hit the download button to get the free 10-page workbook.
We have also put together some key tasks for you to do, that are fundamental to ensuring you capture your visitor’s attention, and quickly.