User journey maps

Posted on by Jag

User journey maps are an effective way to visualize user’s experience for the entire team. Instead of pointing to documents scattered across remote fringes of Sharepoint, we bring key insights together — in one single place. The downside is that journey maps are often too linear, too predictable, too neat — which is often exactly the opposite of what users often go through in their journey.

Let’s explore a couple of helpful customer journey templates to get started, and how companies use it in practice.

AirBnB Customer Journey Blueprint

AirBnB Customer Journey Blueprint (also check Google Drive example) is a wonderful practical example of how to visualize the entire customer experience for 2 personas, across 8 touch points, with user policies, UI screens and all interactions with the customer service — all on one single page.

Now, unlike AirBnB, your product might not need a mapping against user policies. However, it might need other lanes that would be more relevant for your team. E.g. include relevant findings and recommendations from UX research. List key actions needed for next stage. Relevant UX metrics and unsuccessful touchpoints.

Whatever works for you, works for you — just make sure to avoid assumptions and refer to facts and insights from research.

Spotify Customer Journey Map

Spotify Customer Journey Blueprint (in high resolution) breaks down customer experiences by distinct user profiles, and for each includes mobile and desktop views, pain points, thoughts and actions. Also, notice branches for customers who skip authentication or admin tasks.

Spotify customer journey map
A thorough customer journey map for various personas on Spotify.

There Is No “Right” User Journey Map

At their core, user journey maps visualize and document user’s experience. We often think of them as simply an overview of the different phases and actions that users go through to meet their goals. That’s of course true, but they also help identify touch points, pain points and unmet user needs, and allow us to map user’s motivations and needs in each step.

There is no singular “right” customer journey map. At times, they include emotions, jobs-to-be-done, metrics and channels. In B2B, customers might not be end users, so a customer journey can serve different personas (and hence be a user journey map or customer journey map).

Taras Bakusevych has put together a practical guide to customer journey maps that can be a helpful reference to keep in mind. Most notably, I love the point that often user journeys start way before users start interacting with our product — and often it’s full of non-digital touchpoints. In many user journey maps, it’s often forgotten and overlooked, producing wrong assumptions and wrong conclusions.

Getting Started With Journey Maps

As Stéphanie Walter noted, building a journey map is an iterative process that involves the entire team. To get started with user journey maps, we first choose a lens: are we reflecting the current state or projecting a future state? Then, we choose a customer who experiences the journey — and we capture the situation/goals that they are focusing on.

Next, we list high-level actions users are going through. We start by defining first and last stage, and fill in-between. Don’t get too granular: list key actions needed for next stage. Add user’s thoughts, feelings, sentiment, emotional curves.

Eventually, add user’s key touchpoints with people, services, tools. Map user journey across mobile and desktop screens. Transfer insights from other research (e.g. customer support). Fill in stage after stage until the entire map is complete.

Then, identify pain points and highlight them with red dots. Add relevant jobs-to-be-done, metrics, channels if needed. Attach links to quotes, photos, videos, prototypes, Figma files. Finally, explore ideas and opportunities to address pain points.

Layering User Journeys To Map Priorities

I absolutely love John Cutler ‘s point of how unrealistic many linear customer journey maps are. For a project, John layered all the user journeys for different personas to map and discover some of the most frequently trafficked workflows that re-used a lot of nodes. This gives us an overview of where people spend a lot of their time, and gives us priorities to focus on to make the highest impact.

Once you have customer journeys in front of you, explore the shortcuts people take, the uncommon routes they often take to get to the goal, but also map them together to identify the critical areas that most customers are going through. That’s a very helpful exercise to understand what is actually going on in the product, in reality.

Free Customer Journey Maps Templates (Miro, Figma)

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Below you will find a few useful starter kits to get up and running fast. However, please make sure to customize these templates for your needs as every product will require its own specific details, dependencies and decisions.

Wrapping Up

As mentioned above, keep in mind that customer journeys are often non-linear, with unpredictable entry points, and integrations way beyond the final stage of a customer journey map. It’s in those moments when things leave a perfect path that a product’s UX is actually stress tested.

So consider mapping unsuccessful touchpoints as well — failures, error messages, conflicts, incompatibilities, warnings, connectivity issues, eventual lock-outs and frequent log-outs, authentication issues, outages and urgent support inquiries.

Also, make sure to question assumptions and biases early. Once they live in your UX map, they grow roots — and it might not take long until they are seen as the foundation of everything, which can be remarkably difficult to challenge or question later. !