Applying Customer Journey Maps
How to apply and measure the insights gained from journey mapping
It’s About The Journey, Not The Destination
Some of the fondest memories I have growing up were my family’s aimless weekend car trips. On any given summer weekend, my father would pile us kids into the backseat and set out in any direction. No plan, no packs, just the shirt on our backs, and a piqued curiosity to see not just where we’d end up, but also what we’d discover along the way. The point of these trips with my family was the journey, not the destination. And this focus on the journey is the same way I now approach customer journey mapping. The focus isn’t on the destination, but on the path we take to get there. This helps us avoid our cognitive biases, making space for us to fully explore the touch points along the way. When we approach journey mapping through this lens, we can ensure that valuable insights are remembered, integrated and measured long after the initial journey.
Journey Maps For A Purpose
This article is primarily focused on how to integrate customer journey mapping insights into the overall design approach, to ensure the intent and opportunities are adhered to during design and implementation in a way that can be tracked and measured.
Simply put, I will outline a method for extending the journey mapping process by translating and propagating the outputs into guiding principles, objectives, key performance indicators and actionable strategies and tactics. These insights can be applied to your road-mapping, planning, design, testing and optimization programs.
Ultimately, this exercise is about thinking of your journey map outputs in a new way, so you can maximize the usefulness and effectiveness of your maps.
A Journey What?
Journey mapping hit the mainstream in recent years with product owners, marketing/experience strategists, business management consultants and even information technology groups using similar exercises to inform their roadmap development, marketing strategy, design thinking, business process optimization and technical infrastructure planning.
Understanding the road your customer or employee takes through your business is vital for experience planning. When embarking on product design, you want to maximize your research efforts. When done both correctly and thoughtfully, journey mapping can help inform operational changes required to support experience optimization and transformation initiatives. Ultimately, we want a map that will help your organization achieve its greater goal of improving your brand’s experience, both externally and internally.
You say Tomato, I say Journey Map.
In some instances, journey maps are mistakenly treated as just another billable deliverable or ‘trendy task’. Teams sometimes rush to get a shiny map to a client and lose the value of the map along the way, resulting in a fruitless, and sometimes even damaging, exercise.
In the agency world, journey maps are a go-to deliverable. However, maps are sometimes developed at the wrong stage, for the wrong reason, using the wrong methods. Ultimately, these types of maps get tossed aside for tangible design thinking, and lead people away from seeing the value of such an exercise in the first place.
By adhering to few simple guidelines before you begin your journey, you can ensure you’re making good use of your time, and creating a deliverable that will be cohesive, flexible, and used over and over again.
1. Only Do It If You Need It
Journey maps are typically generated early on — often in the research phase — in a business transformation project. If the scope and feature set of the product is provided, and those things map directly to KPIs in an overall strategy, developing a journey map may not be an effective use of time. At this point, jumping into your favorite iterative design process of prototyping and testing could be more valuable. Because journey maps are data-driven, make sure the research is done first. And if you do proceed, ensure it’s a collaborative and creative process with your team.
2. Remember: It’s About The Journey, Not The Destination.
A journey map can be an attractive deliverable, designed with spiffy illustrations that not only looks good but inspires people to think about their customer’s journey. But remember, it’s not about the result, it’s about the process. The exercise should make the team, stakeholders and end-users empathize and build relationships with your customers, while challenging assumptions and seeing alternative perspectives. How the document ultimately looks is secondary to the learning and benefits gained along the way.
3. Keep It Inclusive
You may be the best at your job, but if you create a journey map in a silo, you’ve done a disservice to the product, your organization and customers.
Collaborative workshops should be held at various stages during journey mapping, and should include a wide variety of people from executive stakeholders and marketers to product designers, customer support and even customers themselves. If facilitated correctly, this blend of people can effectively challenge the status quo by bringing together varying perspectives in new and exciting ways.
4. Think Strategically
Journey maps are just one tool in a digital transformation arsenal. The output can help to inform, inspire and challenge, but it should not dictate or govern the business, product or service strategy. Many other strategic insights can direct and influence a business before and after a journey map. In fact, journey maps should reference and consider any business level KPIs, strategic goals and research insights previously authored.
Journey maps can shed light on customer touch points, consolidate data, and help to impart insights. Opportunities from journey maps should be validated, researched and prioritized within a strategic roadmap, but the journey map itself should never be mistaken for strategy.
5. Focus On The Data
While much of your team’s critical thinking, empathy and opinions will go into the creation of a journey map, ultimately an effective journey map starts with unbiased points of data, using both qualified and quantified data. This level of input has a direct correlation to the value of the journey map. You cannot map a user’s emotion or perception of an experience without a number of combined real world data sources. A cognitive walkthrough or empathy map will be limited by your own cognitive biases, and should not be your only reference for the customer point of view.
What Do You Do With The Information From A Journey Map?
Insights and opportunities identified in your journey map should be:
- Appropriately Identified and Categorized
- Validated and Prioritized
- Incorporated Into Documentation
- Measured for Quality, Optimization and Validation
- Identified for Unknowns, Gaps and/or Assumptions
Journey Map Insights
1. Guiding Principles (The Vision)
A guiding principal is a high-level statement that summarizes a broad philosophy behind your business or product. One that is followed irrespective of changes in goals, strategies, experiences and channels.
Guiding principles are extracted insights that usually present themselves during the development of the journey-mapping workshop. They may stem from previous influence material such as a company/product vision or brand strategy but can evolve during the process.
2. Strategic Insights (The What)
Strategic opportunities and insights are broad strategic conclusions across audience/user types about how to position a business or product in the market place or how to influence customer behavior. These can include key customer demographics and engagement insights, product capability focus, marketing and content strategies, and more.
3. Tactical Strategies (The How)
Stemming from the strategic opportunities and insights, tactics are simply the tangible components to a campaign, product or experience that, when implemented, can directly support the parent strategy.
4. Messaging (The Tone)
Make use of the customer empathy and cognitive walkthrough you’re performing to highlight messaging, content or tone (brand voice). These guidelines will help you connect with users and express the brand or product’s empathy with the user. Based on your insights, your messaging can be used to inform, relate, influence or simply to lighten the mood.
5. Knowledge Gaps / Follow-Ups (The Unknowns)
These are the identified items that are in need of further research to make an informed decision, validate an assumption, uncover a missing piece of data or answer questions from the business, marketing or technical departments.
Remember, no insight is a bad insight, even if it contradicts an existing strategy, assumption, project scope, budget or executive statement. Explore, consider and challenge everything. Prioritize later.
Gathering Insights
The chart below is a sample of journey map outputs, along with their definitions, a sample labeling system and the corresponding activities they can influence.
Identified opportunities and insights are typically placed below relevant touchpoints along the journey map document. Using the chart above you can apply a taxonomy that categorizes and numbers them for future use. For example:
Prioritization
With any journey mapping exercise, a post workshop is critical for exploring and prioritizing the insights and opportunities. This process should include stakeholders and team members from the business, product, analytics, design and technical teams. Include as many representatives from the groups that will ultimately be responsible for benefiting from, or executing, the implementation of strategies based on the journey map.
Insights can be categorized into two buckets:
1. Intangible Insights
- Extracted strategies and objectives prioritized by perceived importance, ROI or business impact
2. Tangible Insights
- Includes tactics, capabilities, features, messaging/content prioritized by both implementation constraints such as release windows, budget, viability and direct relation to the strategy and objectives
The prioritization grid below helps correlate the relationship between the tangible and intangible insights and prioritize them. Our intangibles (strategy, objectives, etc) are prioritized vertically down the left side, while tangible items that support the strategies (tactics, features, content) are prioritized horizontally, with each row correlating to the strategic priority.
Remember, this is only a sample framework. Customize it according to the needs of your organization, and make the creation of this grid a collaborative process. Gather your team in a room with stickies, sharpies and some coffee, and get to work to make this effort your own.
Now let’s take a look at distilling, distributing and applying these insights into our downstream design and measurement activities.
Distilling and Distributing Insights
At this point, it’s beneficial to distill the insights into a more communicable format that is best absorbed by the downstream activities in your design process. Consider transforming your journey map insights into a user story, requirement description, KPI, design objective or measurement opportunity. Create something consumable that meshes with your design methodology and process. Doing this allows you to better communicate and distribute collectively across disciplines, teams and stakeholders.
Below are some guidelines on how to distill insights and where to apply them.
Guiding Principles
- Globally propagate these across disciplines and activities
- Influences user experience, visual design, business requirements and technical architecture
- Guides design choices by the design and implementation teams
Strategic Insights
- Used to develop individual strategies, objectives and KPIs that can be used in areas that heavily influence the experience, design and metrics of your product
- Included in marketing strategies, experience strategy, creative briefs, product planning, epics, content guidelines and governance documentation
- Used to identify priority areas (user flow, objectives and activities) that should be measured to evaluate the success of the strategic direction
Tactical Insights
- Distill these insights further in features, functionality, components or user flows
- Always reference the parent strategic objective and priority
- Used to inform analytics, testing and measurements teams as to what areas of the product or experience to prioritize in their analyses, and which strategy they are measuring against
Messaging and Content Insights
- These insights can be distilled into their respective content categories
- Include brand voice/tone, marketing content, influential information, instructional content
- Distribute these through creative briefs, brand guidelines, content strategies, copy decks and SEO/M content planning
Applying Insights to UX Design
Insights gained can ultimately be leveraged in UX deliverables, and these same philosophies can be used on any product deliverable that helps to design or document.
Whether you prefer sketching, prototyping or taking a traditional UX documentation approach, practicing the method of referencing and applying journey map insights is paramount in maintaining the integrity of strategic insights during design.
You could reference distilled output such as:
- Prioritized Objectives > Designs supporting guiding principal and/or strategies
- Tactics and Components > Designs used to meet the objectives
- Content/Messaging > Used to communicate in the messaging or tactics
Additionally, while developing an experience, you’ll need to include other metrics that may or may not stem from your journey mapping exercise:
- audience types and considerations
- device types and considerations
- prioritization of all of the above per experience, flow, page or screen.
- key metrics to test and analyze
A few examples of applying these to typical UX design deliverables can be found below.
Remember, this not required for each deliverable. However, if you are trying to demonstrate how a new experience supports or relates to the strategy, this is good approach to demonstrate strategy-based design, thinking and documentation.
A site map can reference the insights and distilled objectives, demonstrating how they influence and validate the architecture. Insights gleaned from the journey map are listed and highlighted. Also included are distilled items such as objectives, audience considerations and device considerations.
User flows can be used to highlight specific traffic sources, flows and pages that address the strategic insights. It’s also a good spot to start to identify the priority journeys for later testing or measurement.
Experience page mapping is a great opportunity to highlight prioritized content, messaging, and components that map directly to tactics and strategies.
It doesn’t matter whether you use blocking or detailed wireframe, sketch or visual design. Just make sure to highlight prioritized content, messaging and components that map directly to tactics and strategies. This will help to clearly communicate the strategic design decisions.
These simple examples highlight a few ways insights can be referenced, applied and leveraged as strategic inputs, or rational for design decisions. Use your own style, but don’t lose sight of the strategic objectives. Hold on to strategic design integrity.
Measuring, Analysis & Testing
Highlighting strategic insights in the design removes a lot of the ambiguity when identifying test metrics. Emphasizing priority journeys or experiences that ultimately map back to guiding principles (or objectives) gives a clear path to measuring a product, from top to bottom.
To measure how well a particular strategy is doing, you only need to check the related component analytics.
The chart below depicts how end-user experiences are related to parent tactics, strategies and guiding principles. It also demonstrates how the measurement flows upward, providing performance metrics on strategic objectives and guiding principles via child experiences.
If mapped correctly, the measurement can provide a complete picture, from user interface analytics to strategic performance and business intelligence.
This relationship in measurement allows you to answer questions such as:
- What impact did your UI have on the strategic objectives?
- Which tactics worked?
- What strategies were effective on business performance?
- Are you doing enough in marketing to meet this guiding principal?
Putting it all together
The idea is simple: Make good use of your journey mapping exercise, and allow the insights and opportunities to flow through to the design, research, testing and analytics of your product. What you’ll get is an end-to-end eco-system for design and measurement.
Journey mapping is simply about exploring user empathy through experience design, to ultimately meet or define business strategy. It should be an open-ended journey, one without a destination or preconceived conclusion. This method will produce insights that linger long after the initial drive.
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About the Author
Nigel Hudson is a digital strategy and experience consultant based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His thoughts are his own, and not necessarily those of his employer. Feel free to reach out to discuss this article or related themes around digital, experience and marketing.
Special Thanks to Fahrin Kermally for editing.
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