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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

• What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
• Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
• How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

• Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
• Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
• Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
• Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
• Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience.  In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

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User Journey Map Guide with Examples & FREE Templates

18 April, 2024

Senior UX Researcher

Customer journey mapping is also a popular workshop task to align user understanding within teams. If backed up by user data and research, they can be a high-level inventory that helps discover strategic oversights, knowledge gaps, and future opportunities.

Yet, if you ask two different people, you will likely get at least three different opinions as to what a user journey looks like and whether it is worth the hassle. Read on if you want to understand whether a UX journey map is what you currently need and how to create one.

You can get the templates here:

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of the user journey map template. 

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of this template.

What is user journey mapping?

Imagine your product is a supermarket and your user is the person wanting to refill their fridge. They need to: 

Decide what to buy, and in what supermarket will they be able to find and afford it

Remember to bring their coupons

Park there 

Find everything

Save the new coupons for the next shopping trip

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If you want to learn more about how to optimize your user journeys, we recommend enrolling in our course "Mastering Mobile App Product Management" for free.

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3 ways to understand customer journey maps

Now, there are at least three ways to look at the customer journey.

1. Workflow maps for usability optimization 

Some imagine a user journey map as a wireframe or detailed analysis of  specific flows in their app . This could be, for example, a sign-up flow or the flow for inviting others to a document. In our supermarket example, it’s a closer look at what they do inside your supermarket, maybe even only in the frozen section. Or you could define what you want them to do in the frozen aisle.

.css-61w915{margin-right:8px;margin-top:8px;max-height:30px;}@media screen and (min-width: 768px){.css-61w915{margin-right:38px;max-height:unset;}} The focus here is on getting the details of the execution right, not how it fits into the bigger picture of what the user needs.

It is more or less a wireframe from a user perspective. Such a product-focused understanding is not what we want to discuss in this article, though many examples for the best user journey maps you might come across are exactly this. There are good reasons to do such an analysis as well, since it helps you smooth out usability for the people who have already found their way into your supermarket because of your excellent ice cream selection. Workflow maps won’t help you notice that your lack of parking spots is one of the reasons why you are missing out on potential customers in the first place. By only looking at what they do inside the supermarket, you might also miss out on an opportunity for user retention: You could help them get their ice cream home before it melts.

2. Holistic user journey maps for strategic insights

With a more holistic view of what people experience when trying to achieve a goal, product makers gain strategic insights on how their product fits into the big picture and what could be in the future. Because this journey document covers so much ground, it is usually a linear simplification of what all the steps would look like if they were completed. Going back to our supermarket example, it would start from the moment the person starts planning to fill the fridge and ends when the fridge is full again — even if the supermarket building is only relevant in a few phases of this journey. Creating this version of a user journey map requires quite some time and research effort. But it can be an invaluable tool for product and business strategy. It is an inventory of user needs that can help you discover knowledge gaps and future opportunities.  Service blueprints   are the most comprehensive version of a user journey map  since they also lay out the behind-the-scenes of a service, usually called backstage. In our supermarket example, that could be:

the advertising efforts

logistics required to keep all shelves stocked

protocols the staffers follow when communicating with customers

3. Journey mapping workshops as an alignment method

In a user journey mapping workshop, stakeholders and team members share their knowledge and assumptions about the users. Some of these assumptions might need to be challenged — which is part of the process. The goal is not the perfect output, but rather to get everyone into one room and work out a common understanding of the users they are building products for. It forces everyone to organize their thoughts, spell out what they know and assumed was common knowledge — and ideally meet real users as part of the workshop. If done right, this establishes a more comprehensive understanding of what users go through and helps overcome the very superficial ideas one might have about the lives and needs of people outside their own social bubble.

Hence, such a workshop helps create aha moments and gives the consequences of great and poor product decisions a face. So at the end of the day, it is one of many methods to evangelize user-centricity in an organization.

What are the benefits of user experience (UX) mapping?

We already discussed the benefits and shortcomings of workflow maps, but what are the reasons you should consider a UX journey map and/or a journey mapping workshop ?

1. Switching perspectives

Empathy:  Like any other UX method and user research output, user journey maps are supposed to foster empathy and help product makers put themselves into the shoes of a user. Awareness:  It creates awareness of why users do all the things they do. And it challenges product makers to resist the temptation of building something because it’s feasible, not because it’s needed that way.

2. Aligned understanding

Given the team is involved in creating the user experience map (either as a workshop, in expert interviews, observing the user research, or at least as a results presentation), it forces a conversation and offers a shared mental model and terminology — the foundation for a shared vision. 

3. Seeing the big picture

Imagine the vastly different perceptions Sales reps, Customer Support teams, C-level, and backend engineers might have since they all meet very different segments at very different stages of their journey. Day-to-day, it makes sense to be an expert in the stages of a user journey you are responsible for. A journey map helps to step back from this and see the bigger picture, where your work fits in, and where assumptions about the majority of users were wrong. It might even help define KPIs across teams that don’t cancel each other out.

4. Uncovering blind spots and opportunities

A user journey map gives you a structured and comprehensive overview of which user needs are already tackled by your product and which ones are either underserved or solved with other tools and touchpoints. Which moments of truth do not get enough attention yet? These are the opportunities and blind spots you can work on in the future.

When is customer journey mapping just a waste of time?

In all honesty, there are also moments when creating a user journey map or running a journey mapping workshop is destined to fail and should better be put on hold. It’s a lot of work, so don’t let this energy go to waste.  User journey maps only make sense when there is an intention to collaboratively work on and with them.  Here are some of the scenarios and indicators that it’s the wrong moment for a journey map:

No buy-in for the workshop: The requirements of a successful journey workshop are not met, e.g., there is not enough time (60 minutes over lunch won’t do the trick), only a few team members are willing to attend, and/or key stakeholders refuse to have their assumptions challenged.

Isolated creation: The whole creation process of the user journey map happens isolated from the team, e.g., it is outsourced to an agency or an intern. Nobody from the team observes or runs the user research, or is consulted for input or feedback on the first drafts. There is no event or presentation planned that walks the team through the output. Finally, a very detailed, 10-foot-long poster appears in a hallway, and none of the team members ever find time to read, process, or discuss it with each other.

UX theater: For one reason or another, there is no time/resources allocated to user research or reviewing existing insights whilst creating the map (usability tests with non-users do not count in this case, though). Such an approach, also known as, can do more harm than good since the resulting user journey may only reinforce wrong assumptions and wishful thinking about your users.

Unclear objectives: The user journey map is only created because it is on your UX design checklist, but the purpose is unclear. If you are unsure what you or your stakeholders want to achieve with this journey map, clarify expectations and desired output before investing more energy into this. E.g., there is a chance you were only meant to do a usability review of a bumpy app workflow.

Lack of follow-through: Creating a user journey map is just the start. Without a plan to implement changes based on insights gathered, the map is merely a paper exercise. This lack of action can result from limited resources, lack of authority, or inertia. It's vital to establish a process for turning insights from the map into design improvements or strategy adjustments. This includes assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and defining success metrics to ensure the map drives real change and doesn't end up forgotten.

Overcomplication: Sometimes, to capture every nuance and detail of the user experience, teams can create an overly complex user journey map. This can make the map difficult to understand and use, particularly for team members who weren't involved in its creation. A good user journey map should balance detail and clarity, providing insightful and actionable information without overwhelming its users.

Failure to update: User expectations, behaviors, and the digital landscape constantly evolve. A user journey map that remains static will quickly become outdated. Regular reviews and updates are necessary to ensure that the map reflects the current state of user experiences. This requires a commitment to ongoing user research and a willingness to adjust your understanding of the user's path as new information becomes available.

The good news is: UX maturity in an organization can change rapidly, so even if you run into one of the obstacles above, it is worth revisiting the idea in the future. Once you’re good to go, you can get started with the user journey map examples and templates below.

User journey mapping: examples, templates & tools

There is more than one way to do it right and design a great user journey map. Every organization and industry has its own templates, tools and approaches to what elements are most important to them. The following examples and template will give you an idea of what a user journey map can look like if you decide to create one yourself. Make it your own, and change up the sections and design so they make sense for your product and use cases.

User journey map template and checklist

To give you a first orientation, you can use this user journey template and check the two fictional examples below to see how you could adapt it for two very different industries: instant meal delivery and healthcare.

While there is no official standard, most other user journey maps contain the following elements or variations of them:

Key phases (or ‘stages’) start when users become aware of a problem they need to solve or a goal they want to achieve and may end when they evaluate whether they achieved their goal or enter a maintenance phase. E.g., user journeys for e-commerce could be structured along the classic funnel of:

Consideration

Delivery & use

Loyalty & advocacy

2. Jobs to be done

Whilst some other user journey templates might call this section ‘steps’ or ‘tasks’, it can be very beneficial to structure the stages into ‘jobs to be done’ (JTBD) instead. This framework helps you distinguish better between the actual goal of a user vs. the tasks required to get there . For example, safe online payments are never a goal of a user, this is just one of many jobs on the long way to get new sneakers on their feet. Ideally, users ‘hire’ your product/service to assist them with some of the JTBD on their journey. Phrase your JTBD as verb + object + context . Examples:

Install app on phone

Tip delivery driver

Buy new shoes

Naturally, the stages closest to your current (and future) solution require a more detailed understanding, so you might want to investigate and document deeper what JTBDs happen there.

3. Needs and pains

Users have needs and pains every step along the journey. Use this section to collect the most important needs and potential pains, even if not all apply in all cases. Ask:

What are the repeating themes, even the ones you are (currently) not able to solve with your product?

Phrase pains and needs as I- or me-statements from the user perspective, e.g., ‘I forgot my login details, ‘I am afraid to embarrass myself’ or ‘My day is too busy to wait for a delivery.’ 

Which are the pains and needs that are so severe that, if not solved, they can become real deal-breakers for your product or service?

On the last point, such deal-breaker and dealmaker situations, or ‘ moments of truth ’, require particular attention in your product decisions and could be visually highlighted in your journey. In a meal delivery, the taste and temperature of the food are such a moment of truth that can spoil the whole experience with your otherwise fantastic service.

4. Emotional curve

An emotional curve visualizes how happy or frustrated users are at certain stages of their journey. Emojis are commonly used to make it easy to understand and empathize with the emotional state of the user across the whole journey. It can be a surprising realization that users are not delighted with your witty microcopy, but you already did a great job by not annoying them. It is also a good reminder that what might personally excite you is perceived as stressful or overwhelming by most other users. Strong user quotes can be used for illustration.

5. Brand and product touchpoints

Here, you can list current and planned touchpoints with your brand and product, as well as. Whilst the touchpoints when using your product might be obvious, others early and late in the journey are probably less obvious to you but critical for the user experience and decision to use or return to your product. This is why it is worthwhile to include them in your map. Make sure your journey does not get outdated too soon, and don’t list one-off marketing campaigns or very detailed aspects of current workflows — just what you got in general so there is no major revision needed for a couple of years.

6. Opportunities for improvement

As you map out your user journey, it is important to not only identify the current touchpoints and experiences but also opportunities for improvement. This could include potential areas where users may become frustrated or confused, as well as areas where they may be delighted or pleasantly surprised.

By identifying these opportunities, you can prioritize making meaningful improvements to the user experience and ultimately creating a more positive, long-lasting relationship with your users.

7. Other tools and touchpoints

This may seem the least interesting aspect of your journey or a user interview, but it can tell you a lot about blind spots in your service or potential partnerships or APIs to extend your service. E.g., Google Maps or WhatsApp are common workaround tools for missing or poor in-app solutions.

User journey map example 1: health industry

The following example is for a fictional platform listing therapists for people in need of mental health support, helping them find, contact, schedule, and pay for therapy sessions. As you can see, the very long journey with recurring steps (repeated therapy sessions) is cut short to avoid repetition. 

At the same time, it generalizes very individual mental health experiences into a tangible summary. While it is fair to assume that the key phases happen in this chronological order, JTBD, timing, and the number of sessions are kept open so that it works for different types of patients.

You can also see how the journey covers several phases when the platform is not in active use. Yet, these phases are milestones in the patient’s road to recovery. Looking at a journey like this, you could, for example, realize that a ‘graduation’ feature could be beneficial for your users, even if it means they will stop using your platform because they are feeling better.

This user journey map is fictional but oriented on Johanne Miller’s UX case study  Designing a mental healthcare platform . 

User journey map example 2: delivery services

What the example above does not cover is the role of the therapist on the platform — most likely they are a second user type that has very different needs for the way they use the platform. This is why the second example shows the two parallel journeys of two different user roles and how they interact with each other. 

Nowadays, internal staff such as delivery drivers have dedicated apps and ideally have a designated UX team looking out for their needs, too. Creating a frictionless and respectful user experience for ‘internal users’ is just as critical for the success of a business as it is to please customers.

User journey map example: meal delivery. Please note that this fictional journey map is just an example for illustrative purposes and has not been backed up with user research.

For more inspiration, you can find collections with more real-life user journey examples and customer journey maps on  UXeria ,  eleken.co  &  userinterviews.com , or check out free templates provided by the design tools listed below.

Free UX journey mapping tools with templates

No matter whether you’re a design buff or feel more comfortable in spreadsheets, there are many templates available for free(mium) tools you might be already using. 

For example, there are good templates and tutorials available for  Canva ,  Miro  and even  Google Sheets . If you are more comfortable with regular design software, you can use the templates available for  Sketch  or one of these two from the  Figma (template 1 ,  template 2 ) community. There are also several dedicated journey map tools with free licenses or free trials, e.g.,  FlowMapp ,  Lucidchart  and  UXPressia , just to name a few.

Be aware that the first draft will require a lot of rearrangement and fiddling until you get to the final version. So it might help to pick where this feels easy for you. 

How do I collect data for my app user journey?

User journey maps need to be rooted in reality and based on what users really need and do (not what we wish they did) to add value to the product and business strategy. Hence, user insights are an inevitable step in the creation process.

However, it’s a huge pile of information that needs to be puzzled together and usually, one source of information is not enough to cover the whole experience — every research method has its own blind spots. But if you combine at least two or three of the approaches below, you can create a solid app user journey .

1. In-house expertise

The people working for and with your users are an incredible source of knowledge to start and finalize the journey. Whilst there might be a few overly optimistic or biased assumptions you need to set straight with your additional research, a user journey mapping workshop and/or  expert interviews  involving colleagues from very different (user-facing) teams such as:

customer service

business intelligence

customer insights

will help you collect a lot of insights and feedback. You can use these methods to build a preliminary skeleton for your journey but also to finalize the journey with their input and feedback.

2. Desk research

Next to this, it is fair to assume there is already a ton of preexisting documented knowledge about the users simply floating around in your company. Your  UX research repository  and even  industry reports  you can buy or find with a bit of googling will help. Go through them and pick the cherries that are relevant for your user journey. Almost anything can be interesting:

Old research reports and not-yet-analyzed context interviews from earlier user interviews

NPS scores & user satisfaction surveys

App store feedback

Customer support tickets

Product reviews written by journalists

Competitor user journeys in publicly available UX case studies

Ask your in-house experts if they know of additional resources you could check. And find out if there’s already a  long-forgotten old journey map  from a few years ago that you can use as a starting point (most organizations have those somewhere).

