Aly HigginsNutrition profile
Map out the user’s journey when using a product on service to better understand what’s working well and what’s not.
Cooking time
- Planning time: 1-2 hours
- Facilitating time: 90 minutes
- Analysis & retrospective time: 1-2 hours
Perfect for
Understanding how users navigate or use a service, product, or website. You can use findings from a journey map to create or validate personas and to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Journey mapping can also help:
- Visualize how users interact with your service or product
- Understand how users feel when using your product or service
- Highlight shared experiences amongst users
Prep work
Understand your users
Before journey mapping, it’s helpful to complete preliminary user research to understand the needs and motivations of your users.
A few activities you can try are:
- User interviews to learn directly from individual users about their relevant experiences
- Usability testing to understand how users currently use your service or product
- Empathy mapping to build empathy for your users by visualizing what they say, do, think, and feel
- Diary studies to take a deep look at the user experience over time by asking participants to capture their activities through words, photos, and/or videos
Define the scope
Define the scope of your map by selecting clear start and end points of the user’s journey. You don’t have to map the experience of your entire service or product. Instead, you can focus on specific phases, interactions, or features.
You’ll also want to focus on a specific use case or audience for your map. Creating a journey map for all users can be overwhelming and may prevent you from getting the specific, relevant feedback you need to inform design and content changes.
For example:
- Instead of “Students,” try “Undergraduate students who are registering for classes”
- Instead of “Staff,” try “Library staff who work on the front desk”
Decide on journey phases or keep it open
After you determine the scope of your journey map, work with stakeholders and relevant partners to identify 3-4 phases your journey map. Phases are broad categories that summarize the types of actions users take when using a product or service. These phases should reflect what you learned about users during preliminary research.
A typical customer’s journey can be a good starting point to help you decide the scope of your map.
Consider adding phases related to:
- How users learn about your product or service
- How users initially explore your product or service
- How users commonly use your product or service
- How or why users continue to use your product or service
Find examples of journey map phases.
If you’re building a new product or service or not sure what the phases of the journey map should be, you can also leave them open and co-create phases with users during the journey mapping session. Be sure to plan additional time and prompts for this.
Test your map with examples
Before working with participants, it’s a good idea to create a prototype of your map and practice adding steps that exemplify these phases. Revise your phases and map as needed.
Create a facilitation guide
Before your journey mapping session, create a facilitation guide that outlines your roles, script, timeline, and list of questions. This will help keep you organized during the session.
Roles: Identify a facilitator, note taker, photographer, and additional volunteers who can help clarify instructors or ask probing questions during the session.
Script: Plan how you’ll explain each step of the process. Your script should:
- Introduce yourself and your teammates
- Provide context on why you’re here and what the goals of the mapping activity are
- Explain the map, phases, and sticky notes
- Guide people through each stage of the mapping process
Timeline: Plan how long each part of the activity will take to help you stay on time.
Probing or follow up questions: Brainstorm follow-up questions you can ask participants during the activity to get more detailed information. Some questions you can ask are:
- How did you find out about [this specific tool or feature]?
- Have you used the [specific tool or feature]?
- How did [doing this task] make you feel?
- What did you learn when you did [task]?
- Can you walk me through that process?
- What were your expectations when you started this process?
- What prep work did you need to do to successfully [do this task]?
How you want to capture user insights: Decide what information you want to capture and how you might want want to take notes during the session. If you’re doing a remote journey map, consider recording the session so you can reference it later.
Check out example facilitation guides.
Ingredients
If you’re doing a remote journey map:
- Virtual collaborative white board like FigJam, Miro, or a Google Jamboard that has digital sticky notes and stickers
If you’re doing an in-person journey map:
- White board
- White board markers
- Sticky notes
- Pens (thicker pens like Sharpies are often the easiest to read and photograph)
- Stickers
- Emoji stickers help users visualize their feelings as they use your product or service. Users can add emojis to identify which steps are frustrating, confusing, enjoyable, etc.
- Dot stickers help users add their support or agreement with other participants’ responses and can visualize common or shared experiences amongst participants.
