Improving Your Users’ Experiences with Journey Maps

Journey maps are common UX tools which allow the visualization of the process that someone goes through to accomplish a goal. They come in various shapes, sizes, and formats, and depending on the context, can be used in various ways.

A journey map starts out as a compilation of user actions in a timeline, which is then fleshed out with details on user thoughts and emotions which help create a narrative. The narrative is then condensed and given finishing touches, leading to a visualization of the user’s journey.

A journey map is a combination of two instruments: storytelling and visualization. These are essential to journey mapping because they are very effective in conveying information in a memorable and concise way, creating a shared vision. Fragmented understanding should be avoided in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured per each department because the entire user experience from the user’s perspective is never pieced together. Without a shared vision, improving customer experience would be significantly more difficult.

A journey map helps with creating a holistic view of your customers’ experience. This process which brings together and allows you to visualize disparate data points can help you engage otherwise uninterested stakeholders from multiple departments, leading to collaborative conversations and change in your products.

Journey maps will typically follow a similar format:

1. specific user + specific scenario + goals

2. user actions + thoughts & emotions

3. takeaways (opportunities, insights)

Why you should use journey maps

Journey maps are supposed to support a known business goal. A map which doesn’t align with a business goal will not produce any applicable insights. Here are some goals which journey maps could be aligned to:

· shift a company’s perspective from inside-out to outside-in — this means that if a company’s internal processes drive decisions which affect the customer experience, a journey map could turn that around by focusing on customers’ actions, thoughts, and emotions.

· create a shared vision within an organization — because journey maps visualize whole customer journeys, they stimulate cross-department collaboration and can be the first step toward creating an organization-wide plan to improve customer experience.

· assign key aspects among internal departments — glitches in customer journeys often exist simply because no internal team has been given the responsibility of improving that specific element.

· target specific customers — journey maps can focus a team’s attention on specific personas, comparing the journeys of multiple personas and prioritizing certain high-value ones, or exploring means of targeting new types of customers.

· understanding quantitative data — if you realize that something specific is happening, like sales plateauing, a journey map can help you find out why that is happening.

One benefit of mapping is that it forces conversation between team members and aligns everyone’s mental model. Organizations face a widespread problem in fragmented understanding because of success metrics being siloed.

Another is that mapping will allow you to communicate an understanding of your user or service to everyone involved. Journey maps are very effective at conveying information in a memorable and concise manner, creating a shared vision. Moving forward, teams can also use journey maps as a basis for their decisions.

A journey map’s key components

While journey maps can take many forms, they typically include these five key elements:

1. actor — this is the persona, the user, and this is who the journey map is all about, the user and their point of view. A journey map should only contain one point of view for a clear narrative. A university, for example, might choose either students or faculty members as actors, each of which would likely have significantly different journeys.

2. scenario & expectations — the scenario describes the specific situation addressed by the journey map and is associated with the actor’s goal and expectations. This could be an already existing journey, thus potentially uncovering existing positive and negative moments within it, or a future experience, where the mapper designs a journey for a product or service which does not presently exist. While developing your scenario, ensure that you clarify your user’s goal during their experience. A scenario could be a user who’s changing their mobile plan, expecting to easily find the information required to make the change on the website.

3. actions, thoughts, emotions — every journey map’s narrative is based on what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling, throughout their journey. All this data should be based on qualitative research, such as diary studies, field studies, or contextual inquiries. Based on your map’s purpose, how granularly the data is represented can vary. Are you evaluating or designing a contained system, or an entire, broad purchasing cycle?

o actions are the interactions a user has during a phase

o thoughts are exactly that, the user’s thoughts, questions, and motivations at each stage of the journey

o emotions are illustrated as a line spanning each phase, showing the user’s emotional “ups” and “downs” throughout their experience, where they are delighted and where they are frustrated

4. touchpoints and channels — touchpoints represent moments when actors in the map are actually interacting with your company and channels represent any methods of communication or service used, such as a physical store or a website. Your map should align touchpoints and channels with your user’s goals and actions. It’s worth paying extra attention to these elements as they are typically where brand inconsistencies are uncovered, as well as disconnected experiences.

5. opportunities — insights gained from mapping which paint a picture of possible optimizations to the user experience. The whole point of a journey may is to find gaps in the user experience — which are fairly common in omnichannel journeys, and then focus on improving that experience. Insights and ownership are key parts of a journey map which are unfortunately often overlooked. Any insights you gain from the journey mapping process should be listed. If possible, also assign ownership for different parts of your map, so that you have a clear image of who is responsible for which part of the customer journey. If you do not assign ownership, no one will have responsibility or empowerment to change anything.

Even with all the key elements outlined above included in a journey map, there could still be many differences between how two journey maps look, while at the same time both being suitable for the context they were designed in.

When deciding what additional elements to include in your journey map, ask yourself the following questions:

· how detailed does it need to be to tell a complete story?

· what other elements are needed to provide an accurate narrative (e.g. device, channel, content encountered, etc.)?

· are you trying to diagnose an existing issue or design a new experience altogether?

· what’s the balance between actions on the customer’s side and actions on your organization’s side?

· who is the journey map intended for?

Creating a successful journey map

A successful journey map needs more than just including the right elements. The process of creating such a map should be collaborative, with well-defined goals and based on research. Keeping the process on the right track requires a lot of work, so here are some tips for staying focused on the right direction:

· have a well-defined goal — first and foremost, you need to clearly define your reason for building the journey map, its purpose. Ask yourself these basic questions before starting:

o what business goal will this map support?

o who will use this map?

o who is the map about and what experience is it addressing?

o how will the map be shared?

· base your map on the truth — a journey map should provide a realistic narrative. Use any existing research and conduct additional journey-based research if needed to ensure your journey map results in a truthful narrative. This is a qualitative research process, and while quantitative data can support certain narratives, it is not enough to build a story.

· collaborate — the actual process of building a journey map is at least as valuable as the results, so involve teammates in the process to make the most out of the experience.

· don’t rush to visualize — before creating a pleasing design, focus on synthesizing the data and making sure you understand it. You may be tempted to create aesthetically pleasing graphics, but while that may produce a beautiful journey map, it will likely be flawed.

· engage others — you shouldn’t expect others to be interested in your journey map if you don’t make an effort to get them interested. Try to make it an interactive document that anyone can be a part of and talk to people about it and how helpful it is, explaining its role and benefits.

Variations on journey maps

Several other concepts exist which can be easily confused with journey maps:

· experience maps — these are somewhat broader than journey maps in that the actor and scenario aren’t each as specific as they are in journey maps. Experience maps don’t cater to specific businesses or products and are used to understand general human behavior.

· service blueprints — these are used to visualize the relationships between different service components at various points throughout a user’s journey. Service blueprints are in a way extensions to journey maps which focus on the business’s perspective.

· user story maps — a user story contains feature descriptions focused on what the user wants to do and how that specific feature will help them. User story maps are a visual representation of user stories, in that each step intended for the user to accomplish his goal using that feature is mapped out. While journey maps are used to observe and understand users, user story maps are for planning and implementing a user’s intended journey.

Final thoughts

Journey mapping is a process that uncovers moments of delight and frustration throughout a series of interactions, thus providing a holistic view of customers’ experience. When done successfully, it can help you see opportunities to address pain points and create better experiences for your users.

While in the process of creating your journey map, it is important that you remember what the goal is: to create a shared vision. This is why once you have created it, you should always share it with your peers so they can see the entire user experience for themselves and make use of the resulting insights when crafting the product.