3. Qualitative user research

Qualitative research methods are your best shot to learn about all the things users experience, think, and desire before and after they touch your product.  In-depth interviews  and  focus groups  explore who they are and what drives them. You could show them a skeleton user journey for feedback or  co-creation . 

This could also be embedded into your user journey mapping workshop with the team. Alternatively, you can follow their actual journey in  diary studies ,  in-home visits  or  shadowing . However, in all these cases it is important that you talk to real users of your product or competitors to learn more about the real scenarios. This is why usability testing with non-users or fictional scenarios won’t help much for the user journey map.

4. Quantitative research

Once you know the rough cornerstones of your user journey map,  surveys  could be used to let users rate what needs and pains really matter to them. And what their mood is at certain phases of the journey. You can learn how they became aware of your product and ask them which of the motives you identified are common or exotic edge cases. Implementing micro-surveys such as  NPS surveys , CES , and  CSAT  embedded into your product experience can give additional insights.

5. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey

Customer satisfaction surveys (or CSATs for short) are important tools that measure your customers' satisfaction with your product or service. It is usually measured through surveys or feedback forms, asking customers to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 5. This metric can give valuable insights into the overall satisfaction of your customers and can help identify areas of improvement for your product.

CSAT surveys can be conducted at different customer journey stages, such as after purchase or using a specific feature. This allows you to gather feedback on different aspects of your product and make necessary changes to improve overall satisfaction.

The benefit of CSAT lies in understanding how satisfied customers are with your product and why. By including open-ended questions in the surveys, you can gather qualitative insights into what aspects of your product work well and what needs improvement.

5. User analytics

User analytics is a beautiful source of information, even if it has its limits. Depending on what tools you are using (e.g., Google Analytics, Firebase, Hubspot, UXCam), you can follow the digital footprints of your users before and when they were using the product. This may include  acquisition channels  (input for brand touchpoints and early journey phases),  search terms  that brought them to your product (input for needs and pains), and how they navigate your product. 

Unlike a usability test, you can use  screen flows  and  heatmaps  to understand how your users behave naturally when they follow their own agenda at their own pace — and how often they are so frustrated that they just quit. Knowing this gives you pointers to negative user emotions at certain journey steps and even helps identify your product’s moments of truth. Whilst you cannot ask the users if your interpretations are correct, checking analytics already helps you prepare good questions and talking points for user interviews or surveys.

Curious to know how heatmaps will look in your app?  Try UXCam for free — with 100,000 monthly sessions and unlimited features.

How can I utilize UXCam to collect App User Journey data?

If you have UXCam set up in your mobile app, you can use it to support your user journey research. You can find many of the previously mentioned  user analytics  features ( screen flows  and  heatmaps , including  rage taps ) here as well. 

UXCam can also be an  invaluable asset for your qualitative research . Especially for niche products and B2B apps that normally have a lot of trouble  recruiting real users  via the usual user testing platforms. 

UXCam’s detailed segmentation options allow you to  identify exactly the users you want to interview  about their journey — and  reach out to them via either email or UXCam push notifications , which can include invitation links for your study, a survey or an additional screener.

Additionally, UXCam's session replay feature allows you to watch recordings of user sessions, providing valuable insights into how users interact with your app and where they may face challenges.

Where can I learn more?

Don’t feel ready to get started? Here are a few additional resources that can help you dive deeper into user journey mapping and create the version that is best for your project.

Creating user journey maps & service blueprints:

Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach

Journey Mapping 101

How to create customer journey maps

Customer Journey Stages for Product Managers

The Perfect Customer Journey Map

Planning and running user journey mapping workshops:

Journey mapping workshop

Jobs to be done:

The Theory of Jobs To Be Done

Moments of truth in customer journeys:

Journey mapping MoTs

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a visual representation of the process that a user goes through to accomplish a goal with your product, service, or app.

What is a user journey?

A user journey refers to the series of steps a user takes to accomplish a specific goal within a product, service, or website. It represents the user's experience from their point of view as they interact with the product or service, starting from the initial contact or discovery, moving through various touchpoints, and leading to a final outcome or goal.

How do I use a user journey map in UX?

User journey maps are an essential tool in the UX design process, used to understand and address the user's needs and pain points.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

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What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

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1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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4 June 2024

Journey mapping in UX design

Last updated

21 February 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Customers are essential to the success of a business. Without them, the company would cease to exist. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand the stages customers go through when interacting with a brand. You can use a journey map to visualize this across all digital channels over time.

If you’re looking to create user-friendly, intuitive experiences for your customers, journey mapping is a key part of UX design . Find out everything you need to know about journey mapping in this guide.

• What are the four stages of journey mapping?

A journey map should accurately represent your user’s experience from when they first find you and start to interact with you, through to them making a purchase and becoming a loyal customer.

The stages of a journey map will therefore depend on your product. The four stages of a customer’s buying cycle are:

During this stage, customers are looking for solutions to a problem. They become aware of your brand, services, or products via advertisements or other marketing vehicles.

Social media is a powerful tool that companies use to boost awareness. During the awareness stage, the brand should share pertinent information, such as business goals, ethics, and values.

Consideration

At this stage, customers consider the brand against similar companies offering the same products and services.

You need to give potential customers a deeper understanding of what you’re offering and why your brand is a better choice. They may engage with the business by signing up for a newsletter or visiting a brick-and-mortar store.

Customers have decided what they want and make a purchase. They have gathered the information they need before committing to a purchase. They may find this information in email confirmations, FAQs on billing and shipping, and online ordering pages.

Customer loyalty

This is the last stage, after customers have made their purchase and are evaluating the overall experience. This phase is about creating loyal, returning clients by offering membership programs and future discounts.

• How to make a simple journey map

Each customer journey is unique, so journey maps vary depending on the scenarios experienced by customers. Although the maps vary widely, the same steps are involved in creating them.

Let’s look at a step-by-step approach to making a simple journey map.

Step 1: Scope definition

The first step is to clearly define your goals. What are you hoping to achieve from this journey map? Do you want to make a particular aspect of the purchasing cycle more user-friendly? Or are you trying to find out why potential customers don’t follow through with a purchase?

Setting a goal will provide guide rails around the particular customer path you’re trying to understand. This will drive UX designers throughout the journey.

Step 2: Create user personas

Next, get a grasp of who your customers are. Gather information to create different personas to improve your knowledge of the different segments of your target audience. This helps you to:

Define your target market

Create better products and services

Appeal to them through your marketing

Step 3: List channels and touchpoints

Touchpoints are points of interaction between the user and the product. The channels may be through social media platforms, the path a user would take through your product, and other supporting applications or communication necessary to complete their goal.

List all the channels and touchpoints in the journey scenarios. Identify the touchpoints with higher engagement and those that need to be optimized.

Step 4: Collect customer feedback

Gathering customer feedback helps gauge how your users feel about your product or service. Methods used to gather information include:

Questionnaires

Rating systems

Your aim is to see your product through the eyes of your customers.

Step 5: Define pain points and points of friction

Using the customer feedback you gathered in the previous stage, identify gaps in the user journey that make it difficult to move through stages. Identify when they happen and what triggers them. 

This will help you to smooth out potential friction points in the customer journey.

Step 6: Improve and re-evaluate

The last step is to improve the overall experience of your customers. Once you have identified the pain points, opportunities, and goal metrics, brainstorm solutions to the identified flaws and implement necessary changes.

Regularly conduct further research and re-evaluate the customer journey.

• What are the elements of a journey map?

A journey map is made up of the following elements:

Persona (actor)

The persona is the one who experiences the journey; it may be a customer or a product user. Depending on the scenario, it could be a group or an individual.

The scenario is what the actor or persona is trying to achieve. A scenario describes the situation that the journey addresses. It primarily includes goals and expectations and can be real or imaginary.

Journey phase

Phases are the different stages of a journey, from awareness to purchasing and beyond. In each phase, try to visualize how you can meet the customer’s goals.

Thoughts and emotions

This refers to how the customer feels as they interact with your brand. Thoughts help the UX designer understand what the customer is experiencing, for example, relief, anxiousness, or frustration. Emotions allow the UX designer to focus on encouraging positive thoughts.

User actions

The action element details what the actor does in each phase to achieve their goal. It defines the actual steps taken by an actor throughout the journey.

Opportunities

This element offers the brand a chance to improve the customer's experience . They are insights gained from journey mapping and used to make informed decisions.

• Why are journey maps important?

Journey mapping brings the following benefits for a company.

Customer-centric philosophy

Using journey maps, UX designers can focus on how customers feel and think about the product being designed.

Journey maps help businesses understand their customers better, resulting in improved decision-making.

Broader business perspective

A journey map helps you to visualize situations experienced by a customer when interacting with your brand. The goal of a journey map is to remove obstacles and make the purchasing process intuitive and efficient.

Customer journey mapping helps a business owner gain an overview of their product or service from multiple viewpoints.

Improved customer experience

A journey map is the first step toward gaining a deeper understanding of customer engagement and fostering the flow of customer experience. It can help you to smooth out the customer experience and personalize it across all touchpoints.

Identification of opportunities

In complex business environments, gaps and breakdowns are common. Mapping out how a user interacts with your brand and/or product may reveal design flaws and areas that need change. 

By charting the entire process, a journey map helps identify gaps and opportunities for improvement that will enhance customer experience.

Competitive advantage

Journey mapping helps a company eliminate design flaws and make its product stand out. Once a UX designer has improved customer experience, this becomes a differentiation factor among competitors in the market.

• How does a customer journey map help?

A detailed and well-researched journey map will help you to: 

Build a customer-centric organization

Improve customer retention

Identify unmet opportunities that competitors may have missed

Understand the target audience

Align brand position with target market needs and expectations

Meet customer expectations

Understand different buyer personas

Optimize customer onboarding process

• How much does journey mapping cost?

The cost of journey mapping varies widely. The pricing depends on who’s doing it, how much research you want to do, and the complexity of the customer's journey.

• Designing journey maps

Journey maps are unique since they should represent whatever product or service they emulate. Variations of journey maps include:

Experience map

Empathy map

Service blueprint

You can use a third-party tool to build a well-designed journey map, such as:

Omnigraffle

However, there are no rules around what you use to build your journey map and can build it using a whiteboard, PDF format, and even Microsoft Paint. As long as it’s an accurate representation of the user’s journey, that’s what counts.

Experience maps

Experience maps are a zoom-out from journey maps. While journey maps represent a single persona’s behavior at each phase of the customer journey, experience maps can include multi-players that may interact with that user, additional products that customers typically use, or perhaps entirely different methods outside technology that users engage with to complete their goals.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps are used to understand customer personas . They do not follow a particular sequence of events along the journey. Empathy maps are divided into four parts and track what the customer does, thinks, says, and feels when using a product.

These can be helpful when defining who the persona is within your journey map.

Service blueprints

Service blueprints focus on how a brand delivers its products and services to customers rather than being customer-centric. In other words, they describe the behind-the-scenes details of the process.

They are mainly concerned with actions performed by every stakeholder in the purchase process. By focusing on service, gaps or friction points are identified and can be eliminated.

• Map your brand's path to success

Journey mapping offers many benefits to a company. Once your customer journey map is in place, you will fully understand your customers’ experience.

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What is ux journey mapping.

12 min read What is a user journey map, and how can it help your business to improve its outcomes? Create your own user journey map and understand customer journey mapping differences with our full guide.

What is user journey mapping?

A user journey map is a visual representation of what a user must do to achieve a goal, and outlines the experience they have with your brand. Their goal might be to complete a purchase, find information, or sign up to a service. Whatever the user’s goal is, a journey map can help businesses to figure out where there are pain points and improve the user or customer experience.

A journey map is best used for outlining complex journeys that involve either multiple events, a particular process with several stages, or involve more than one channel. User journey maps can help to clarify these complicated journeys and ensure that the process is smooth and fulfilling for everyone.

Free eBook: The ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

A user journey map / UX journey map vs a customer journey map

Sometimes, the phrases “user journey mapping” or “UX journey mapping are used interchangeably with “customer journey mapping”. In most cases, this is accurate – the users of your website are your customers, so creating a customer journey map will effectively be a UX journey map. However, this doesn’t cover all scenarios. For example:

Customer journey maps don’t cover all users

Customer journey maps are useful for understanding the customer experience you offer, but what if your users aren’t customers? Internal and external stakeholders, researchers, employees, and more might need to find information on your website, even though they’re not customers.

Customer journey mapping is usually tied to a financial goal

Customer journey mapping usually has a financial goal, with a monetary transaction at the end of it (even if the initial goal isn’t, such as a free sign up to a service). A user journey map doesn’t necessarily tie into financial goals – it might be to provide information, for example.

UX journey maps are usually for UX design thinking

A customer journey map is a tool that can be used for many different areas of business – sales journeys, marketing journeys and more can be mapped out. However, a UX journey map is usually used for the UX design process, and might involve more technical information such as website usage data.

Why is a UX journey map important for business?

Getting the complete picture and a deep understanding of your user or customer journey allows your business to understand where problems lie and where positive action can be taken.

Defining your users’ needs, issues, and the scale of their interactions with your brand gives you the ability to fix pain points and develop new pathways for users that you hadn’t thought of before.

For example, perhaps your business has taken a desktop-first approach, offering a great experience for desktop users at the expense of creating a mobile-responsive design. By creating a user journey map, you might see that your users are actually coming in via mobile searches – and with 58.33% of global users choosing mobile , this is quite likely. Your UX journey map gives you a better idea of how to win over your mobile users and provide them with a better user experience.

Why user experience matters

Creating a user experience that meets and exceeds expectations allows you to:

• Create positive feelings and a stronger connection with your users. Fully connected users are on average 52% more valuable than users that are highly satisfied. By offering a positive, connective experience, you can reap the benefits.
• Develop loyal users who return time and time again. With 88% of online users being less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience, it’s important to cultivate loyalty by understanding where your user journeys are failing to impress.
• Invest in your business with a proven ROI. According to Forrester, every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return on average, an ROI of 9,900%.
• Stand out from the competition. Your journey map might not be too different from a competitor’s – but what will make you stand out is the exceeding of the usual expectations at each stage of the user or customer experience.

Building out a journey map or multiple journey maps for your users allows you to create a deeper relationship with your audience, enabling them to have an intuitive, cohesive experience with your brand.

Components of a thorough user journey map

There are several key elements of a user journey map that are vital for creating an effective service blueprint. You can get started with our basic customer journey map template here , or read on for a more in-depth approach.

1. The specific user

You will likely create a variety of user journey maps. Each one will require you to focus on a specific user and their journey through the assets you’ve created.

