What’s a User Journey Audit and why should I do one?
In this small tutorial you will find out how to properly test your membership website by performing what we call a User Journey audit.
This process is a must after you finish development on your site.
The idea of the User Journey audit is to make sure that the entire experience—from signup to checkout to being a member and beyond—is smooth and intuitive for your customers.
Required steps to perform the journey audit
In this article we’ll assume that you’re using MemberPress as your membership plugin.
Many membership plugins handle Stripe subscriptions internally ( e.g WooCommerce, S2Member, etc. ).
That means they don’t actually create a subscription in Stripe that you would be able to go into Stripe and manage / modify.
Rather, they create the subscription in the plugin and create payments in Stripe according to that internal subscription schedule.
This is why I personally love MemberPress—the subscriptions are handled directly by Stripe and not the plugin itself.
The point is that when you perform a User Journey Audit with some other plugins, you may have to check the subscriptions internally and not in Stripe.
1 – Create new user to test the payment gateways
This is the first step that you need to do, after everything is set up you will have to create a new user to test the payment gateways.
First, you will do it in testing mode, if you don’t get any errors proceed with testing with live payments.
Here are the important points that you need to check.
a) The subscription was created in Stripe
b) The webhook in Stripe doesn’t have any errors
c) The payment was successfully made.
d) The subscription was successfully created in MemberPress and the unique ID was added correctly (sub_xxxxxxxxx).
If you have an ID that looks like this: mp_sub_xxxxxxxx that means that something is wrong and it will not work.
e) The subscription has a corresponding transaction in MemberPress that will expire at the end period that was set when you created the membership (e.g Monthly, Annually).
Notice: If you have a transaction smaller than 1$ it will not be added in MemberPress, make sure when you are testing to complete a transaction that’s equal with 1$ or bigger.
For PayPal the subscription should look like I-xxxxxxx but otherwise the process is the same.
2 – Make sure that the emails are being sent via WordPress or a CRM
On this step, after the user was created successfully, you need to make sure your members are receiving their welcome emails.
Important points on this step:
a) Make sure that the emails are sent, if they are not there is a problem somewhere. E.g SMTP configuration is not good, webhook issues, domain is not verified, SPF, SKM, DKIM records are not set, etc.
b) If the emails are sent, make sure that they are in the inbox and not in the spam folder or one of the Gmail tabs (promotions, social).
If the emails are arriving in the spam, we recommend you can use a service like SendGrid or AuthSMTP to improve deliverability.
3 – The Redirect after completing the checkout page
Make sure that after your member completes checkout he is redirected to a thank you page or directly to the members area.
In either case, you may wish to include some kinds of instructions such as, “please check your email for your logins.”
4 – Testing the My account page
On this step we have several important points that you need to look after.
a) Change Password functionality is working
b) Cancel subscription functionality is working
c) Test other functionalities like Update card, upgrade downgrade memberships
5 – Login/Logout tests
On this point, you will have to log out from your account and test the forgotten password functionality, then log in again with the new password.
6 – Test Access rules and Menu items
This is the last part of the user journey Audit.
Once you logged back in, you need to see if the access rules that you’ve set in MemberPress are working properly and the menu items that you chose to enable for that specific membership work.
Make sure that the test user you’re logging in with to check this point has the correct Membership access.
Do not conduct any of these tests while logged in as an admin.
In fact, I suggest you open an Incognito Window where you’re not logged in at all to make sure you’re getting accurate test results.
After you have successfully completed these steps you should be ready to launch your site!
Got any questions or comments…?
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