OUTCOMES
An understanding of all stages of the experience
Organised research based on the experience of a product, service or issue over time
Clarity on user interactions
Identified key areas of opportunity for intervention
USING THE TOOL
Conducting research with people can often be messy and may sometimes seem unhelpful. It is important to visualise and contextualise your user research to condense complex information into more understandable formats. Journey Maps help you do just this. By highlighting key junctures in your user’s interactions over time, you can gain clarity about the experience and decide on how best to intervene to benefit your users.
Define your persona: Start by defining the key attributes of your character. You can use the persona tool to help you. Think about which journey you are mapping and how it will add to your insights. This could be a day in the life of your users, their interactions with a product/service or a specific process.
Identify key steps: Write down the crucial steps in your user’s journey associated with each of the defined stages (for example, these could be Aware, Decide, Join, First Use, Repeated Use, Support, Retain). It is important to understand all these broad stages, but if you find a lot of detail in one area, feel free to expand horizontally adding more space for additional steps.
User experience: Then define the overall experience at each stage, the emotional and functional challenges and any opportunities you can see.
Add more layers: Be more detailed by introducing more layers as rows under the ‘Key Steps’. These could be about the stakeholders involved, the user’s internal dialogue or communication channels and infrastructure used.
Identify key points: Highlight stand-out moments when things are particularly bad or good, or where a problem originates. Use the map to identify key moments and understand their significance.
good sequence
Interviews> Journey Map> Research and Insight Synthesis
other names:
User Journey, Customer Journey, Experience Journey, Employee Journey, User Experience Map, User Story, Use Case
Tips
Consider mapping the journeys of different personas within your user group to understand patterns and key distinctions in behaviours
This can be an interesting activity to do with your users during an interview or workshop
This tool can be applied to all stakeholders involved in the issue, not just end users
It can be a useful map to validate with users and as a communication tool to share someone’s experience with other necessary stakeholders