Your specific user for each journey map will usually tie into a customer persona. Your user persona should be based on data you’ve collected about your business, such as who is buying your products, has a stake in your business, or is employed by you.

For example, you might have a user who is a senior team member in your business, and a user who is a new employee – both might need different journey maps.

2. The scenario and the goals

On journey maps, the scenario is the situation that the user finds themselves in, with a specific goal in mind. For example, say your user is a customer – the scenario might be that they’re buying a product, with the goal of completing a transaction.

You don’t have to create a user journey map for an existing scenario or goal – perhaps you’re looking to map out a process that’s in the works for a future product launch.

3. User journey stages or phases

Your user journey map is now broken down into stages or phases. This is the high-level view of your user’s scenario, broken down into individual interactions or customer touch points.

For example, if you were selling a product to a customer to fix a particular problem, your stages might be the following:

4. Actions, attitudes and emotions

Within each user journey stage, you will need to map out the actions a user will take; their mindset or attitude toward this journey stage; and the user’s emotional state.

For example, for the “Discovery” phase in the product sale example above, you might note:

• Actions : Use online search engine to find information, visit website, read blog article
• Attitude: Searching for help for a problem
• Emotions: Frustrated with the problem they’re trying to solve, happy at potentially finding a solution

5. Opportunities

When you’ve mapped out the above on your user journey map or customer journey map, you’ll start to see where you have the opportunity to create change. For example, perhaps you’ve seen that you lose lots of users at the Purchase stage. Is there a problem with your purchase system? What incentive could you offer to get users over the hurdle?

Ask yourself:

• What can you do with the knowledge you’ve gained from this journey map?
• What are the main opportunities that should be tackled first for the best ROI?

6. Internal ownership

Once you’ve identified the opportunities, you can then assign internal ownership. Without assigning specific actions and responsibilities, improving your customer experience or user experience can easily fall under the radar.

Your customer journeys or user journeys outlined in your journey map might touch upon multiple parts of your organization. For example, the customer journey outlined in this example involves product design, marketing, sales and frontline customer service departments. Each area of your business will need to take action for the best user or customer experience.

7. Measurement

To understand how your user journey has improved, you’ll need to determine the metrics each improvement will be judged against. This might be customer satisfaction (CSAT) , sales numbers, Net Promoter Scores (NPS ), or positive user reviews – whichever you feel best represents an improvement for your users’ experience. It’s best to create KPIs to track over time to see how your actions contribute towards tangible change in the user experience.

How to build a user journey map

Now you understand how to create a customer journey map or user journey map, how do you gather all the data you need to flesh it out?

The main sources of useful information will be:

• User/ customer research , such as market research
• Unsolicited user data, such as web traffic numbers or social media listening data
• Solicited user data, such as data from user interviews or customer surveys
• Operational data, such as financial transaction data

Qualitative UX research

Qualitative user research helps you to understand the “why” behind user’s actions. How was your customer feeling in the moment when they interacted with you? Which emotion drove them to move into the next phase of your user journey map?

This type of user research involves collecting non-numerical data, such as opinions or feelings. To do this, you might decide to:

• Host user interviews/customer interviews to discover pain points and understand the drivers behind users and customers’ experience
• Perform user research through surveys to gather information on experiences at all user and customer touchpoints
• Conduct research to understand why specific demographics might act in a specific way during their user journey
• Observe users in action, either in person or through screen recordings, to get contextual information on what happens during the journey
• Create an empathy map, outlining what a user says, thinks, does and feels, for each stage of the user or customer journey

Quantitative UX research

Quantitative user research is a more structured approach to gathering user information for your journey map. Rather than the “why” behind your user or customer’s experience, it illustrates the “what.” What are your users doing? How often are they doing it? How much do they spend on it?

• Get insights from internal data to understand actions, such as what happens during user pain points or how often your customers return for another purchase
• Test the usability and accessibility of your website to understand if there are technical drivers behind actions
• Use user research methods such as mouse heatmaps, funnel analysis, analytics and more to understand user behavior

With all this information, you can then create user personas to help kickstart your user journey mapping and UX design process.

Create effective UX journey maps with Qualtrics

Get a deeper understanding of your users and build better customer experiences with user journey maps, enabled by Qualtrics. Build multiple in-depth user journey maps, populated with your organization’s collated data and third-party inputs, for better UX design and customer experience.

With Qualtrics CustomerXM™ , you’ll be able to:

• Outline individual user and customer journeys with input from across your business
• Automatically surface emotions, drivers and sentiments in unsolicited and solicited data with iQ™
• Deliver insights and actions automatically to key parties within your organization to enable positive change
• Create UX designs that meet and exceed user expectations

Related resources

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User experience 20 min read, user experience surveys 9 min read, ux research tools 8 min read, user analytics 11 min read, rage clicks 11 min read, user experience analytics 10 min read, request demo.

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Journey Mapping Method

A journey map is a holistic, visual representation of a user’s experience with a product or service over time. Journey maps combine data and insight from other research and discovery methods to provide a detailed description from the user’s point of view of steps taken, decisions made, successes, pain points, and emotions felt.

Journey maps help designers understand the user’s motivations and needs at each step of a process, from the earliest earliest phases of researching a product or service all the way through adoption, providing crucial insight for designing solutions that better meet user and business needs. The journey map’s visual and storytelling elements also help it communicate research data and findings to broader audiences within an organization.

Preparation

Journey Mapping is often more effective when it is informed by these complementary methods.

Contextual Interviewing

Observation of users performing tasks in their own environment

Task Analysis

Observe users in action to understand how they perform tasks to achieve goals

Written descriptions of how users will perform tasks with your product or on your website

A specific user's context, motivations, and goals for visiting a website or app

Stakeholder Interviewing

Understanding the perspective and influence of those invested in a project's success

User Interviewing

Understand the tasks and motivations of the user group for whom you are designing

• Define business and user goals Clearly articulate the organizational goals for the product or service, the design and business goals for the mapping exercise, and the goals of the target user the map is to represent.
• Gather research data Effective journey maps are based on qualitative and quantitative data collected across a range of activities. Review and incorporate existing research as you create your journey map, and note where gaps in understanding indicate the need for additional research. 
• Identify touchpoints and channels Touchpoints describe what users do and how they do it. Channels describe where the interaction takes place (e.g. website, call center, native app, or in-store). 
• Create an Empathy Map Empathy maps describe what users do, think, feel, say, and hear in a given situation. They help you understand and articulate users’ emotional state, and provide the basis for illustrating the peaks and valleys of frustration, anxiety, happiness, etc.
• Sketch the journey Visualize the order in which users exhibit behaviors, use information, make decisions, and feel emotions. Group elements into phases related to the narrative of each user. Integrate touchpoints, channels, empathy insights, and other research to show the user’s course of motion across the timescale as a whole. Include the user’s feelings at each touchpoint. 
• Review, refine, and revise Review your draft journey with team members and subject matter experts to gain new insight and integrate new perspectives. Use these to identify additional opportunities to make your journey map more accurate, more expressive of the data, and more useful for the design process. From time to time, evaluate your map to make sure it remains accurate. Revise as necessary to account for evolving research, product development, and user and business needs.

Journey Mapping typically produces insight and solutions focused on these areas:

User Preference

Elements, arrangements, or qualities of experience design that user state or show are valuable to them.

User Behavior

Information about how users currently use a site, service, or resource.

Journey Mapping Resources

10 most interesting examples of Customer Journey Maps

7 Interesting Real Life Customer Journey Map Examples

Customer journey maps for content: Untangle complex insights and create better experiences

144 Best Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples

Category Design

Creating structures and schemes that make the location and use of content clear

Persona Creation

Development of research-informed representations of target user goals, behaviors, and pain points

Style Tile Creation

Communicate the use of fonts, colors, and interface elements in a design system

Define a system for labeling and classifying content to make it easier to find, understand, and use

Journey Mapping Method details last edited on Sunday, February 6, 2022

A comprehensive guide to effective customer journey mapping

A brand's user experience shapes its target audience's entire perception of your organization. Maximize audience engagement with customer journey mapping.

Discover key challenges today's marketing teams are facing, as well as opportunities for businesses in 2024.

Incorporating customer journey mapping into your web design process helps elevate consumer engagement to drive loyalty and sales.

Many in-house teams and web designers strive to better serve users by optimizing their customer experience (CX). Considering how your customers use your platform or service helps you see your website from a user perspective, letting you shape your design to better meet their needs. To achieve this, web designers can look to customer journey mapping.

A particularly handy tool for user experience (UX) design , this process helps teams understand who their users are and how to fulfill their expectations, guiding development decisions for improved audience engagement. Learn more about customer journey mapping and how you can implement it to enhance your CX.

User journey mapping: an overview

User journey mapping, also known as customer journey mapping (CJM), maps a website visitor's experience from their perspective. Presented through a visual diagram, the customer journey map charts the user’s path as they seek information or solutions, starting at the homepage and tracking their routes across other menus and links.

To create a customer journey map, you begin by researching who users are, what they want from your site, and how positive or negative their experiences have been. 

There are two main purposes for mapping your customers’ journey.

1. Improve customer experience

This is the ultimate goal of CJM. Site navigation can be especially tricky to assess because you’re already familiar with the layout. A fresh perspective on your site often uncovers overlooked details such as navigation issues or broken links.

By conducting research on UX trends and visually mapping your results, you’ll identify any parts of your design that confuse or frustrate visitors. This process also reveals areas that work well, which you can repurpose elsewhere in the design.

2. Maintains ease-of-use as your site grows

A customer journey map can make even a simple site more straightforward to navigate. When your website or business grows, you may need to add content and features to accommodate the expansion. Implementing customer journey mapping ensures your website's fundamental flow remains intuitive and that new material and features are easily discoverable and usable.

Primary user journey map types

There are various ways to approach customer journey mapping based on the specific insights you’re seeking. The end result of each map will look similar, but the focus of each is different — which changes the information it offers. Here are three standard types of maps to get you started.

Current state

The current state map is the most common type. It evaluates your website’s present state to better understand visitors’ current experiences, helping identify improvement opportunities for its existing design.

Future state

A future state map explores a hypothetical "ideal" website, considering the visitor’s experience if every site component were optimized. This map is helpful when planning a total redesign or a specific change. When you collect user research and translate the results into your map, you can present a visual outline to your client or company for a straightforward explanation.

Persona-based

A persona-based map lays out the journey of a single designated type of user, or persona (which we will define below). This type of diagram is useful when optimizing your website for a specific sector of your audience with particular needs.

Learn best practices for integrating the workflows between design and development in this free webinar.

The 5-step customer journey mapping process

Once you’ve set clear goals for your map’s achievements, you can select the appropriate diagram type. To begin visualizing your user journey, follow this five-step process.

1. Define the map’s scope

Your map may focus on just one customer interaction or outcome, such as finding the newsletter sign-up sheet or making a payment, or it could cover the entire website’s navigation. A focused scope helps you troubleshoot a problem area or ensure an especially critical element functions properly. Alternatively, a larger-scope map provides a big-picture perspective of how the site works as a whole. Creating a comprehensive map is more complex, but high-level mapping helps comprehend the entire user experience from beginning to end.

2. Determine your user personas

A persona describes a particular type of visitor using your site. When imagining and defining these users, you can assign a name to each and include details about who they are, what they’re looking for, and why.

Focus on users who contribute most to your business goals, consulting your marketing or sales teams for insights. To define your customer personas, explore current user behavior through surveys, online reviews, and email list responsiveness.

For example, if you’re creating a website for a store that sells artisanal coffee-making tools, your personas could be:

• The gift giver. This user only knows a little about coffee but wants to select an impressive gift for someone else. They’ll need help with purchase decisions, so they might interact with an FAQ or chat feature before visiting the products page. They may also leave your site if overwhelmed by options, so it’s important to offer helpful information proactively. This will keep them engaged and more likely convert them to paying customers.
• The coffee nerd. This person is knowledgeable and always seeks the highest-quality tools, so easily accessible product details and customer reviews are important to them. To support their user experience and encourage them to purchase, ensure these elements are easily discoverable.
• The tourist. This user is on vacation and looking for a cute brick-and-mortar shop to visit. They aren't interested in your online store, but an appealing photo of your physical store with easily accessible hours and location information may convince them to come by in person.

These three types of users have very different needs and goals when visiting your website. To capture all of their business, create a map for each of them to ensure you accommodate their specific wants and circumstances.

3. Give the personas context

User context is the “when” and “how” of each persona visiting your site. A user will have a different experience loading your site on a mobile device than on a laptop. Additionally, someone in no rush may use your website differently than someone looking more urgently with a specific purpose.

Figure out when, how, and in what mindset your personas most commonly visit your site to map their experience accurately. This context has very concrete impacts on your finished design. If visitors tend to look for one specific page whenever in a hurry (like contact or location information), placing those details on the front page or prominently linking to it will smooth the user experience for those users.

Here’s an example of how to place a persona in context.

Persona: Jo is an apartment hunter in her early 20s and is still in college. She's looking for off-campus housing for herself and some roommates. The collective group values location and cost more than apartment features.

Context : Jo is in a hurry and trying to visit as many apartments as possible. She’s looking at property rental websites that clearly state apartment addresses in each listing.

Method : Jo is browsing the sites on her iPhone.

4. List persona touchpoints

Touchpoints mark when the user makes a purchase decision or interacts with your user interface (UI) . They include visitors' actions to move toward their goals and consider each associated emotion. The first touchpoint is how they reach your website — such as tapping a social media ad, clicking on a search result, or entering your URL directly.

First, list each action the visitor took and their corresponding emotional reactions. Subsequent touchpoints include instances when they navigate a menu, click a button, scroll through a gallery, or fill out a form. When you diagram the route through your site in an A-to-Z path, you can place yourself in the persona's mind to understand their reactions and choices.

A met expectation — for example, when clicking a "shop" button takes them to a product gallery — will result in a positive emotional reaction. An unmet expectation — when the “shop" link leads to an error page — will provoke an adverse reaction.

5. Map the customer journey

Illustrate the user journey by mapping these touchpoints on a visual timeline. This creates a narrative of users’ reactions across your entire service blueprint. To represent your users’ emotional states at each touchpoint, graph their correspondences like this:

The map helps you understand the customer experience as a whole. 

For example, based on the diagram above, touchpoint 3 is the largest navigation challenge on the website. The graph also shows that the user's mood eventually rebounds after the initial setback. Improving the problem element in touchpoint 3 will have the biggest impact on elevating the overall user experience.

Customer journey mapping best practices

Now that you understand the mapping process, here are some best practices to implement when charting your customer journey. 

• Set a clear objective for your map: Define your CX map’s primary goal, such as improving the purchase experience or increasing conversions for a specific product.
• Solicit customer feedback: Engage directly with customers through surveys or interviews so you can implement data-driven changes. Ask users about their journey pain points and invite both positive and negative feedback on the overall navigation.
• Specify customer journey maps for each persona: To specifically serve each customer persona, consider charting separate paths for each based on their behaviors and interests. This approach is more customer-centric, as not all user types interact with your website the same way.
• Reevaluate your map after company or website changes: As your business scales, your website must evolve — and so will your customer’s path. Review your map when making both large and small website adjustments to ensure you don’t introduce new user challenges. Navigational disruptions can frustrate visitors, causing would-be customers to leave your site and seek competitors .

Optimize your user journey map with Webflow

A user journey map is only as effective as the improvements it promotes. When redesigning your website based on insights your map provides, explore Webflow’s vast resource bank to streamline your design processes. 

Webflow offers web design support with diverse guides , tutorials , and tools for straightforward web design. Visit Webflow today to learn how its site hosting , e-commerce , and collaboration resources support enhanced user experience for better engagement.

Webflow Enterprise gives your teams the power to build, ship, and manage sites collaboratively at scale.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Ux mapping methods compared: a cheat sheet.

November 5, 2017 2017-11-05

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Designing and developing a product often involves a large team of people with different backgrounds and experiences who must be on the same page about the project goals, the user needs and behaviors, and even the component processes involved. This common understanding is often built with visualizations (commonly referred to as mappings). Mappings make sense of and describe various aspects and processes associated with a product.

In This Article:

Four types of mapping, empathy mapping, customer journey mapping, experience mapping, service blueprinting, three-step decision framework, use all four ux mapping methods.

This article gives an overview of four commonly used mappings, their defining characteristics, and when to use which:

• Empathy mapping
• Customer journey mapping
• Experience mapping
• Service blueprinting

Additionally, this article will outline the decisions that must be made before creating any of these mappings in a simple three-step approach framework.

Empathy maps help team members understand the user’s mindset.

Empathy map :  A tool used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes user knowledge in order to 1) create a shared understanding, and 2) aid in decision making.

Characteristics:

• The map is split into 4 quadrants: Says, Thinks, Feels, Does.
• It shows user’s perspective regarding the tasks related to the product.
• It is not chronological or sequential.
• There is one empathy map for each persona or user type (1:1 mapping).

Why use it:

• To build empathy for your users
• To force alignment and understanding about a user type

When to use it:

• Beginning of any design process
• When categorizing research notes from a user interview

Customer journey maps focus on a specific customer’s interaction with a product or service.

Customer journey map : A visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal tied to a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes.

• The map is tied to a specific product or service.
• It is split into 4 swim lanes: phases, actions, thoughts, mindsets/emotions.
• Including her mindset, thoughts, and emotions
• Leaving out most process details
• It is chronological.
• There is one map per persona/user type (1:1 mapping).
• To pinpoint specific customer journey touchpoints that cause pain or delight
• To break down silos to create one shared, organization-wide understanding of the customer journey
• To assign ownership of key touchpoints in the journey to internal departments

At any point in the design process, as a reference point amongst a team throughout a product design cycle

Experience maps generalize the concept of customer-journey maps across user types and products.

Experience map:  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. It’s used for understanding a general human behavior (as opposed to a customer journey map, which is more specific and focused on related to a specific business).

• It is not tied to a specific product or service.
• It offers a general human perspective; it is not a specific to a particular user type or product/service.
• It depicts events in chronological order.
• To understand a general human behavior
• To create a baseline understanding of an experience that is product/service agnostic
• Before a customer journey map in order to gain understanding for a general human behavior
• When converging multiple experiences (tool and specific user agnostic) into one visualization

Service blueprints are counterparts to customer journey maps, focused on the employees.

Service blueprint : A visualization of the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. Similar to customer journey maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or require a crossfunctional effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).

• It is tied to a specific service.
• It is split into 4 swim lanes: customer actions, frontstage actions, backstage actions, and support processes.
• Focusing on the service provider and employees
• Leaving out most customer details
• It is chronological and hierarchical.
• To discover weaknesses in the organization
• To identify opportunities for optimization
• To bridge crossdepartment efforts
• To break down silos and create one shared, organization-wide understanding of how the service is provided
• After customer journey mapping
• Before making organizational or process changes
• When pinpointing a funnel or breakpoint internally

Before beginning any mapping effort (regardless of the type), 3 decisions must be made:

1. Current (as-is) vs. future (to-be)

This decision involves the actions and states depicted in the visualization: do they reflect the current state of the world or a desired state of the world?

• Current mappings are based on an actual “today” state of what you are mapping. This approach is ideal when the mapping goal is to identify and document existing problems and pain points. Use current state maps to help analyze research or align a team around a data-validated problem.
• Future mappings are based on an “ideal” state for a user type, experience, or a to-be service structure. Future state maps help reinvent and conceive how a user or experience would feel in the future. Use future state maps to set a benchmark or goal for the ideal form of your product or service.

2. Hypothesis vs. research

This decision depends on the type of input that you will use to build your mapping.

• Hypothesis mappings are based on an accumulation of existing understanding within a team or organization. This approach is a great way to merge multiple existing team views, create a research plan (based on the gaps that emerge from your hypothesis map), and make a first step towards a higher-fidelity, research-based map.
• Research mapping is based on data gathered specifically for building the map. This approach is best when there are time and resources dedicated to creating a research plan. While this method creates the best maps, it takes time and significant buy-in. Regardless of where you start, your maps should be iterative and constantly updated with new findings.

3. Low-fidelity vs. high-fidelity

This decision pertains to the quality of the final map visualization.

• Low-fidelity maps are unpolished and often created with sticky notes in a flexible, unrefined manner. These maps are best in an early part of the process. Low fidelity means little commitment or creation effort and empowers people to collaborate, revise, and update as needed. Use sticky notes (physically on the wall or digitally with tools like Mural.co) or collaborative excel sheets.
• High-fidelity maps are polished, created digitally, and look final. High fidelity maps are the best for creating an artifact that is going to be shared amongst many. High fidelity can be easier to read but less flexible because of the “finished” nature of the product. These maps are often created digitally and then dispersed.

All UX maps have two-fold benefits. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model. Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used amongst your team, organization, or partners to communicate an understanding of your user or service. This artifact can also become the basis for decision making as the team moves forward.

Using one mapping method over another will not make or break a project. Ideally, a combination of all four will be used as needed at different points in your process to create an in-depth understanding of your users and organization.  

Kyle, Beth. Pregnancy Experience Map. http://www.bethkyle.com/portfolio-item/pregnancy-experience-map/

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UX Customer Journey — How to Map Out User Experience

Customer journey maps are effective visualizations that help organizations understand their customers and create better experiences. Product teams use these journey maps during the design process to solve usability issues, streamline user experiences, and identify opportunities that help the organization achieve its business goals.

Creating customer journey maps requires research, collaboration, the right tools, and an appropriate visualization format. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to streamline journey mapping, which we cover later in this article.

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What is a UX Customer Journey?

A customer journey represents the steps customers go through when interacting with a product, service, or business process. Companies use journey maps to visualize this end-to-end process and identify customer needs across multiple touchpoints.

User journey map vs. customer journey map

While the theory and application are similar, there is a slight difference between a user journey map and a customer journey map:

• User journey map : A visual representation of the steps to complete a specific task or goal.
• Customer journey map : A broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints, including all the interactions with an organization.

Benefits of mapping the customer journey

Mapping customer journeys offer many benefits for organizations and teams, notably improving user experience and customer satisfaction by identifying pain points and opportunities.

Some key benefits of customer journey maps include:

• Enhanced customer understanding: helps organizations gain insights about their target audience’s needs, preferences, motivations, and pain points by visualizing the experience from the customer’s point of view.
• Pinpoint issues and opportunities: allows teams to identify which steps cause difficulty or frustration for customers. Conversely, the organization can find areas for improvement and innovation.
• Streamlined and consistent experiences: organizations can identify and fix inconsistencies and gaps across multiple touchpoints, creating a more cohesive and consistent user experience.
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty: by streamlining and optimizing product processes, organizations improve customer satisfaction leading to increased loyalty, recommendations, and growth.
• Informed decision-making: journey maps help teams across the organization make decisions about design, development, marketing, etc. Many organizations use these visualizations to prioritize features, updates, and investments.
• Cross-functional collaboration: customer journey maps allow organizations to visualize how customers pass through each department, creating opportunities for teams to collaborate and find ways to improve the customer experience at each touchpoint–UX design, marketing, customer support, social media, etc.
• Creating benchmarks and continuous evaluation: organizations can use customer journey maps to evaluate projects and how products evolve and improve with releases.

Customer Personas – The Foundation for Customer Journey Maps

A user persona (customer persona) is UX research artifact design teams use as a fictional representation of a user group, including their demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points.

These user personas are the foundation for customer journey maps because they provide the framework for understanding how different types of users engage with the organization and its products.

For example, if a company is designing a fitness app, the research team might create personas for three primary user groups:

• Yoga practitioners

These three user personas will have different needs, priorities, goals, challenges, and ambitions. Their interactions with your brand and how they enter customer journeys will also differ.

Incorporating personas into the customer journey

User personas give designers a start and end goal for customer journey maps. They can use the persona’s behavioral patterns to highlight how these users interact with a product or service and tailor content that meets their needs.

Returning to our fitness app example above: Researchers learn that yoga users prefer to use the desktop application at home, while gym-goers use the mobile app in their local gym. The runners view their daily running program on a mobile device before their run and don’t view the app again until they return.

The customer journey maps for these three users will look completely different, each with varying steps, challenges, and goals.

This example demonstrates how customer journeys for each persona vary and the importance of separately acknowledging each group’s needs, behaviors, challenges, and goals.

Stages of a Customer Journey

There are several key stages of a customer journey:

• Awareness: the moment someone becomes aware of your brand through social media, paid ads, word-of-mouth, etc.
• Consideration: customers research your product and compare it to others by reading reviews, comparing prices, and evaluating features.
• Onboarding: once customers decide to use your product, they set up an account and learn to use its features . If your product uses a freemium model, these people may be users before converting to paying customers.
• Engagement: customers regularly use and engage with your product, its features, and its content. During engagement , they often upgrade to paid services and make purchases.
• Support: customers may require support during their journey. Organizations must answer questions (customer service, docs, etc.), identify ways to streamline experiences, and reduce support queries.
• Retention & loyalty: when customers have positive engagement and support experiences, they will continue using the product and recommend it to others.

Touchpoints and Channels

Touchpoints and channels are points of interaction between a brand and its customers.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the interaction points between a customer and a brand, including physical, digital, and emotional. Some touchpoint examples include paid ads, social media posts, customer service interactions, and product experiences.

Channels are the mediums or platforms delivering these touchpoints–for example, social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), email marketing, ad channels (Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads), digital products, and physical locations (stores, service centers, events, etc.).

Organizations map these touchpoints and channels to identify areas for improvement and optimize the customer experience.

Emotions, Motivations, and Pain Points

Understanding a user’s emotions, motivations, and pain points throughout the customer journey is crucial, as these elements drive user actions and decision-making.

Here is a rough outline of how these core user elements relate to each other:

• Emotions: The feelings people experience at each stage of the customer journey, including excitement, happiness, frustration, disappointment, and anger. Designers use empathy maps to visualize these emotions across the customer journey. 
• Motivations: The reasons why people take action at different stages of the customer journey.
• Pain points: The challenges or obstacles customers experience during a customer journey.

By identifying these factors at each stage of the customer journey map, product teams can create solutions to reduce and mitigate problems while streamlining customer experiences.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

Select the appropriate format and tools for your journey map

The format and tools required for your journey map will depend on its complexity, level of detail, and available resources. Here are some tips:

• Consider your audience: who is the journey map for, and what are their needs? Do you need a high-level overview or a detailed step-by-step analysis?
• Choose a format: the level of detail will dictate the structure and medium of your journey map, including flowcharts, diagrams, infographics, and spreadsheets.
• Use tools: there are many tools for creating and sharing high-quality journey maps, including Lucidchart, UXPressia , Canva, Miro, Mural, and design tools.
• Find collaborators: identify teams, stakeholders , and departments that can offer insights and different perspectives about your customers to make journey maps as accurate and relevant as possible.

Collect and incorporate data from various sources

• List the touchpoints and channels customers will have with your brand for the specific journey, including website, social media channels, customer service, etc.
• Gather research data from customer surveys, user research, user interviews, analytics (product, social media, etc.), and other relevant sources.
• Analyze the data to identify patterns, trends, and behavior . The key is to find common customer pain points and friction across the journey.
• Create a visual representation of your customer journey, illustrating touchpoints and interactions and noting customer emotions, motivations, and pain points at each stage.

Visualize the customer journey in a clear and engaging way

Use your research to create a visualization of your customer journey. Start by sketching the journey and touchpoints or create a simple flow diagram mapping each step.

We recommend using customer journey map templates from Mural , UXPressia , or Miro to streamline the process and produce beautiful visualizations to share with your organization. You can even use a free whiteboard tool like Google Jamboard or create your journey map in a spreadsheet.

Recommended reading from UXPressia: Customer Journey Mapping Mistakes and How to Avoid Them .

Customer Journey Map Examples of Templates

Here are some customer journey map examples of templates that you may use at work or as an inspiration for your own visualizations.

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey maps are a visual interpretation from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand.

This whiteboard animation (and article) shows you how to create a Customer Journey Map.

Despite best intentions and mountains of data, many organizations continue to offer lackluster experiences for their customers.

Many organizations function with an internal focus, and that becomes apparent when customers interact with their various products, services and employees. Every interaction a customer has with an organization has an effect on satisfaction, loyalty, and the bottom line. Plotting out a customer’s emotional landscape by way of a Customer Journey Map, or Experience Map, along their path sheds ­­­­light on key opportunities for deepening those relationships.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A Customer Journey map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand, over time and across channels. Occasionally, a more narrative, text-based approach is needed to describe nuances and details associated with a customer experience.  The story is told from the customer’s perspective, but also emphasizes the important intersections between user expectations and business requirements.

Inspired by user research , no two journey maps are alike, and regardless of format they allow organizations to consider interactions from their customers’ points of view, instead of taking an inside-out approach. They are one tool that can help organizations evolve from a transactional approach to one that focuses on long term relationships with customers built on respect, consistency and trust.

All organizations have business goals but leveraging customer journeys as a supporting component of an experience strategy keeps customers (or members, patients, employees, students, donors etc.) at the forefront when making design decisions. They can be used in both current state review and future state visioning to examine the present, highlight pain points and uncover the most significant opportunities for building a better experience for customers.

How Do We Use Them?

Customer engagement is not simply a series of interactions, or getting people to visit a website, “Like” something on FaceBook, or download a mobile app.  Genuine engagement centers on compatibility, and identifying how and where individuals and organizations can exist harmoniously together. Giving thought to how your organization/product/service/brand fits into customers’ lives is crucial.

I also use journey maps to gain internal consensus on how customers should be treated across distinct channels. Holding collaborative workshops with cross-disciplinary teams mixing people who otherwise never communicate with each other can be extremely valuable in large organizations in particular.

