How to Make a Helpful Red Route Matrix in 5 Simple Steps

How to make a red route matrix is simpler than you think.

Do you know what your user’s want? Red route matrices capture at least 90% of your user’s red routes.

Red routes are the main tasks or objectives that users want to complete. A red route matrix is a way to visually show how often or how critical individual red routes are. It consists of a 4×4 square grid with the number of users on one axis and the amount of times a route is used on the other axis. The squares that have more people going through a route more times have a background of a brighter red (or the text is in red) while the squares that have few people going through a route a few times have a white background.

The five steps of how to make a red route matrix are:

• Pick a website, app, object, service, etc.
• Identify main audiences.
• Pinpoint tasks and objectives that can be accomplished on a website, app, etc.
• Create a 4×4 square grid using users vs. how often they do a task.
• Place the tasks in the boxes that correspond to them.

Benefits of a Red Route Matrix

There are several benefits of knowing how to make a red route matrix.

Find main objectives and tasks

As a part of making the matrix, you must identify expected red routes. These are the main tasks or objectives that users want to complete. They will change based on the type of organization and users that make and use the product. Red routes can be anything from (but not limited to):

• Make an appointment.
• Lower the volume.
• Order an item.
• Find instructions.
• Check notifications.
• View your profile.
• Make a payment.
• Find out more about the brand, etc.

Identify critical pathways

Not only should you keep in mind the tasks that users want to accomplish but also the pathway they need to get through to do so. Making a red route matrix will cause you to identify pathways and mini tasks that need to be completed to complete the main task. Want to purchase an item? You need to find it first. Need to look at your account? First, you must login. 

Have an estimate for the usefulness of content, tools, and services

As part of making the red route matrix, you have to categorize how often content and services are used. The more people that use them more of the time makes it more useful. This means that this service or tool is crucial for users and should be as fine tuned and easy to find and use as possible.

Find main audiences

Although a simple question, it should be asked multiple times throughout a site’s or service’s lifespan, ‘who is using our stuff?’ or ‘Who is our main audience’? You need to know who you are catering to or otherwise trying to get to use your service(s) to know what tasks they want to accomplish. Please keep in mind that both the critical tasks as well as the less desired tasks of your target audience(s) should be considered when designing user experience and user interfaces.

Identify potential pain points

A red route matrix is used to find how user friendly a website (or other digital item or service) is to customers and/or visitors and find pain points and opportunities to improve the site or service. These are issues that make the user’s tasks harder to accomplish. After completing the matrix, you should have an idea what red routes you need to focus on to make them pain point free. You may also find you need to add services or tools to allow users to accomplish other tasks (less critical tasks should also be user friendly; how many services have you terminated when you couldn’t find how to contact customer support?)

How to Make a Red Route Matrix

1.Pick a website, app, object, service, etc.

Pick a specific website, app, or service that you want to explore what the main tasks or objectives that users want to complete are. This can be one that already exists or that you want to create. Make sure that you know what the site or service does or is intended to do.

2. Identify main audiences

The site or service should be one where you know who the target audience is and have some idea what the target audience wants. Who do you think will use this? What grand goal are they trying to accomplish? Why should they use your product or site over your competition. Making a user persona can help you understand your target audiences.

3. Pinpoint tasks and objectives that can be accomplished on the website, app, etc.

Based on the target audience, figure out all of the tasks that users are likely to want to accomplish at some point when using the service or tool. You can do this mentally or by a user experience research method, like card sorting. The goal is to pinpoint the main tasks that users need to be able to complete to be satisfied with the site, product, or service.

4. Create a 4×4 square grid 

Below is a download for a premade template for a red route matrix.

5. Place the tasks in the boxes that correspond to them

Summary

Red routes are the main tasks or objectives that users want to complete. A red route matrix is a way to visually show how often or how critical individual red routes are. It consists of a square grid with the number of users on one axis and the amount of times a route is used on the other axis. The five steps of how to make a red route matrix are:

• Pick a website, app, object, service, etc.
• Identify your main audiences.
• Pinpoint tasks and objectives that can be accomplished on the website, app, etc.
• Create a 4×4 square grid using users vs. how often they do a task.
• Place the tasks in the boxes that correspond to them.