User Journey Mapping in Denmark
In the world of user experience, we like to think of user journeys as a visual interpretation of an individual’s relationships and interactions with a product over time and across different touchpoints or channels. Creating user journeys or maps is a strategy executed by service designers in the discovery stage of a project. They usually look a little something like this:
During the discovery stage, service designers are often trying to understand the lay of the land — what is the user flow of the process that currently exists? What pain points exist for the user? Are there unnecessary steps within the user’s journey that can be simplified? By empathizing and understanding where your users are coming from, you can better support the enhancements to the product moving forward. Here’s the rest of the journey after the discovery stage, if you’re curious:
Denmark is flipping the term user journey on its head — instead of building a user journey to benefit service designers and UXpractitioners, they have created them as an aid for members of the public to navigate a variety of government-related services. User journeys, as a tool for the public, enable citizens to meaningfully engage with and understand how a service is designed so they can access the services they need in a simple and efficient manner.
This solution grew out of collaborative efforts between the Danish Business Authority and the Agency for Digitisation, and currently includes user journeys for how to move, how to get divorced, and how to create and close a company.
For example, when you turn 15 in Denmark, you have to register to become a digital citizen. This involves a Digital Post, a NemID and a tax card. Each of these services has touchpoints with a wide range of services and agencies within the government. This can be confusing for users to successfully become a digital citizen on their own. By empowering users through user journey visualizations, they are able to understand the many touch points within a service and the step-by-step journey that they’ll take to access the service. Here’s an example of a user journey illustration on how to become a digital citizen:
Denmark is also working towards collaborating with municipalities and regions on cohesive journey maps. Many life events will require a citizen to access services at a local, regional, and national level. For example, getting a divorce would require that organizational boundaries are broken down at a user level, so that they are able to holistically understand the end-to-end process of what needs to be done in order to get divorced in Denmark. Here’s an example of a user journey illustration on how to become divorced:
The Government of Denmark’s vision is that “user journeys will become so coherent over time that citizens no longer perceive organisational borders as a problem”. By 2021, it is the Danish Government’s goal to have user journeys for 20 core government services for both citizens and businesses so that life’s major events as a citizen or business within Denmark can be accessed by the user in a clean, simple, and coherent way.