Illustrating or describing how the customer experience could be brought to life across channels allows all stakeholders from all areas of the business to better understand the essence of the whole experience from the customer’s perspective. How do they want to be spoken to, what are they thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, and doing? Journey maps help us explore answers to the “what ifs” that arise during research and conceptual design.

What Components Does a Journey Map Include?

• Personas : the main characters that illustrate the needs, goals, thoughts, feelings, opinions, expectations, and pain points of the user;
• Timeline : a finite amount of time (e.g. 1 week or 1 year) or variable phases (e.g. awareness, decision-making, purchase, renewal);
• Emotion: peaks and valleys illustrating frustration, anxiety, happiness etc.;
• Touchpoints : customer actions and interactions with the organization. This is the WHAT the customer is doing; and
• Channels : where interaction takes place and the context of use (e.g. website, native app, call center, in-store). This is the WHERE they are interacting.

Nice-to-haves

• Moments of truth : A positive interaction that leaves a lasting impression, often planned for a touchpoint known to generate anxiety or frustration; and
• Supporting characters: peripheral individuals (caregivers, friends, colleagues) who may contribute to the experience.

The Process

1. review goals.

Consider organizational goals for the product or service at large, and specific goals for a customer journey mapping initiative.

2. Gather Research

Review all relevant user research, which includes both qualitative and quantitative findings to provide insights into the customer experience . If more research is needed, get those research activities in the books. Some of my favorite research methods include customer interviews, ethnography & contextual inquiry, customer surveys, customer support/complaint logs, web analytics, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

3. Touchpoint and Channel brainstorms

As a team, generate a list of the customer touchpoints and the channels on which those touchpoints occur today. Then brainstorm additional touchpoints and/or channels that can be incorporated in the future journeys you will be mapping. For example, the touchpoint could be “pay a bill”, and the channels associated with that touchpoint could be “pay online”, “pay via mail” or “pay in person”.

4. Empathy map

Empathy maps are a depiction of the various facets of a persona and his or her experiences in a given scenario. This exercise helps me organize my observations, build a deeper understanding of customers’ experiences, and draw out surprising insights into what customers need. Empathy maps also provide a foundation of material to fuel journey mapping. The goal is to get a well-rounded sense of how it feels to be that persona in this experience, specifically focusing on what they’re thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, saying and doing.

5. Brainstorm with lenses

The goal of lensed brainstorming is to generate as many ideas as possible in a short period of time. To gain focus as I generate ideas I use “lenses”—words representing key concepts, brand attributes or mindsets that help us look at a problem or scenario in a different way. For this exercise I recommend that the team agree on 3-5 lens words (for example: accessible, social, comforting), then set the clock for 2 minutes per lens word. Each person individually writes down as many ideas as they can think of in that time. After 2 minutes switch to the next lens word until all lens words have been used as idea inspiration. This ensures that every voice on the team is heard and generates a huge inventory of ideas.

6. Affinity diagram

This is a method to visually organize ideas and find cohesion in the team’s concepts. Affinity diagramming helps us shift from casting a wide net in exploring many possibilities, to gaining focus on the right solutions for this audience. All team members should put their ideas generated in the lensed brainstorming activity up on the wall. Have someone sort the ideas into categories and label them. As a group, begin to consider where you might combine, refine, and remove ideas to form a cohesive vision of the future customer experience.

7. Sketch the journey

Drumroll, please. This is the part you’ve been waiting for! It’s now time to put together all the pieces: timeline, touchpoints, channels, emotional highs and lows, and all the wonderful new ideas the team generated for how to improve the future customer journey. Get creative with how you lay it out—it doesn’t have to be a standard left to right timeline. It could be circular or helical. It could be one large map or it could be an interactive, clickable piece with embedded video. There are no templates, and there are infinite possibilities.

8. Refine and digitize

Journeys don’t always become a sophisticated deliverable—sometimes they begin and end as sticky notes on a wall or sketches on a whiteboard. But most of the time, when you go through the activities to arrive at a solid customer journey map, you want to polish it, leverage it in your work and share it with colleagues across the organization. If visual design isn’t your strong suit, consider collaborating closely with a visual designer who can transform the journey map sketch into an impressive artefact.

While journey maps are usually a tangible deliverable, like the one above, the process of journey mapping is what’s most important – it pushes us to think deeply about how we can use experience design to have a positive impact on our customers.

9. Share and use

It can be beneficial to maintain journey maps over time. For example, you could set a time each quarter or year to evaluate how your current customer experience matches your documented vision journeys. If your organization tracks quantitative KPIs, you can integrate these into a journey benchmarking process. Socializing journeys among stakeholders is critical in moving your organization toward action.

In addition to prioritization, the output of a journey map can serve as a backbone for strategic recommendations and more tactical initiatives.

For example, if you’re a mortgage company and you identify the closing process as a key area of frustration, anxiety and opportunity for engaging with the customer and designing for the “moment of truth”, then mark this as a high priority and get that on your strategic roadmap.

Schedule enough time to properly go through the recommended process. I’ve found that you can document a current state journey in about 3 hours, and a future state journey in about 5 hours. This makes for a full day to do both for one persona.

Make sure a good mix of people are involved in the journey map creation. It’s helpful to have stakeholder participants from many areas of the organization, as well as people of varying levels of seniority.

Once the journey maps are created, share them with zeal. Shout them from the rooftops and display them prominently in common areas.

Megan Grocki

Megan Grocki is an experience strategy director at Mad*Pow. With over 15 years of experience in research, experience design and strategy, she helps clients discover the expectations and behaviors of their audiences and identify opportunities for engagement. She has presented and led workshops at several UX, healthcare, and strategy industry events. In her spare time she is earning her master's degree in gastronomy with a concentration in food policy at Boston University. She hopes to leverage her design and strategy chops to educate the public about the connections between their health and what they eat, and use design to help affect changes in food policy at local, national and global levels.

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49 comments.

The post is incredibly good and very well explained. Well done Megan. Thanks UX Mastery for gathering this content and people.

Thanks Justin—I agree Megan did a great job explaining it, and we’re pretty proud of the resulting animation!

Keep an eye on the site as we tackle other UX techniques .

Megan – can you kindly post a better quality image to your final visual please – it certainly seems it will be worth reading your output. Good work!

That’s been done, Max.

Excellent Post Megan! Your process and explanations are easy to follow and very useful. I love the video too. I help people & groups as they through change and an early step in creating a compelling future is gaining a shared understanding of where we actually want to go. Techniques like the ones you’ve described here are so important to structuring the kind of dialogue needed to build that understanding! Thanks for sharing! -Steve

Great article, I agree with everything you’ve written. In my daily workflow, I use Mediatoolkit.com for media listening activities and I highly recommend it, because it enables me to be careful around the challenges you mentioned. :)

Great article Megan! As a Customer Journey Research provider from The Netherlands, it’s very interesting to read. The process and examples are well explained!

This is a really great article. It is well written and a step-by-step tool for mapping and exploring user journeys. The video is also excellent! Thanks!

Hey Megan!!

Just doing a little bit of research on customer journey maps for a talk and boom!! here you are!! This is very helpful information!!!

Great work. Thanks for sharing your methods.

Thanks for this article! However, several points are still unclear. For example – step 5) Brainstorm with Lenses. What exactly is the team brainstorming for? What ideas are we looking for? Shouldn’t the customer journey map be based on observing what frustrations and triumphs people have at each stage in the journey?

Similarly, I didn’t understand clearly how affinity diagramming fit into this process. Is it simply gathering and organizing all the data from research into potential steps in the customer journey?

Hope to hear from you soon! :) And thanks again!

Best wishes, Eureka UX Researcher at Piktochart

I had the same thought. I assume these are the steps for creating a future state journey map, not a current state.

Great post Megan! Thank you for the explanation and process mapping.

Thank you for your post and the video! We use it sometimes to explain our students in just several minutes how to build CJM. On step 4 we also try to identify mood (experience). And on step 10 we usually say “Iterate!” (: We also created a tool to create customer journey maps online – http://uxpressia.com .

Beautifully explained…Amazing how relevant this is for transporting your customer to a virtual world during a sales demo!

Hello Megan,

Very nice article & informative vide, ths for the share.

Regards, Ayman

Thanks for the great information. Very helpful and well-outlined. Much appreciated!

Love the intelligence and delivery. Off to put to good use hopefully! Thank you Megan.

Thank you for your thoughtful post. I’m finding that different groups in my company (engineers, sales, client services) all want and could benefit from user research assets such as personas and journey maps. However, they each prioritize different content. Do you happen to know of a tool that enables storing and maintaining a lot of content pieces (modules) about a persona and enables dynamic updating of “child” content? For example, if I tweaked the empathy map in the master, all the child artifacts that included the empathy map would be updated. I’d be happy to pay for a good solution, but have not found any. I also work on a mac… Thanks in advance for your help!

hi Megan thanks for your post being a student I have to create an assignment of a customer journey map of any service or any product can you tell me which software is to be used for this purpose.

Hello Megan for sharing extreamly good idea about customer journey map.Really Great Work.Keep it up

Thanks for brilliantly mapping the steps in visual form!

Excellent Megam, process mapping really well done.

Hey guys, what tool do you use Megan for the journey map? Can people recommend good free alternatives?

Great stuff… very helpful video.

1+1=3 Ger dig snabbt en bild av värdet i kundresan ur kundens perspektiv. vilka tjänster skall jag erbjuda med utgångspunkt från kundens resa

Well Done Megan! Great video.

One thing I’d maybe add for what it’s worth is the idea of interviewing Stakeholders as you begin the process. They can add some great ideas into what they perceive the customer pain points and relevant journeys to be. But more important than that, is that the Stakeholders will be more “bought-in” to your feedback when you present the final Journey Map product. That part is priceless.

Thank you for putting this together!

Hi, thanks for such an a valuable and insightful article. I’m just curious to understand more about affinity diagram. Could you elaborate more? From my understanding, I gathered that affinity diagraming is more of an activity than a documentation that requires a team discussion to gain consensus and categorize the deliverables from the preceding procedures into something more visual/documented? Could you elaborate more and point me in the right direction?

Trying to get in touch with Mad Pow Megan Grocki, does someone have her direct email address?

Thanks, Paul L

Some time has passed since we did that, but I think it’s still actual for the community. This year we’ve published a list of free customer journey maps templates here – https://uxpressia.com/templates . It is a pretty bunch of customer journey maps templates created for different business domains (including Healthcare, Travel, Banking, Telecom, etc.). All of them are based on the actual experience. You can download the template as PDF or start creating online map inside our tool based on that template.

All perfect and fine, but what I am always missing in discussions about user journeys is an overview of what we are ‘competing’ with. To achieve a touchpoint (meaning the client or user gives his or her attention to my app, or my service, or simply to me), what else is screaming for attention that the user then has to ignore.

I tried to discuss this here: http://www.expressiveproductdesign.com/competing-for-attention/

And did an attempt to create a template to help uncover the competition here: http://www.expressiveproductdesign.com/stickiness-creating-products-services-make-people-come-back/

Not sure if I am there yet. What do you think? Is ‘competition’ an issue in user journey mapping, and how do we best deal with this?

Great article!! In addition to all the pointers mentioned, would like to add the importance of CRM in regards to customer journey mapping. Traditionally retail stores, call centers, social media, and other channels were separately managed. However, now businesses cannot take the risk of handling these channels separately as it will result in a disjointed customer service.

Today the objective should be to have a broad single channel with multiple touch points. And that is only possible when all channels are merged.

Buisnesses who use a robust CRM software like ConvergeHub, Zoho or Infusionsoft are able to combine all communication channels to have a consolidated view of the customers and deliver consistent experience across all channels. So whether customers want to make a purchase, renew a service, or resolve a problem, they can do so in any of their preferred channels.

As the customers move across physical store, online e-commerce, social media and call centers, businesses can map the entire customer journey to provide a unified experience.

I dont see the highs and lows in the CJM?

This post illustrates well on this concept, thanks Megan, hope I have chance to translate the article into Chinese soon.

This is an awesome and very helpful post! Thanks for sharing these tidbits! I’d love to learn more.

This is immensely resourceful and precise. The nuances of user journey and the process explained in a lucid manner, keeping in mind the user journey of the reader. That’s a story within a story, using your technique to explain your technique. Thanks a ton, Megan. God bless!

Ditto. Very helpful, clear process to follow and great sample of the outcome. A watershed moment for me in documenting my own businesses CJM

Great post and video, thanks.

Wonderful post Megan

Great work, thank you very much!

Thanks for sharing, very useful post.

Thanks Kevin.

This is a really great article…concise with a great visual that really ties everything together well.

However, I struggle making these types of documents because of the abstraction. Frank isn’t real and the behavior pattern (the “journey”) has never happened. I know you pulled this from real data, but since I can’t tell what is real and what isn’t from this doc I am treating real behavior with equal weight to behavior you made up.

In fact searching for Healthrageous reveals a postmortem that admits they overbuilt and didn’t focus enough on market fit. This document fully embraces that admittedly flawed business approach…almost celebrates it. Do you think this document contributed to a false sense of security? Do you think it would have helped to surface more about what was real and what wasn’t, or is this document format more a symptom of this client’s approach than a cause?

Hi, I’am a trainee from Huawei Tunisia, i want to create a customer journey map and i’m looking for some examples of customer journey map for a telecom operator. Can you help me please with some design examples? I will be very grateful. Thank you.

This is a very informative document. I can’t wait to apply them. Thank you for sharing!

Thank you so much!!! Loved it:) Simple language & full of quality information:) Good job :)

Thank you so much its good

Hi, how to write the customer journey as a critical narrative. can u guide

Gorgeous 3-D Journey Map concept. Wish it was just a little less blurry!

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How to Create Effective Journey Maps: Learnings from the IxDF Course

A low conversion rate (below 2%) usually means a website struggles to keep visitors interested. Journey mapping helps identify why visitors leave quickly and tracks every step of a user's interaction with a website. The goal is simple: to create a smooth, enjoyable journey to make users return. Learn the secrets of journey maps with the IxDF course, Journey mapping . This course shows you how to pinpoint improvement areas effectively and how to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

Have you ever found yourself lost on a website, unsure where to click next? Frustrating digital experiences make us want to give up and leave. This is why journey mapping is so important. It's a strategic approach in UX design that lays out a user's path through a product or service. When you understand each step a user takes, you can create more intuitive and enjoyable experiences. 

In journey mapping, you plot a course to guide users from one point to another. This method reveals the pain points and moments of delight in a user's product interaction. When you smooth out these critical junctures, you can craft solutions that meet and exceed user expectations. 

“ Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.”    - Joe Sparano 

Journey mapping equips us with the insights needed to refine the user experience and create first encounters with your product, both positive and memorable. Since 94% of first impressions relate to a website's design, it’s critical to make an excellent first impression through a well-mapped user journey. A solid understanding of journey mapping principles can transform a confusing or mediocre user experience into one that’s engaging and seamless.  

