Empathize Phase Journey
Mapping
A visual representation of the customer/ user journey. It helps you tell the story of the customers’ experiences, needs and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with the product/ company/ experience that you are studying. It helps you understand and drive the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.
When would you use Journey Mapping?
Journey Mapping should happen BEFORE and AFTER conducting user research. You will have hypotheses that should be incorporated into the learning and research objectives before conducting research. After the research, the journey map helps you to organize your findings and construct precisely where your customers interact with you and why – as well as how they feel about it. In the end, there should be “leverage areas” or opportunity areas identified.
Here’s where Journey Mapping can be a difference maker:
- Your team is updating your brand strategy and you need to highlight the key decision points in the customer journey
- Your team needs to align cross-functional teams around the customer experience and wants to ensures that everyone from product development to marketing and customer service has a unified understanding
- Your team is looking to expand into new markets or categories and you want to understand the unique needs and behaviors of that new customer segment
How does Journey Mapping work?
- 1
Start
by defining your user and journey map objectives and goals - 2
Decide on the types of data that you need. Gather data through user research to understand the actual experiences of your users. - 3
Break down
the user's interactions into distinct stages. Typical stages might include awareness, consideration, decision, and retention, but these can vary based on your specific context - 4
Compile
all the information into a visual map. This can be a simple diagram or a more complex infographic, depending on your needs. - 5
Identify "leverage points" or areas of opportunity across the map. Review with your team to align on those opportunities and turn into actions.
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Deliberate Innovation Journey Mapping Tool Guide
Top Journey Mapping Tips
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A journey map can either simulate an experience with your product or service. In general, a journey map should be a visualization of an entire end-to-end experience that a “generic” person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. This experience is agnostic of a specific business or product. -
Use data gathered from user research - Such as interviews, surveys, and analytics, to inform your journey map. Real insights lead to a more accurate representation of the customer journey. -
Don’t just point out what’s wrong with the experience; Provide some insight! Find the pain and the gain so you can finetune your experience rather than create an exhaustive log of problems. -
You don't always have to recreate the wheel. Before building your journey map, search to find pre-existing journey maps that may help guide your research and visualization work. -
Consider starting with a simple 1-hour workshop with the most important internal resources and keep the map low fidelity on paper or a whiteboard. By involving participants you increase your chances of having buy-in and validity. -
Make the journey map accessible to all relevant stakeholders Sharing the map helps align efforts and ensures everyone understands the customer experience. -
Accept that you can't map everything. Prioritize journeys with a significant impact on your experience so you can work on improving high-impact pain points. -
Remember that journey maps are living artifacts.
More Journey Mapping Tips & Stories
Storytelling is at the heart of our teaching and is essential for understanding new concepts. Here are some short stories and tips to continue to bring this tool to life.
Additional Empathy & Insights Articles & Resources
How Small Thinking can be BIG
We tried every marketing tactic in the book. Advertising and public relations campaigns, customer workshops, a specialized field force...
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Reducing Information Overload by Simplifying
We are compelled to think of all things at the same time… preventing the appropriate amount of attention...
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When Customer Experience Can be the Difference Between Life and Death
On a frigid November evening, I ascended the steep steps at the 7th Avenue subway station in midtown Manhattan.
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