Blending User Journey Mapping with AARRR Metric Framework

Rakuten TV is an over-the-top (OTT) digital distribution service, for both video-on-demand (VOD) of movies, as well as free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) of live TV channels.

Celonis SE is a German data processing SaaS company that works to improve processes by continuously observing client workflows, removing bottlenecks, and signalling the right actions to capture value.

+200 employees across Europe

+3,500,000 users worldwide

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Strategy & Operations

During my tenure at Rakuten TV, I noticed 2 re-occuring problems:

1) Some employees seemed to have a different view of our product than the user’s actual view—as suggested by our user feedback data.

2) Growth experiment scopes were sometimes truncated/reduced in way that would interrupt user’s task flows.

So I led an initiative to improve internal stakeholders’ understanding of UX’s impact on the Business. To achieve this, I deployed a common and effective UX tool—a User Journey Map.

UJMs are a great visual, story-like diagram that shows a user’s steps, interactions, and emotions as they interact with a product to achieve a goal. They help teams understand user needs, identify pain points, and ultimately improve the overall user experience.

As with all new UX initiatives, broad adoption is critical for impact. To ensure that the UJM findings would be accepted by the Business unit, I engaged non-Designers to participate in an interactive and educative workshop.

I led 2 workshops—one with the Design team, and one with non-Designers, consisting of Product Managers, Front-End Developers, QA Testers, Customer Service, and Data Analysts.

The comparison of the 2 workshops were striking:

Aligned on negative views of the Welcome and Consumption journeys. Designers and non-Designers both believe that the Load and Landing UXs are negative for the users.

Misaligned on the Discovery journey: Designers believe content discovery is a negative user experience while non-Designers believe it is a positive one.

The workshop was successful in capturing internal Rakuten TV views of the product experience we deliver to users. But what about users say about the product?

Using user feedback from NPS to 1-on-1 usability interviews, I built alternative UJM that visualizes both the positive and negative parts of the user experience.

Here we see a different story:

Users had an overall declining positive experience: We see that they found the Welcome phase fair, the Discovery phase poor, and the Consumption phase negative.

Boring and dark first impression.

Unappealing layout and structure that made content Discovery slower.

Overwhelming number of ads during playback.

The UJM demonstrated a user blindspot in our Business unit, as demonstrated by the combined Journey path views of both workshops and aggregated user data: