User Journey MapResearchOpsJourney ManagementMixed methodsB2B E-commerceTheyDo

The User Journey Map as a central reference for innovation

Use case — Portfolio of Mehdi Aoussat, Lead User Researcher · Scope: the purchase experience on RAJA NEXT

How a User Journey Map, installed as a single source of truth, brought a scattered research practice together and changed the moment research enters the decision.

Role: Lead User Researcher
Duration: Ongoing practice
Tools: TheyDo

Context & role

RAJA Group is Europe's leader in the B2B distribution of packaging and business supplies, present across 19 markets through several subsidiaries. Its shared e-commerce platform serves thousands of professional customers with very different needs and levels of maturity.

Within the Digital Factory, I built the user research practice. My role: to ensure that product decisions rest on a real understanding of users, through mixed research (quantitative, qualitative, competitive) and diverse data sources (online listening programme, biannual journey evaluation, web analytics).

The underlying challenge was not a lack of studies. It was the opposite: insights existed, but scattered — a report here, a survey there, a benchmark elsewhere. All of it hard to mobilise at the moment of deciding. What we lacked was a legible, useful point of convergence.

The challenge

On a platform like RAJA NEXT, the purchase experience belongs to no one in particular — and therefore to everyone. The product manager sees their scope, the designer their screen, the tech team their constraint, the business its numbers. Everyone holds a fragment of the journey; no one holds it whole.

As a result, studies are commissioned to answer a one-off question, used once, then forgotten. Setting up holistic evaluation programmes becomes hard to defend. Insights that overlap without ever speaking to one another. And, when it comes time to decide, a frequent reflex — leaning on intuition or urgency, for lack of a shared reference.

The real problem, then, was not user knowledge. It was its fragmentation and its lack of continuity. What was needed was a common object: a representation of the purchase journey — living, shared — to which each study would add itself rather than starting from scratch.

Before — scattered insights, no point of convergence: each artefact lives on its own, disconnected from a journey none of them covers end to end.

The approach: the UJM as a central reference

Rather than multiplying deliverables, I made the opposite choice: to build a single, durable object and install it as the source of truth of the purchase experience. A User Journey Map of the customer journey, structured into phases — from product search to order validation — and hosted in a journey management platform (TheyDo).

This choice of tool is not incidental. A UJM drawn in a slide dies the moment the file is closed. A living, centralised, versioned UJM becomes an infrastructure: every team refers to it, every study is deposited into it.

The principle is simple. The UJM does not replace research methods — it federates them. Each approach feeds it on a different dimension:

The quantitative (behavioural data, large-scale survey) sheds light on where it happens: the phases where attention concentrates, those where users drop off.
The qualitative (think-aloud sessions, customer feedback) sheds light on why: what people are trying to do, what blocks them, what they feel at each step.
The competitive (benchmark of market players) sheds light on what is possible: the standards users encounter elsewhere that shape their expectations.

These three angles meet on the same map. A friction spotted in the data finds its explanation in a verbatim; an expectation voiced in an interview is confronted with a competitor's practice. The UJM stops being an illustration: it becomes the place where signals cross-reference and where meaning emerges.

And because everything converges in the same place, innovation opportunities are no longer isolated ideas. They read directly off the journey: where several sources point to the same pain, a lead takes shape, is qualified, is prioritised.

After — one shared map: the three research angles converge onto the journey, and opportunities read directly off the phases where signals stack up.

The process: how the map comes alive

The strength of a central reference lies less in its creation than in its upkeep. A frozen UJM soon becomes a slide again. Here is how this one stays alive.

Lay the skeleton. You start with the bare structure of the purchase journey: the main phases, in TheyDo. No insight yet — just a shared frame everyone agrees on. This base is the fruit of collective work with product managers and designers, so the map reflects the real journey and not an isolated research view.

Feed in waves. Each study becomes a contribution to the map. A large-scale survey feeds the phases with its quantitative reading; a series of think-aloud sessions adds the frictions and emotions; a competitive benchmark sets the market's expectations. The map thickens with every research cycle, without ever starting from scratch.

Make it converge. This is the key step. You connect the signals: a drop spotted in behavioural data finds its explanation in a verbatim, is confronted with a competitor's practice. TheyDo lets you attach these elements directly to the relevant phases — the data stops being a separate file, it becomes a layer of the journey.

Qualify the opportunities. Where several sources point to the same pain, an opportunity is formalised. TheyDo links these opportunities to the journey phases and allows them to be prioritised by impact and recurrence. Research no longer produces only findings: it produces a queue of qualified opportunities.

Feed the roadmap. Prioritised opportunities flow down toward execution — as epics and quick wins carried by the product teams. The link with the map is preserved: you always know where a decision comes from, which signal motivated it. The loop closes, and the next research cycle enriches it in turn.

What makes the whole thing robust is that the map does not belong to research: it is shared. The product manager reads their priorities in it, the designer the context of their screens, the business the logic behind a trade-off. One object, several readings.

The process runs as a continuous loop: each research cycle enriches the map, which in turn feeds the next.

Results & impact

The most visible effect is not a metric. It is a shift in posture.

Deciding from a shared reference. Before, every trade-off reopened the debate about the real state of the journey. Now, the discussion starts from a common base: we no longer argue about what is happening, we discuss what to do. The UJM shifted the starting point of conversations.

Insights that last. A study no longer exhausts itself in the meeting where it is presented. Deposited on the map, it stays available, usable months later, cross-referenced with others. User knowledge stops being a flow consumed once and becomes a capital that accumulates.

Traceable innovation. Every opportunity brought to the roadmap keeps its link with the signal that gave rise to it. You always know why a lead exists. This changes the nature of exchanges with product and business: research no longer arrives after the fact to justify, it is upstream to orient.

An established research practice. Finally, this setup anchored research in how the teams work. The UJM became a natural point of passage — a place people come to for context before designing, not just a deliverable they receive. Research gained in continuity and legitimacy.

The UJM did not just centralise insights — it changed the moment research enters the decision.

Before

Scattered studies
Intuition-based decisions
Forgotten insights

After

Shared reference
Traceable decisions
Cumulative knowledge

The shift, at a glance: from scattered, forgotten studies to a shared reference where decisions are traceable and knowledge accumulates.

What I take away from it

The method matters less than where it lands. I could have multiplied sophisticated studies. The real lever was not producing more of them, but giving them a point of convergence. An insight only has value if it is findable, cross-referenceable, mobilisable at the right moment.

Research is an infrastructure, not a service. The turning point was to stop thinking in deliverables and to think in systems: a durable object that teams maintain together. It shifts the researcher's role — from a supplier of reports to an architect of user knowledge.

To centralise is to share the power to decide. By making the journey legible to all, the UJM did not concentrate knowledge in research's hands: it spread it. It is perhaps the result I am most proud of — research gained influence by becoming less proprietary.

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