To create seamless user journeys, you must understand the journey mapping process in detail. Look at the fundamental aspects you should explore to craft better digital experiences. 

Journey Mapping: The Essentials

Journey mapping enables teams to visualize the user's experience from initial contact through various interactions to the final goal. Let’s run through the basics.  

What is Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping creates a detailed visualization of a user's experience with a product or service. It maps out each step a user takes. It highlights their feelings, motivations and challenges. This process helps you identify pain points and opportunities to enhance the user experience. 

Watch Matt Snyder, Head of Product & Design at Hivewire, discuss journey mapping in UX. 

• Transcript loading…

Why Journey Mapping Matters

Journey mapping matters because it shows where users face struggles and frustrations. If you understand these issues, you can make your websites or services better. This means happier customers who are more likely to return and recommend the product/service to others. 

Consider the process users follow to book a flight online. The user's journey begins with the search for flights. Here, they might encounter their first obstacle: a confusing interface. This moment could lead to frustration. It may push them towards a competitor's website. Journey mapping would reveal this pain point and allow you to simplify the search process. 

Next, the user selects a flight. If the site bombards them with too many upsell options, like seat upgrades or extra baggage, it might overwhelm them. A well-designed journey map would highlight this issue. It may suggest a more streamlined and helpful upsell process, not pushy. 

Finally, the user reaches the payment section. A complex checkout process with unclear pricing and surprise charges can deter them from completing the purchase. Journey mapping pinpoints this critical moment. You may have to recommend a clearer, more concise checkout flow. 

If you map out this journey, your design team can: 

Simplify the flight search interface to reduce initial frustration. 

Streamline the upsell process to enhance the user experience without overwhelming them. 

Revise the checkout process for clarity and ease. You must encourage the completion of the purchase. 

Watch this quick video that explains the power of mapping. 

How Journey Mapping Improves UX

Journey mapping provides a clear framework to analyze and optimize each touchpoint in the user's journey. It allows you to: 

Identify and eliminate barriers that cause frustration or abandonment. 

Enhance features that users find valuable. 

Design with a holistic understanding of the user's experience. 

Journey Mapping Variations

Journey mapping comes in different forms. Each one offers unique insights into the user experience. These variations can help you apply the right approach to your UX challenges. You’ll learn about these variations in detail in our journey mapping course.  

Experience Maps

Experience maps are the broadest form of journey maps. They map out the overall human experience in different situations. You can use these maps for more than product or service interactions. Their goal is to get a broad understanding of human behaviors and feelings.  

For example, consider mapping the common experience of commuting. This could include various methods like walking or biking to public transport. Experience maps can help you spot common issues and chances for improvement. They prepare you for more detailed studies. 

Example of an Experience map for ordering a car through an app. It shows the actions, problems, emotions, quotes and opportunities that relate to the user.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps narrow the focus. They focus on how a person interacts with a specific product or service. These maps help us understand a customer's experience with a business. 

A customer journey map includes the following elements.  

Customer persona : This defines a typical customer. You create a character that represents a part of your customer base. 

Phases : Stages of the customer journey. It typically includes Awareness, Research, Consideration, Purchase and Support. 

Touchpoints : These are all interaction points between the customer and your brand across different phases. This interaction may happen through marketing materials, digital presence, staff interactions, purchase process and post-purchase follow-up. 

Customer thoughts, actions and emotions : Detail what customers think, do and feel at each touchpoint. Use surveys and direct feedback for accuracy. 

Opportunities : You list the chances to improve the customer's experience, solve any issues they face and make their journey smoother. 

For instance, with a music streaming app like Spotify, a customer journey map would show how a user finds, chooses and uses the app. It would point out their main steps and where they might have problems. 

An example of a customer journey map for a music streaming app. It tracks interactions from the initial visit to the response. It also highlights emotions and thoughts at each stage.

© Draft.io, Fair Use

Service Blueprints

Service blueprints build on what we learn from customer journey maps . Unlike journey maps, which focus on the customer's experience, service blueprints give us a peek into how the service works behind the scenes. They show how different parts of the service work together to support the customer's journey. 

The anatomy of a service blueprint showing all the key processes in different phases. (described below)

A service blueprint maps out five key areas: 

Physical evidence: This is anything the customer can see, touch or interact with, like a website or a product. It includes all the physical parts of the service. 

Customer's actions: These are the steps customers take when they use the service. The service needs these actions to meet the customer's needs. 

Frontstage: This area is all about what the customer interacts with directly. It's the part of the service the customer sees and uses. 

Backstage: These are the parts of the service that happen out of the customer's view. They support the frontstage but remain hidden to the customer. 

Supporting actions: These are the behind-the-scenes processes that make sure the service operates smoothly.    

The Role of Research in Effective Journey Mapping

You need comprehensive data—both qualitative and quantitative—to create an accurate and useful journey map. This process involves understanding the problems your users face and the potential solutions. Here’s an overview of key steps to collect the necessary information. 

Research Problems and Solutions

Identify the problems and opportunities within the user experience. You must look at the issue from two angles: the problem space and the solution space.  

In the problem space, you aim to understand the user's challenges, needs and pain points. You typically do this through qualitative user research , such as user observation and interviews. Quantitative methods like surveys can also contribute. You don’t need to consider the existing solutions.  

A straightforward perspective grid for a person aiming to become an expert drummer. This individual needs a clear path, access to drums and some instruction. 

In the solution space, you ideate potential solutions to problems you identified. This shift requires a creative approach. You aim to explore various ideas that effectively address users’ needs and evaluate those in usability sessions or A/B testing. 

A simple perspective grid for a Rhythm Road customer. This customer is between coaching sessions. They need help from Rhythm Road to remember to practice. 

Organize Your Research

A perspective grid helps you organize and synthesize the data collected from your research. You can use it to ensure the remainder of the journey mapping process proceeds smoothly. It allows you to categorize insights based on different user perspectives or personas . This step helps you understand the experiences and expectations of your user base. 

To create a perspective grid, list your user personas along one axis and the stages of their journey along the other. Fill in each cell with the Gaps/Barriers/Pain/Risks relevant to that persona at each stage. This visualization helps you identify commonalities and differences across the journey.  

How to Create Journey Map Variations

Each journey map variation helps you achieve specific goals. Let's explore how to create experience maps, customer journey maps and service design blueprints. 

How to Create an Experience Map

An Experience Map involves a five-step approach.  

Plan your experience map : Determine the scope. Decide who needs to participate in the workshop. Consider a cross-disciplinary team for better insights. 

Customer research : Gather factual data along with user stories and analytics. This step helps you fill knowledge gaps. 

Run the workshop : An all-day event where diverse voices collaborate. You must plan the event for productive outcomes. 

Create your experience map : Turn the workshop findings into a visual map. This map should outline general common experiences related to your field. 

Use your experience map : Apply what you learned to make decisions and improvements in your organization. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Follow these seven steps to map out the detailed interactions users have with your organization: 

Define your objectives : Determine what you aim to achieve with the map. 

Gather Information : Understand your customers’ behaviors, needs and how they interact with your product. 

Identify customer touchpoints : Note how customers interact with your product. Then, understand how these touchpoints affect their experience. 

Outline key stages of customer experience : From the customer's perspective, map the sequence of events. Document all events from initial contact to post-purchase support. 

Start mapping : Use diagrams or digital tools to visualize the journey. Include touchpoints, emotional responses and any other relevant factors. 

Validate your results : Get feedback from customers and internal teams to ensure accuracy. 

Analyze your map : Compare it against your goals to see if it meets customer expectations. 

How to Create a Service Design Blueprint

Service design focuses on the internal workings of a service. It outlines frontstage and backstage actions. Here’s how to develop a Service Design Blueprint:

Find support : Assemble a cross-disciplinary team and secure stakeholder buy-in. 

Define the goal : Set a clear scope and business objective for the blueprint. 

Gather research : Unlike customer journey mapping, a blueprint requires more internal research. It includes direct observations and employee interviews. 

Map the blueprint : Organize a workshop to determine the five elements encountered throughout the service delivery. 

Refine and distribute : Enhance the blueprint with contextual details. Then, distribute it to stakeholders to communicate the internal processes.  

The Role of a Journey Mapping Workshop (and How to Do It Right)

The effectiveness of journey mapping hinges on a detailed and well-organized journey mapping workshop. This is when teams work together to understand and improve customer experiences.

Here’s how to navigate the pre-workshop preparation and conduct the workshop. 

Before the Journey -Mapping Workshop

Preparation is key. Assemble a diverse team to bring a wide range of views. Prioritize the customer personas and scenarios you'll focus on to maintain a clear focus. Share existing research with all participants to get everyone on the same page. They should understand the journey's context. 

Build a Collaborative Team

Journey mapping thrives on collaboration. Include people from various departments to ensure a holistic view of the customer journey. Don’t forget to invite stakeholders who will decide on the final approach. This team will help you create the map and implement its findings. 

Prioritize Actors and Scenarios

Focus on specific customer personas and how they interact with your service. It helps you create a more targeted and actionable journey map. If you cover multiple personas or scenarios, plan how to manage this complexity. 

Share and Analyze Existing Research

Compile and review all data related to the journey. This may include user experience studies, marketing analysis and customer feedback. Share information before the workshop to help everyone understand the starting point. 

Assign Pre-Workshop Tasks

Assign homework to make the participants well-prepared. It includes background reading and key questions related to the journey. This pre-engagement makes the workshop more effective.  

During the Journey-Mapping Workshop

The workshop should be an active and engaging process. It starts with building a basic understanding. Then, you map the customer's experience and brainstorm ways to improve it. 

Establish the Foundation

You bring everyone on the same page to begin. Everyone should understand journey mapping principles, existing research and input methods. Use engaging activities like trivia to refresh key concepts and energize the group. 

Map the Current State

The team would create an assumption-based map of the current journey. This should reflect the team’s collective understanding. Offer attendees a template to identify pain points with ease: 

"   requires ______ to achieve ______." 

"   requires ______, allowing them to ______." 

For instance: "Bob requires an easier method to compare choices, allowing him to avoid feeling swamped."  

Note : It’s important to avoid using the first person , like "As a I want...". This format can be repetitive and time-consuming in documents full of user stories. It also shifts important information into sentences that make them harder to scan and understand. More importantly, you must not assume the user's perspective as that can lead developers to project their own experiences and biases onto users. 

Make the map open to revisions. Use customer interviews for this phase to validate assumptions and gain fresh insights. 

Vision the Future State

Use the identified pain points to brainstorm ideas to improve the customer journey. Encourage teams to think big and use metaphors in their ideas. This prevents them from focusing too early on specific solutions, like features. Sketch and critique potential future interactions to translate these ideas into tangible designs. 

You need the positive aspects on green sticky notes. You can mark areas for improvement on yellow ones. The critiques help refine the ideas.  

Now, merge the best elements from these individual sketches into a unified future-state flow. You can then share this consolidated journey with the whole workshop team. It will help you paint a picture of what the improved customer experience could look like. 

After the Journey -Mapping Workshop

The work doesn’t end when the workshop does. Quickly share the outcomes and next steps to maintain momentum. Further test and refine the ideas generated during the workshop. It’ll bring meaningful changes to the customer journey. 

Share Workshop Insights

Document and distribute the workshop's findings to all participants and stakeholders. This includes:  

The journey maps created 

Identified pain points 

Future state designs 

Keep everyone informed for continued engagement and support in implementing changes. 

Bring Ideas to Life

Translate the workshop's conceptual ideas into prototypes for user testing . This iterative design and feedback process helps refine the solutions into actionable improvements to the customer journey. 

Continuously Refine the Process

With each workshop, gather feedback on what worked and what didn’t to improve future sessions. This continuous improvement ensures that journey mapping remains a productive and insightful tool for your organization. 

This might seem like a lot, but if you want to learn about how to set up workshops, the journey mapping course can help you. You’ll learn how to:  

Increase understanding 

Create visions 

Guide evaluations 

Plan experiments 

Build a workshop plan 

About the Journey Mapping Course

Journey mapping is a 7-week course that will help you solve complex design problems with simple, user-friendly solutions. You’ll learn the right journey-mapping process for your goals and master data collection and analysis with a perspective grid. Create key journey maps: experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints. Gain skills to run a journey mapping workshop and turn insights into real solutions. 

This course will help you if you want to design smooth shopping experiences, easy signup flows or engaging apps. Start with journey mapping basics. Understand its power and role in UX design. Learn to identify, read and use various journey maps. Gain data gathering and analysis skills. Then, finish with the ability to create journey maps and lead workshops. 

Make sure to benefit from practical techniques and downloadable templates. Participate in three hands-on exercises in the " Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project. " These activities solidify your learning. They also offer an option to create a case study for your portfolio. 

Learn from four industry experts: 

Indi Young , founder of Adaptive Path, brings her deep understanding of data gathering in journey mapping. She wrote two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models . 

Kai Wang shares insights from his experiences at CarMax and CapitalOne. She emphasizes journey mapping's organizational impact. 

Head of Product & Design at Hivewire , Matt Snyder, presents journey mapping as an effective product development tool. He teaches the application of a perspective grid for smoother data-rich processes. 

Christian Briggs , Senior Product Designer and Design Educator, guides you through this course with his extensive experience in digital product design and journey mapping.  

This course caters to budding and intermediate designers eager to refine complex user experiences. It's ideal for:  

Aspiring UX/ UI designers seeking foundational design skills. 

Junior to mid-level designers aiming for advanced challenges and strategic team roles. 

Product managers focused on crafting intricate experiences. 

Join a global design community that shares knowledge. Collaborate, learn and grow with peers to enhance your design skills and career prospects. 

Course Overview 

Weekly lessons : We release each week with no deadlines. 

Learning time : Approximately 9 hours and 54 minutes over the span of 7 weeks. 

Where to Learn More

Enrollment for the Journey Mapping course is now open. It’s included in an  IxDF membership. 

To become a member, sign up here . 

Read our article Customer Journey Maps — Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes . 

Learn more about website conversion rates .  

Read web design statistics from WebFX . 

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What are Customer Journey Maps and Why Do They Matter?

A customer journey map is an excellent way to visualize how your users navigate your user experience. But what is a customer journey map, exactly? Let’s find out.

Customer experience (CX) has become quite a hot topic in the brand and product design field. While it’s still important to turn out top-notch products for a fair price, consumers are beginning to put more value in their overall experience with a company rather than how high quality their products are. This means forming meaningful long-term relationships with customers through thoughtful and smooth customer experiences.

Recent research conducted by Forrester, a well-known consulting and analytics firm, shows that customers will spend more money for a quality lifetime relationship with an organization rather than just an impressive product. Organizations that have a solid grasp on who their customers are and what they expect to achieve when interacting with the business, are more likely to grow their bottom line and reach company goals. One of the best ways to do this is to create a customer journey map.

But what is a customer journey and why should you map it out? We’ll answer those questions and more in this informative guide. Here’s what you can expect to learn:

• What is a customer journey?
• What is a customer journey map?

