User journey games: automating user-centric analysis

The servitization of business is moving industry to business models driven by customer demand. Customer satisfaction is connected with financial rewards, forcing companies to invest in their users’ experience. User journeys describe how users maneuver through a service. Today, user journeys are typically modeled graphically, and lack formalization and analysis support. This paper proposes a formalization of user journeys as weighted games between the user and the service provider and a systematic data-driven method to derive these user journey games from system logs, using process mining techniques. As the derived games may contain cycles, we define an algorithm to transform user journeys games with cycles into acyclic weighted games, which can be model checked using to uncover potential challenges in a company’s interactions with its users and derive company strategies to guide users through their journeys. Finally, we propose a user journey sliding-window analysis to detect changes in the user journey over time by model checking a sequence of generated games. Our analysis pipeline has been evaluated on an industrial case study; it revealed design challenges within the studied service and could be used to derive actionable recommendations for improvement.