Understanding the Customer Journey in Health & Wellness E-Commerce
Using a customer-journey framework to uncover customer needs, delights, and pain points across a health and wellness e-commerce experience.
Role: Sole UX Researcher
Research: Foundational / Exploratory
Methods: Semi-Structured Interviews
Analysis: Thematic Analysis
Platform: UserTesting
Participants: 10 high-purchase-intent customers
Interview Duration: 60 minutes
Timeline: ~6 weeks
*Product and specific research findings have been anonymized to protect confidential information.
01 – Challenge
A product design team was exploring a new health and wellness e-commerce experience. Before moving further into design, the team needed a better understanding of how customers navigate existing e-commerce experiences and what they need at different stages of the journey.
The research centered on one question:
How do customers navigate the health and wellness e-commerce website?
The study explored customer needs, delights, and pain points throughout that journey, providing a foundation for the team’s initial design work.
02 – Approach
Starting with a Customer-Journey Framework
The research was structured using the Customer Journey Framework from Lemon & Verhoef (2016), which organizes the customer experience across three broad stages:
The framework informed the interview guide and provided a consistent structure for examining experiences across participants.
Semi-structured interviews was employed to provide flexibility to probe individual experiences and allow unexpected needs, behaviors, delights, and pain points to emerge.
Research Design
Participant Recruitment
The study recruited 10 high-purchase-intent customers through UserTesting. Five participants was considered the minimum for generating meaningful qualitative insights, while recruiting 10 provided greater depth and variation in customer experiences and stronger confidence in recurring patterns across the journey.
03 – From Interviews to a Customer Journey
Interview notes, transcripts, and recordings were reviewed to identify recurring patterns across participants.
Customer needs, delights, and pain points were identified through thematic analysis and then organized across stages of the customer journey.
This transformed individual customer experiences into a representation of the broader journey that the product design team could use.
04 — Outcome
The research produced a customer journey map and detailed research report that gave the product design team a shared understanding of the existing customer experience, including needs, delights, pain points, and recurring patterns across different stages.
The report also included design recommendations based on the research findings, helping guide initial prototype design and providing a foundation for subsequent research.
05 — Reflection
Balance Structure With Openness
The research topic was broad, so the customer-journey framework provided a clear structure for framing the interviews within a 60-minute session and organizing the analysis, allowing experiences to be explored consistently across participants.
However, the framework was developed for general e-commerce experiences rather than the specific context of health and wellness. It provided a useful starting point, but potentially could not fully capture everything that might be relevant to this customer journey.
The semi-structured interview format allowed the use of the framework to provide structure while remaining open to needs and experiences specific to health and wellness.