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.
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
- Contextual InquiryResearch method
- Funnel AnalysisResearch method
- Research SynthesisResearch method
- PersonaTemplate
- Story MapTemplate
- FigJamTool
- MiroTool
Short definition
The one-paragraph version, for when that is all you need.
- Journey MapTerm
- Service DesignTerm
- TouchpointTerm