How are customer journey maps used?

• Why are customer journey maps important?
• Key takeaways

Ready to learn all about customer journey maps? Let’s get started.

1. What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the experience an established or prospective customer has with your company when trying to accomplish a certain goal. The customer journey takes into account every point of contact a customer has with a business, not just their interaction with a single product. For instance, say someone wants to find a way to learn French language quickly. Their customer journey would include their realization of the problem or goal, researching about the different solutions available to them, deciding on a product, using it, and discontinuing its use.  While the product-level interaction is an important step, the customer journey takes into account how the product was marketed to the customer, customer service and support experiences, the purchasing experience, all the way to the discontinuation of use.

2. What is a customer journey map?

Customers usually have a certain goal they would like to achieve when dealing with an organization or business. A journey map gives a visual depiction of the steps it takes for them to achieve that goal and how they felt about it along the way. Using journey maps allow businesses to take a walk in their customer’s shoes and accurately experience their brand as their users would. Often this helps identify gaps or pain points in the customers experience that the organization can then address and remedy.

A customer journey map can be made with pencil and paper, sticky notes on a white board, or displayed in an Excel spreadsheet. Some businesses will even incorporate meaningful graphics into their maps to help better visualize the customer journey. These maps may focus on a certain aspect of a customer journey like service and support or they may have a broader scope and look at their customer’s daily experience.

Here are examples of some different maps and templates:

CareerFoundry: Customer journey map template

CareerFoundry’s downloadable journey map template . You can also follow this 7-step guide to build your first customer journey map .

Hubspot’s This A Day In the Life template map via HubSpot.com focuses on consumer’s needs throughout the day.

This Preact map is a good example of a more traditional map.

This Starbucks customer journey map is very linear and prioritizes the customer timeline.

This map from UXPressia uses meaningful and memorable graphics to display the customer journey.

3. How are customer journey maps used?

Now that we’ve explained what a customer journey map is, let’s look a little bit further into who uses them, when, and how.

Who uses customer journey maps?

Since customer journey maps have such a large scope, their use spans a variety of professional titles. CEOs, company managers, UX/UI designers, and copywriters can all gain unique insight from customer journey maps. Designers may use them to understand where the user has come from before using the product and where they will go next while a company manager might be more interested in seeing how customer’s approach and move through the sales process.

When are customer journey maps created and used?

To make the most out of a customer journey map, they should constantly be being referenced and updated as a company and their audience evolves. However, the earliest you’ll see a customer journey map in use is usually after a business starts to have a solid grasp on who their customers are and what sort of steps they take when trying to achieve their goal. Customer journey maps are regularly revisited as a company grows.

So, once you’ve created a customer journey map, you may be wondering how best to use it. The main objective when creating a customer journey map is to keep the customer and their experience in the front of everyone’s mind. Many will choose to display customer journey maps in the workspace or ensure they are easily accessible to all employees. This way, all staff members can refer to it at any point in the design process to ensure the needs of the user are constantly being considered.

Be sure to keep your map research-based and up-to-date as well. If your map does not accurately portray the customer’s experience, it will be rendered useless. The best way to validate your results is by showing your map to customers and receiving their feedback.

4. Why are customer journey maps important?

The practice of moving through an experience as customers do helps businesses understand who their customers are and how they feel about their brand overall. These maps help create efficient work environments to create a brand that users feel happy to interact with as a whole.

Safeguards a brand’s promise

Looking through a customer’s eyes without bias can be difficult. Customer journey maps help compare what an organization may be claiming they provide to what their patrons are actually experiencing. Often, there can be stark differences between the two that, if left unaddressed, can have negative impacts on brand trust .

Narrows down the customer base

Along with understanding what it takes for a customer to achieve a certain goal, customer journey maps can also help narrow down exactly who a business’s customers are. Understanding your patrons is crucial to making sure you’re catering your services to the right people, in the right field, in the right way. Customer journey maps give a more personalized and complete picture of who businesses need to be reaching and connecting with.

Prioritizes the customer’s needs

One of the best ways to help customers succeed is to identify where their roadblocks may be and how to remove them. The visual nature of a customer journey map makes it easy to see what a customer’s pain points are and what can be done to move them along their journey with ease. Because journey maps look at the life-long relationship between customer and company, they give designers and businesses greater context when learning how to solve their customers’ needs.

Improves company communication

It can be common for consumers to express difficulty navigating between different divisions of a company. They may experience a great sales process but have trouble contacting support. Design tools that help all the different departments of an organization communicate effectively are almost invaluable. Customer journey maps help all sections of a company understand how their consumers move and what their goals are. This knowledge helps each department understand where the customer is coming from and gives them the ability to assist the customer along their journey by providing next steps.

5. Key takeaways

Understanding consumers through the creation of a customer journey map can help identify what customers need to have a positive overall experience with a brand.

While customer journey maps can provide deep insight into their customers’ experience, companies should be sure to combine this knowledge gained with other user research tools like empathy maps , user personas , and storyboarding. Used together, these design aids can help all aspects of a business create stellar experiences and products for their key audiences and consumers.

To learn more about how to craft great user/customer experiences, check out these articles:

• What exactly is CX (customer experience)?
• UX vs. CX: What’s the difference?
• What is user experience (UX) design?
• 11 Best online courses to learn UX design

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6 user journey map examples to enhance your ux.

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What is journey mapping.

User journey maps (sometimes called customer journey maps) detail how your users move through marketing and sales funnels.

That gives you a better picture of how users interact with your company. And that can translate to better UX and improvements for a ton of KPIs.

But there’s more than one type of user journey map. And they won’t all fit all companies. Each type of user journey map illustrates a particular dimension of the user’s experience. The six user journey map examples below cover all the high points so you can find the exact type you need. Read on.

1. Experience maps

Experience maps visualize the steps someone takes to achieve a desired goal, like buying a car or ordering take-out through a delivery app.

Experience maps are the simplest type of user journey maps. They’re all about tracking behaviors at each phase of a process from beginning to end. Experience mapping is an exercise that encourages you to think about users’ wants and needs and the potential actions they might take in a certain scenario. These maps are incredibly useful at giving you a general sense of the user's point of view before you get into the weeds with more detailed user journey mapping. Here’s an example of what an experience map could look like for a food delivery app:

Most customer experience maps qualify whether each individual step of the process is positive or negative. The simple design of these customer journey map examples makes it easy to determine the overall quality of a user’s journey with just a quick glance. 

That makes experience mapping especially helpful for working backward from a problem. Imagine users are subscribing to your product but not adopting it. You can map the interactions they had with your brand in reverse and identify if friction in earlier phases compounded your onboarding or retention problems.

2. Current state maps

Current state maps are a visual representation of how users engage with your product at every customer touchpoint. They’re the most common type of UX maps.

Current state maps help you think about customer satisfaction, mindset, behavior, and pain points when they use your app. Using this user journey example, you can constantly tweak your UX to keep users happy with your product.

You can translate what current state maps reveal into advocacy for change to your current UX. On paper, current state maps sound similar to experience maps. But current state maps dive deeper into the mind of the customer, attempting to give reasons for why the experience for the customer is good, bad, or neutral. 

Experience maps are good at pointing out bad interactions, but current state maps provide further dimensions to the analysis. For example, you would log when a customer interaction occurs on social media versus within the product itself. Relational database tool Airtable allows users to start on a free plan and upgrade to a paid plan when they need more records or storage space. Early on, the Airtable team realized their free version was beneficial to casual users. They also identified opportunities to monetize larger teams that had more complex organizational needs. As a result, Airtable has prioritized helping users determine what they need from a paid plan to successfully navigate this upgrade. 

A current state map would help remove friction points around this process. For instance, if the CMO at a startup is looking for a better way to organize their content team’s workflow, they might consider upgrading from Airtable’s free plan. Their journey might look like this:

Using this map, Airtable identifies the critical points in their user’s journey that can make or break their product’s success. For example, a user experiences friction when they can’t decide between annual and monthly billing:

By adding a “Save 17%!” message to the annual billing option on their pricing page, Airtable made it easier for visitors to make a decision about which billing cycle to choose.

3. Future state maps

Future state maps use the framework set up by current state maps and shift the focus to what’s next. Mapping the future state is all about designing an experience that does not yet exist—specifically, one that improves upon the current journey. Future state maps are like vision boards for your products. They help you envision how you hope customers will use your product and guide you to establish specific goals during the design process or at other touchpoints. 

Like current state maps, these types of maps help you to step into your user’s shoes for a bit. Do some future state mapping when you’re brainstorming ideas for a new product or when you want to map out the best-case scenario for one that already exists. Companies can predict behavior to a limited extent using existing digital metrics, computer learning, and a solid analytics platform. 

But no one can accurately predict the future. This means future state mapping is best considered a helpful exercise for guiding new developments—not as an absolute guide for planning business goals.

4. Empathy maps

(Source) Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along a user journey. Instead, these maps are divided into four sections and track what a user says , thinks , does , and feels when using a product. 

Empathy maps are usually created after user research and usability tests, where you have a chance to observe and directly ask someone about their experience with your product in real time. The development of empathy maps is critical to understanding your customer personas. Not every customer who uses your product will have the same motivations, needs, and pain points. This means users will experience the same product in different ways. Creating multiple empathy maps for different personas will help you to build a UX that’s positive for every kind of user your product attracts. Empathy maps are generally used to detail broader facets of a particular user group. Alternatively, you can focus on how a specific type of user performs a particular activity to reveal broader insights about your UX. 

Take this mock empathy user journey map example created in collaboration platform Miro :

Hypothetical user Mary needs to run and export reports on certain segments of users ahead of a round of A/B testing. She finds your product easier to use after your most recent update but still identifies points of friction that could be ironed out in the future. 

Zooming in on how a specific buyer persona performs a relatively routine task will help you highlight places for product improvement going forward.

5. Day in the life maps

Day in the life maps are all about narrowing in on users’ daily behaviors to gain insight into how a product can help alleviate a person’s pain points. They  visualize obstacles a user might encounter and address issues well before the user notices there’s a problem. While still working with the hypothetical, these maps emphasize practicality. You would build an empathy map to construct and inform user personas, but a day in the life map illustrates how these personas interact with your product at various points throughout the day. 

For example, if you manage a food delivery app, your customers are unlikely to engage with your product at 4 AM as they would during the dinner rush. People don’t use your products in a vacuum. They exist within the context of routines and responsibilities unrelated to anything ecommerce or SaaS companies provide for them. 

Consider a user who usually starts using your product around 10 AM. By the time they open your product, they’ve dropped kids off at schools, hopped onto video calls, and answered two dozen emails. They may be frustrated before your product has even had a chance to wow them. 

These insights help product teams develop products built for real-world usage versus isolated experiences.

6. Service blueprints

Service blueprints detail the individual actions performed by everyone involved in the delivery process—including the customer.   Service blueprints shift the focus away from customer centricity and toward how companies work to deliver products and services to their customers. 

By focusing on touch points across channels and departments, service blueprints reveal hiccups in business processes. They focus on the customer as well as the roles stakeholder like employees and customer support providers play in different scenarios. There are four major elements to service blueprints:

• Customer actions. What customers do when engaging with a service provider
• Frontstage actions . Employee actions that the customer sees
• Backstage actions . Everything that occurs on the backend, out of the customer’s view
• Processes . All of the events and inner workings of the organization that make the business work

Figuring out customer behavior is the first step in creating service blueprints, which makes them a logical bridge between more customer-centric maps and actual action plans. 

Your product team may identify a pain point in the user journey with a current state map and theorize how to eliminate the source of friction. 

You could move forward with the change and hope for the best. However, this isn’t recommended. 

Instead, create a service blueprint to understand how that single change might affect the delivery process at every stage of the journey and for team members in every department involved.

What defines a great customer journey map?

You’ve spent enough time analyzing user journey examples. Now, it’s time to create a user journey map of your own..

But what will make it great ?

In our experience, a few key traits will bring any user journey map from “OK” to “Oh, wow”:

• It’s tied to something measurable . Each stage of whichever user journey map you’re dealing with should be tied to relevant KPIs. That means assessing how your findings affect the metrics your company cares about.
• It uses your data . Not just broader market research. If you’re not doing customer surveys and other forms of customer data and feedback collection, start now. Blend that information with your market research. That way, you’re not just guessing what your users encounter, but you’re not taking every single one of their words for it, either.
• It doesn’t stop at the purchase . Don’t make the mistake that so many of your competitors do: stopping the customer journey mapping process after the moment of purchase. That’s incomplete data and says nothing about onboarding, retention, churn, and so many other critical SaaS metrics. Map the user journey from start to actual finish.

Use these guideposts and the wisdom from the examples we’ve discussed so far as you create your map, and you’re golden.

The best kind of user journey map: the next one

If we still relied on maps from a thousand years ago, we’d have a hard time getting around. Our collective knowledge base has expanded as exploration and mapping technology has improved. Similarly, choosing the right type of user journey map for your current needs is only the beginning. Once you’ve mapped out your user journey, you’ll need to identify how your awareness of the customer experience can be used to improve it. Even then, every customer pain point you address or every new flow you develop will alter the user journey.

In other words, user mapping is an iterative process. Tomorrow, your current state map will look like yesterday’s future state map. Your user journey map examples are just snapshots of a point in time—not a permanent state.

Instead of becoming complacent with a single instance of success, head back to the drawing board and identify the unforeseen ways your fixes impact your UX. Committing to this process will create a cycle of constant improvement that consistently places your customer’s needs at the forefront of your product’s development.

Build your user journey map in Appcues

You might be wondering—where should I build my journey maps? On paper, in a tool like Miro, or perhaps another dedicated tool?

Our take: do what makes the most sense for your team. That could mean building these user journeys directly in Appcues.

Our Journeys feature makes it easier than ever before. Now, you can effortlessly map out desired and actual in-product experiences, collaborate with your team, share, and align your cross-functional teams on the user experiences you want to create.

And here's the biggest advantage of mapping experiences in Appcues: any change you make to an in-app experience will automatically update on the associated Journey. Meaning less maintenance and more time for you to focus on building remarkable user experiences.

If you're intrigued, learn more about Journeys or start a free trial of our journey mapping software to embark on your own journey of building exceptional experiences.

The UX Designer’s Guide To Critical User Journey Mapping

10 min read

What is a critical user journey? Why is it important in UX design ? And how do you create and use one?

If you Google “critical user journey” to find answers to these questions, you’ll come across dozens of user maps, but nothing concrete on how to map a critical user journey.

In this short guide, we’ll shed light on what a critical user journey is and how you can map one that improves your experience.

Let’s dive right in.

