Each Aspect of a User’s Journey Should Have a Beginning and End

The user’s journey can be thought of in a broad or narrow way: it can be their journey through the whole product—for a dating app, that could be from signing up to a first date—or it could be a fine-grained journey, for example, into a particular settings menu to change an option.

As the user goes through their jobs to be done (JTDB; a methodology for discovering user needs and solving them), they make a great many small journeys. In every case, the user should know that they have begun a journey, that this journey will end at some point, and when it has ended.

The classic anti-pattern here is users thinking, “Have I saved these settings or not?” For example, a rare UX mistake from Apple is that on macOS, changing the settings and then closing the window saves the settings. On the other hand, on (older) Windows applications, the user must press Save. In some more obscure...