- A camera to document the process and final map
Directions
Prep work
If remote:
- Create a Zoom or online meeting room and invite participants
- Create a virtual whiteboard and make sure you have a public link ready that is accessible to all participants
If in-person:
- Reserve a space to do your activity and invite participants
- Gather all materials
- Draw the phases in order from left to right on the board. Make sure there is adequate space for participants to add their sticky notes under each phase.
Introduce the activity
Follow your facilitation guide. Introduce the context and goals of the session. Explain what a journey map is. If you have phases on your map, explain them and ask if they make sense to participants. If you’re co-creating phases with your participants, explain how you’ll fill them in together.
If remote, the facilitator should share their screen and the link to the journey map. Another person should be in charge of monitoring the chat for questions. As you introduce the activity, be sure to explain and demonstrate the tools participants will use. Show them where to access virtual sticky notes and stickers, how to add text, and how to drag and drop the sticky notes onto the map. You may need to remind participants how to use these tools throughout the session.
If in-person, pass out several sticky notes and pens to each participant.
Guide participants through the activity
Use your facilitation guide to help participants complete the following tasks:
- Give them time to think about their experience using your product or service and to draft several action items on sticky notes. Encourage participants to be as specific as possible and to add one action item per sticky note.
- Invite participants to add their sticky notes to the map under corresponding phases. Ask prompting questions to clarify or expand on participants’ responses.
- Encourage participants read others’ responses and to add stickers to the action items they agree with. They can also add emoji stickers to action items to show how they feel when completing those action items. If you’re in-person, make sure the facilitator and notetaker can hear what participants say and see the board clearly.
- Work with participants to group sticky notes with common themes together. The facilitator should summarize what they see out loud. Name these groups by adding a text box to your virtual map or writing on the whiteboard.
Wrapping up
After the map is complete, ask for final observations and reflections. Consider asking:
- How did that activity feel to you?
- What stands out to you about our map?
- What trends do you notice?
- What parts of the product or service seem to be the most challenging?
- What parts of the product or service seem to be the easiest or most enjoyable?
- Do you have additional feedback about our product or service that you’d like to add?
Document the final map by taking photos and saving the sticky notes or making sure the link to the virtual map is saved.
Retrospective
After you complete the journey map, run a retrospective with your team. Reflect on how the journey mapping went and initial takeaways. The 4 Ls framework can be a helpful way to structure your restrospective.
Consider:
- What needs to be done with this knowledge?
- What are the biggest opportunities for improvement?
- What’s working well that we want to preserve?
- What stakeholders should be involved with what changes?
- How are we going to measure the impact of the changes we implement?
- What additional UX research do we need or want to do to build on what we learned?
Plating
Prepare and summarize your data
- Document each sticky note. Note any votes or emojis.
- Summarize the groups of sticky notes you created. Explain how these groups represent trends or common experiences of participants.
- Summarize the main pain points or moments of confusion.
- Summarize what participants’ most enjoyed and why.
Inform design and content strategy
Journey maps reflect the personas and other UX research artifacts in your project and should give you an overview of different use cases and scenarios where the user interacts with your product. Use the journey map as a guide when you:
- Design website information architecture, such as site navigation or sitemap
- Create scenes in a user interface prototype
- Clarify or confirm details in your microcopy to address the needs of the user
Pro tips
- Ask participants to think of a specific or most recent experience using your product or service. When users are prompted to remember a specific time using your product or service, they can wirite more detailed sticky notes.
- Give people more time than you think to write, add, and group their sticky notes. Also factor in transition time between these activities when planning your timeline.
- Invite participants to help organize sticky notes in and name categories. The organizing process can bring up new insights about how participants see connections between different parts of the map.
- If remote, have a member of your team monitor the chat for questions. The facilitator may not be able to see the chat as they focus on what’s happening on the virtual whiteboard.
- Think about accessibility when choosing a virtual whiteboard tool to make sure all participants will be able to contribute.
Gallery
Journey map for undergraduate students who use the library’s 3D printing service:
Journey map for new library graduate assistants going through the onboarding and training process:
Resources
- How to make a user journey map
- What is a customer journey map?
- Creating an experience map
- How to create a user journey map
- How to run a virtual journey mapping workshop
Credits
Thank you to Bob Liu for the helpful revisions and to Rebecca Blakiston for drafting the facilitation guide examples.