Journey Map
The stages a person moves through, with what they do, think and feel, and where the experience breaks.
Definition
A journey map lays out an end-to-end experience across stages, including the parts that happen outside your product. Its value is in the gaps it exposes between channels and teams.
Craft convention. True because the industry converged on it. Breaking it costs familiarity, not correctness.
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Scope
One persona, one scenario. Mapping several at once produces an average that describes nobody.
Start before the product and end after it. The interesting failures are usually outside your boundary.
Which research this is based on. A map built from assumptions is a workshop artefact, not a finding.
Stages
Add a block per stage. For each, capture actions, thoughts, emotion, touchpoints and the pain points.
Name the stage in the user's terms. Then: what they do, what they are thinking, how they feel, which channel, what goes wrong.
Continue through the journey. Keep stages at the level a user would recognise.
Include the stages after the core task, which are frequently unowned.
Analysis
The peak and the ending carry disproportionate weight in how the whole is remembered.
Tie each to a stage and a pain point, with an estimate of who it affects and how often.
Stages where no team owns the experience. These are where journeys break.
Running the mapping session
The map is the by-product. The point is the shared view of where the experience breaks and who owns each part.
- 1
Bring evidence, not memory
Research notes, support tickets, analytics, recordings. A map built from assumptions documents the team's beliefs rather than the experience.
- 2
Agree the scope first
Whose journey, which goal, from what trigger to what end. Most unproductive mapping sessions are two people mapping different journeys.
- 3
Lay the stages, then fill them
Stages across the top, then actions, thoughts, feelings and channels beneath. Filling stage by stage keeps the group together.
- 4
Mark the gaps between owners
The handovers between teams, channels and systems are where most experiences fail, and no single team sees them.
- 5
Rank the moments
Not every low point is worth fixing. Weight by how many people hit it and what it costs them when they do.
- 6
Assign the next action
Each prioritised moment gets an owner and a first step before the group leaves the room, or the map becomes wall decoration.
Maps that get used
Do
- Include what happens outside your product: the email, the phone call, the paperwork, the wait.
- Show the emotional line where you have evidence for it, since it is what makes the low points arguable.
- Date the map and name its source research.
- Keep one journey per map, however tempting it is to merge them.
Do not
- Do not map the journey you wish people had. Map the one they have.
- Do not smooth over the parts owned by another team, which are usually the worst parts.
- Do not produce a poster nobody can edit. A map that cannot be updated is out of date within a quarter.
- Do not confuse a journey map with a flow. One is experience over time, the other is paths through a task.
Local chart
TPL·004 · Region VIII · Grid H4
This entry and the entries it is stated to connect with. Each line is labelled with what the connection means.
Continue from here
Each link says what the connection is, so you can tell a principle from an alternative from a thing people mix this up with.
Applies when you are designing
Often used with
These usually appear in the same screen or the same decision.
- Peak-End RuleLAW·007 · Law
- Contextual InquiryRES·012 · Research method
- Funnel AnalysisRES·011 · Research method
- Research SynthesisRES·014 · Research method
- PersonaTPL·003 · Template
- Story MapTPL·006 · Template
- FigJamTOOL·006 · Tool
- MiroTOOL·007 · Tool
Short definition
The one-paragraph version, for when that is all you need.
- Journey MapTERM·117 · Term
- Service DesignTERM·017 · Term
- TouchpointTERM·018 · Term