Creating a User Journey Map

3 min readDec 5, 2015

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This past summer, as part of my MBA at UBC, I had the privilege of working with a local startup here in Vancouver that is developing connected-car solutions. One of my projects was creating a user journey map. Creating this was a valuable exercise to fully understand the entire flow that a customer moves through, and helps you to prioritize on which touchpoints to focus your efforts on.

After much research, here’s a quick framework I put together, largely developed from the inspiration from the “useful resources” posted at the bottom of this post.

Review Goals

First, make sure to review the goals of your journey map. Generally speaking, the more specific you can be, the more insights you will draw, however it may help to first create an overarching map, and then drill down deeper.

Also, consider the desired journey that you want your users to experience. A large part of the exercise it to understand your current user journey and shift that towards the desired journey.

Gather & Assess Existing Knowledge about Users

Who exactly are your users? The more you know about your users, the better and more accurate your map will be. Gathering user data can be accomplished through interviews, surveys, and by analyzing existing user data. (eg. Social media analytics)

Create User Personas

With some good user-data, you can now begin to cluster your groups of users and create personas for each group. Use demographic and psychographic information to create your personas.

Channel & Touchpoint & Empathy Mapping

Channels. Create a list of all of the current channels that your users journey through. (eg. Social media, website, review sites)
Touchpoints. Now map out a timeline of all of the typical touchpoints that user would flow through. A super useful tool for this process can be found here: Oracle’s CX Journey Workshop. For each touchpoint, map out the desired emotions and actions, the people and things that you can directly control, and the people and things that you do not have direct control over. (See table below). One useful way to organize these touchpoints is by pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase phases.
Future Channels or Touchpoints. Where did you find holes? Think about what additional channels or touchpoints could be added to enhance your user’s journey.

Create New Desired Journey Map

Now that you have a good handle on your current and desired customer journey, spend some time thinking about how you could best represent this visually. I think this stage deserves some good thought. Is your journey linear, or is it a loop? It might be useful to pull in a graphic designer at this point to create a graphic that is super clear and easy to understand.

Share & Review

Post on your company walls for all to see as a constant reminder. It may be useful to set times where you can focus on improving certain channels or touchpoints, rather than trying to tackle the entire thing at once.

Set up quarterly (or however often is useful) reviews to see where the journey map have changed as the result of product changes, and where you see the most room for improvement.

That’s it! Hope this was useful. If you want to dive deeper into user journey mapping, heres some valuable resources that helped me a lot.

Useful Resources: