How to Create a Customer Journey Map for UX and Product Teams
A customer journey map is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through when engaging with your product or services. Different industries do it in different ways, but the essential parts of a journey map include some or all of the following elements:
- Persona: who is the persona (customer segment) referred to in the journey maps?
- Journey steps: breaking down the journey into steps that make sense from a customer’s viewpoint
- Thoughts and feelings: what are the thoughts and feelings of the customer when engaging at each touchpoint in the journey?
- Scope of the journey: parts of the journey or the entire journey from awareness to consideration to purchase to usage to advocacy to non usage
- Challenges: hurdles customers face at each step
- Needs vs. delights: customer needs and delights for each step in the journey
- Experience gap: what customers think is missing from a great experience at each step in the journey
- Journey improvements: how can the journey be improved?
- Product actions: actions to take to inform the product roadmap at addressing the experience gap
There are so many versions of journey maps, but this example below in particular has worked really well for our UX and Product Teams at RingCentral. It serves as a roadmap of what needs to be improved while still educating the reader on the customer’s viewpoints. Let’s look at some key components in the example below of a videoconferencing product similar to Skype or Zoom that employees use to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues.
Key components of a customer journey map infographic
Clear purpose
For this journey we have focused on product usage (vs. awareness or advocacy) since the audience for this infographic is primarily UX and Product teams who want to improve the product experience.
Persona
Let’s start with the persona on the left of the infographic. The Persona here is a Sales Manager who often uses videoconferencing to close deals and is always on the go.
Stages
In the top right section are the stages in videoconferencing (pre-meeting, in-meeting and post-meeting) which are further broken into steps (pre-meeting includes schedule, set preferences, etc.).
Customer needs
The top half of the infographic contains customer needs divided into must-haves and delight-ers and these also have status indicators (red, orange, green and gray dots) that show gaps in the current experience. These are based on usability tests conducted with customers and employees (as we also use our products).
Thoughts and feelings
The bottom half of the infographic communicates thoughts and feelings of customers as they use the product.
Actions
The most important parts for the Product and UX teams are the purple labels that communicate actions the Product team plans to take to improve the customer experience and is informed by the Product roadmap.
Do you want to create one? Here is the template!
You can easily create a customer journey map infographic too! Use this template and like this post if it helped you.
How does one collect this information to create this journey map?
Usually collecting this information is done through interviews with the persona or via a contextual inquiry by visiting them at their offices/locations. I recently listened to Sean Dolan talk about using card sorts to help our personas better recall their journeys to collect better data and present an interactive journey map using Keynote with embedded links to dig deeper into parts of the journey only if the reader wants to learn more thus removing a lot of clutter. If you have some more ideas for better journey maps please let me know in the comments below.