• A user journey is a path a user takes to reach their goal when using a particular product.
• A critical user journey is a UX tool that maps out the key interactions between users and a product.
• There are two types of critical user journeys: the high traffic critical journey and the high dollar critical journey.
• The high traffic critical journey is the most engaged path, while the high dollar critical journey is the revenue-generating journey path.
• The difference between the critical user journey maps and user experience journey maps is that the former prioritizes different aspects of a customer journey over others, while the latter monitors the overall customer experience across every touchpoint and channel.
• Define the journey stage you want to map and use the pirate metrics to track the customer lifecycle at every stage of the user journey .
• Consider splitting the customer journey map between different milestones to focus on smaller paths that need optimizing.
• Use UX analytics to find unhappy paths causing a drop-off in user engagement and optimize to put users on the right happy path .
• The happy path is an error-free path, describing each step the user must take and the ideal outcome.

Replace empty states with demo content or messages to prompt users to take action and start getting value from your product immediately.

• Add a progress bar to your onboarding checklist to help users stay motivated and enhance the experience.
• Leverage small guidance tooltips, or hotspots at the right moment, to highlight important features on your UI.
• Identify a successful user’s journey path and replicate it by creating engagement loops to motivate new users to walk through it uninterrupted.
• Use a simple onboarding checklist to keep users on the desired journey. Make it more fun by converting it into a game .
• Want to build product experiences code-free? Book a demo call with our team and get started!

What is a user journey?

A user journey is a path a user takes to reach their goal when using a particular website or app. It’s the series of interactions the user has across different touchpoints in order to achieve something.

UX designers depict this tool as a diagram called a user journey map , to illustrate how a user moves through the sales funnel and engages with your product, highlighting points of friction and suggesting improvements.

A typical user journey starts from the awareness stage to the “ Aha moment ”, down to the activation and then the adoption stage, after which they convert to premium users.

What is a critical user journey?

A critical user journey is a UX tool that maps out the key interactions between users and a product. In other words, it’s a process that helps you visualize and drive focus on the most important parts of the customer’s journey, which have a direct impact on revenue or retention.

Creating a critical user journey is helpful for product teams. It reveals bad UX designs , which could lead to the loss of paying customers .

Types of critical journeys you should be looking into

There are two types of critical journeys that you can identify with UX user journey analytics . Both types are important, but when you’re looking to optimize certain aspects of your product journey map , consider which is more critical for your business.

That is the one that should require your attention first.

High traffic critical journey

These are the paths that a lot of users take when using your product. For instance, when users engage with the core features like completing an order or interacting with support.

When a product feature has high engagement, it means users find it valuable.

Ultimately, this results in an increase in product adoption and helps you decide what features to include in your SaaS minimum viable or minimum lovable product (MVP or MLP).

High dollar critical journey

These are revenue-generating journey paths. As the name suggests, it is the journey that generates the highest revenue. It’s the path that takes a user from trial to paid, or from activation to retention .

Critical user journey map vs user experience journey map

Most people confuse the critical user journey map and the user experience journey map as the same. After all, they’re both journey maps, but they have their differences.

The difference between the critical user journey maps and user experience journey maps is that the former prioritizes different sections of a customer journey over others, while the latter monitors the overall customer experience across every touchpoint and channel.

The critical journey is connected to a business goal. It is more focused on traffic or money, so paying attention to these is crucial.

Meanwhile, the UX journey map is built to map the entire experience and look into reducing friction overall.

Why should you map your critical user journeys?

As discussed earlier, mapping a critical user journey reveals emerging patterns in the user experience of new users and existing customers. It also helps to:

• Improve user experience : By mapping user journeys, you can better understand the pain points of your target audience to design a personalized experience.
• Decrease churn: An optimized critical user journey reduces churn by identifying friction points that impede users from having a great experience.
• Increase customer loyalty: A good experience makes customers like your brand, leading to repeat business.
• Drive alignment across your team: A company that maps critical user journeys will have individual team members working towards achieving a common goal.

Steps to mapping the critical user journey

Many product teams map user journeys at the initial stage and call it “a night.”

Unfortunately, this approach is wrong.

This is because mapping a user journey is not a one-time thing; it should be optimized continuously in order to drive improved user experience and business growth.

Here are steps to map the critical user journey:

• Define the journey stage you want to map.
• Define the particular user journey to focus on.
• Determine the happy path flow.

Define the journey stage you want to map

To define the journey stage you want to map, we use pirate metrics . In summary, pirate metrics is a framework that helps product teams track how customers are advancing through the lifecycles by looking at each main stage in the user journey .

For example, you can choose to map your critical journey in:

• The acquisition stage: Here, you might be looking at the signup flow and how it can be designed to create a frictionless experience.
• The activation stage: Here, you might be looking at improving the flow to the activation point.
• The adoption stage: Here, you might be monitoring the flow of feature engagement to product adoption .
• The retention stage: You might be looking at the flow for subscription renewal and upgrade at the retention stage.
• The revenue stage: This is where users spend more money on your product, including upgrading and adding add-ons.
• The referral stage: When users get to this stage, they become advocates for your product so you might be interested in driving word of mouth.

Define the particular user journey to focus on

If the customer journey has multiple touchpoints, consider splitting them up and focusing on smaller paths.

A user journey is difficult to understand, but when you break it down into smaller bits, you have a zoomed-in view that’s easier to read.

Start with the goal of the journey you are mapping.

Ask questions like: what milestones does the user need to reach? What is the path the user takes to get there? For instance, you could choose to focus on the initial “AHA moment” or secondary feature activation.

Whichever it is, this is the flow you will be mapping in detail.

Determine the happy path flow

The happy path is an error-free path, describing each step the user must take and the ideal outcome. Mapping this path for the journey you decided to optimize will reveal friction points and gives insight into exactly what actions can be improved.

Use different UX analytics to understand how users are engaging with your product and identify areas where they are not staying on the path. When you find these unhappy paths , use them to optimize the UX by keeping users from getting on them, to begin with.

How to optimize critical user journeys using user research data

Now that you have your critical journey path mapped, it’s time to optimize it. Whether this is a traffic or revenue path, you need to focus on identifying friction points and removing them to optimize the journey.

Here’s how to do it.

Use UX analytics to identify friction points

UX analytics gathers data on user behavior, helps you spot friction points, and gives you insights into potential solutions. With these metrics, it’s easy for product teams to focus on creating the right experience that meets user expectations while also increasing customer satisfaction.

What metrics should you track?

Feature usage analytics

Use feature tagging to understand which features customers use most and which features are neglected.

If engagement with specific features is an important point on the critical path, you should look into implementing different in-app engagement experiences meant to drive feature discovery and engagement.

Heatmaps analytics

Use heatmaps to identify what’s dragging customer attention on the UI and what’s being ignored. Pair this with screen recordings to get deeper insights. Then, analyze the ignored places and make changes to improve conversion rate optimization.

Heatmaps also help uncover bugs that might be stopping users from engaging with the product.

Funnel analytics

Funnel analytics help you visualize how a user flows through a buying journey. With funnel analytics, you can set up custom events to monitor different types of user interactions and figure out what steps cause friction.

Then optimize these specific steps to prevent churn.

Improve user interface feedback at critical points

The critical point in UX is the most delicate path where users make decisions. For instance, a critical point for any SaaS would be when a user fills in their payment details, wanting to upgrade to a paid subscription.

At this stage, a bad UX can turn them away.

By improving the user interface (UI) at critical points, you encourage users to complete their actions flawlessly.

Here’s how to do that:

Use empty states to provide guidance

Notion does this by using empty states as a chance to showcase several functionalities and engage new users. This helps them use the product to its full potential instead of staring at a blank page and eventually churning.

Use a progress bar

Introduce a progress bar into your onboarding checklist or signup flow. A progress bar helps users stay motivated and keep going as they can clearly see how far they are from achieving their goal.

It’s in human nature to finish a task when you know how much is still left.

Contextual guidance through UI feedback

UI feedback refers to short messages, prompts, UI color changes, and all the other elements that interact with the user in real-time as they engage with your product’s UI.

An example is when you click on a button and something happens, such as a message is displayed, a progress bar shows up, a new page is loaded, a notification about an error, etc.

By using small guidance tooltips or hotspots at the right moment, you help users interact with the product without friction and set the right user expectations.

Leverage these UI patterns to highlight important features while users ”walk” through your UI at their own pace.

Here’s an example from Slack. They use introductory tooltips to explain the main parts of their UI and show users where they can start.

Replicate successful user’s journey path

Analyze the paths and behavior of your most engaged users to determine the golden path. To put it simply, the golden path is described as important steps users must take to get the most value from their experience.

You can use segmentation to create user segments and understand how they are getting value from the product.

When you know your golden path, encourage the rest of your users to take the same path with in-app guidance.

Do this by creating engagement loops around these actions to motivate new users to walk through the entire path uninterrupted.

Use checklists to keep users on the desired journey

Since we have identified the ideal critical user journey, we can use checklists to keep them on the desired path so that they don’t take “unhappy” paths and end up churning.

Keep your onboarding checklist simple by breaking it down into mini-tasks. Include a progress bar to keep users motivated, or make it fun and convert it into a game .

Critical user journey mapping is a valuable tool that will help you structure the user experience of your product into a cohesive story that flows naturally from beginning to end.

More often than not, a product that lacks this sense of direction will struggle to engage users and retain their loyalty over time.

Want to build product experiences code-free? Book a Userpilot demo call with our team and get started!

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Creating User Journey Maps: A Guide

User journey maps help you harness empathy to gain valuable insights about your customers and product.

One of the skills you’ll leverage as a UI/UX designer is the ability to empathise with the people using the products you design. Creating user journey maps can help you harness that empathy and transform it into valuable insights about your customers and product. Take a closer look at what a user journey map is and why it’s an important tool in the UX designer’s toolbox.

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map gives a visual representation of a customer’s experience. This visualisation might cover a customer’s entire relationship with a brand or focus on a specificselect experience they might have while interacting with an app or website. No matter the type, user journey maps serve as a useful tool for understanding user needs and pain points that willand ultimately optimising user experience (UX). 

Why create user journey maps?

The main job of a UX designer is to make products intuitive, functional, and enjoyable to use. By creating a user journey map, you’re thinking about a product from a potential customer’s point of view. This can help in several ways.

User journey maps foster a user-centric mentality . You’ll focus on how a user might think and feel whilst using your product, as well as what goals they’re trying to achieve and what obstacles they might face along the way.

User journey maps create a shared vision for your company . This visualisation can serve as a reference point for different team members and stakeholders throughout the product development process. 

User journey maps can uncover the limitations of your product . Taking the time to map out how users interact with your product (and how they feel doing so) may reveal design flaws or new opportunities you hadn’t considered.

Types of journey maps

Journey maps can be as unique and creative as the products you’re designing. Whilst there’s not one boilerplate template for a user journey, you will find a few main types of these maps. 

A UX journey map focuses on the user experience of a specific product, typically an app or website. With these maps, you can understand how customers interact with your software and what they might find helpful or frustrating. This, in turn, helps you design software that’s simpler and easier to use.

A sales journey map follows the buyer’s journey through its typical stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. To maximise sales, marketing teams can use these maps to evaluate how customers interact with a brand across multiple communication channels.

A customer experience journey map offers a high-level view of a customer-brand relationship across time. A current-state customer journey map focuses on current customer interactions and how they can be improved. Future-state customer journey maps can drive innovation by imagining new customer experiences. 

Elements of a user journey map

As you map out user journeys, you’ll likely find ways to customise your maps to your particular company, product, and customer base. Search for user maps on the internet, and you’ll find various creative examples. But take a closer look, and you’ll find that many of these maps have a few elements in common.

Persona : What segment of users are you trying to understand (current or target)?

Scenario : What interaction are you trying to map out (real or anticipated)? 

Stages of the journey : What are the high-level phases of the scenario? 

User actions : What actions can the user take in each stage of the journey?

User emotions and thoughts : What is the user’s emotional state as they move through the stages? What are they thinking in each stage?

Opportunities : Where can you improve the UX of your product or connect with your customer in a more effective way?

Internal ownership : Which team or team member will be responsible for enacting these changes?

How to create a user journey map

We’ve outlined what a user journey map is, why you might want to create one, and what elements to include. Let’s go through the basic steps to creating your own user journey map.

1. Define the scope.

Creating a helpful user journey map starts with defining your goals. Ask yourself; are you mapping the journey of a new target user across the entire buyer’s journey? Or are you seeking to make a transaction on an app—transferring money, for example—more intuitive? Being clear on your goals can help give you more relevant insights once your map is complete.  

2. Build user personas.

Typically, you’ll want a different map for each unique user segment. Not all your customers will have the exact needs or ways of going about meeting those needs. Think about who your users are, and create a persona for each segment. This often starts with user research. User interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, and prior user feedback can help you develop these personas.

3. Define user goals, expectations, and pain points.

Once you have a better idea of who your target user is, spend some time thinking about what they want. What problem do they have that your product or service can solve? What expectations might they have as they begin their journey? What problems might they face, or what about your product might cause them frustration?

4. List touchpoints and channels.

The term “touchpoint” refers to the point of interaction between a user and a product or business. These touchpoints can occur across many different business channels, including websites, social media platforms, apps, ads, or face-to-face communications. Create an inventory of all the touchpoints and channels you’ve previously defined in the scenario.

5. Map the journey.

You’ve gathered the data you need to populate your map, so now it’s time to visualise this information. This is where you can get creative. Your map could be as simple as a timeline or as complex as a storyboard that shows visually what happens in each phase. You could take a low-tech approach with self-stick notes on a whiteboard or go digital with an Excel spreadsheet or software program.

Many common UX tools, including Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD, offer journey mapping capabilities. You’ll also find a range of dedicated journey mapping tools, such as UXPressia, Smaply, Custellence, or Visual Paradigm.  The UX research and consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group based in the United States offers a free template that could help you get started. 

6. Validate and refine the map.

Your user journey map is only as strong as it is truthful. Validate the map by moving through the user journey yourself. Usability testing, analytics, and user reviews can also help validate that your map reflects the user reality. Continue to refine the map as you discover discrepancies.

Other types of UX mapping

The user journey map is among many types of mapping tools UX designers might use throughout the design process. Let’s take a brief look at some of the others that can be used on their own or alongside your journey map.

Service blueprint 

A journey map illustrates the customer experience. A service blueprint maps out what goes on behind the scenes to deliver that experience. The former is customer-focused, the latter organisation-focused.

A user flow maps out the path a generic user takes through a website or app to a successful outcome. These often take the form of a flow chart and are not focused on specific personas. 

Empathy map 

This tool helps you understand a customer segment by mapping out what these users say, think, feel, and do. You may find it helpful to create an empathy map as part of Steps Two and Three above. 

Experience map 

This visualisation tracks the entire experience of a generic user as they seek to achieve a goal or satisfy a need. These maps typically look at a larger context to evaluate how potential customers solve their problems with or without your product.

Explore the components of user journey maps by enroling in the Google UX Design Certificate course. Learn about design processes, building wireframes and prototypes, and more in order to build a foundation in UX. You'll also have opportunities to explore user research methods and product testing to help you better understand your customers. Upon completion, gain exclusive access to career resources like resume reviews, interview prep, and career support. 

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