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What Are User Journeys?
A user journey map illustrates the step by step process that users take to complete a task. You should answer, "How do users use the marketplace?"
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What are user journeys?
User journey mapping is a simple process that helps you understand and plan how users interact with your marketplace and how they will do business on your marketplace. An effective user journey maps the distinct steps a user must take to accomplish a certain goal - for example, buying a bike - and what other options are available to them, like cancelling or leaving a review.
Building your custom marketplace starts with defining the user journey through your marketplace; how providers and customers use your marketplace illustrates the platform you’re building.
Customer (buyer) - A user who registers to a marketplace to make purchases.
Provider (seller) - A user who sells or rents their products or services on a marketplace.
The Template user journeys
Marketplace development on Flex begins with the Sharetribe Web Template. Developers download this codebase, then modify it to create custom marketplaces. The existing codebase can save developers lots of time. It can also make it a lot easier to create your user journeys because that Template codebase already contains prebuilt journeys for a variety of must-have marketplace features, such as signup, listing creation, search, purchasing, reviews, seller onboarding, and more.
Creating a free Flex account and visiting your Test environment is the best way to see how the Template works. There you can access the Template and use it as a real user, creating accounts, making transactions, sending messages, and so on. If you're familiar with Figma or other design tools, you can also download, view, and modify the design files showing all the screens in the Template.
The workflows you pursue in the Template represent the out of the box features available in Flex. Developers can use them as they are, modify them, or completely remove (or add) functionality from this starting point. A great way then to describe the requirements of your marketplace are as modifications, tweaks, or sweeping changes to the existing functionality.
In the next article, we will share more about how to organize, describe, and share your user journeys.