Simulating User Journeys with Active Objects

Abstract

The servitization of business makes companies increasingly dependent on providing carefully designed user experiences for their service offerings. User journeys model services from the user’s perspective, but user journeys are today mainly constructed and analyzed manually. Recent work analyzing user journeys as games enable optimal service-provider strategies to be automatically derived, assuming a restricted user behavior. Complementing this work, we here develop an actor-based modeling framework for user journeys that is parametric in user behavior and service-provider strategies, using the active-object modeling language ABS. Strategies for the service provider, such as those derived for user journey games, can be automatically imported into the framework. Our work enables prescriptive simulation-based analyses, as strategies can be evaluated and compared in scenarios with rich user behavior.