Journey Mapping in Design Thinking

🗺️ Useful Customer Journey Maps (+ Figma / Miro templates) (https://lnkd.in/eQnd6K-c). Helpful guides and starter kits to design better journey maps ↓ ✅ We create user journey maps to visualize user’s experience. ✅ We start by choosing a lens: current state vs. future state. ✅ Then, we choose a user who experiences the journey. ✅ We capture the situation/goals that we are focusing on. ✅ Next, we list high-level actions users are going through. ✅ We define the first and the last stages, and fill in-between. ✅ You might start from the end to explore alternative routes. 🚫 Don’t get too granular: list key actions needed for next stage. ✅ Add user’s thoughts, feelings, sentiment, emotional curves. ✅ Add user’s key touchpoints with people, services, tools. ✅ Map user journey across mobile and desktop screens. ✅ Transfer insights from other research (e.g. customer support). ✅ Fill in stage after stage until the entire map is complete. ✅ Then, identify pain points and highlight them with red dots. ✅ Add relevant jobs-to-be-done, metrics, channels if needed. ✅ Attach links to quotes, photos, videos, prototypes, Figma files. ✅ Finally, explore ideas and opportunities to address pain points. ✅ Layer customer journeys to find frequent flows and map priorities. As Stéphanie Walter noted, often user journeys start way before users actually start interacting with our product — so always consider non-digital touchpoints as well. Users might even need to consult other tools and services as they interact with yours, so keep track on them, too. Personally, I found it remarkably useful to map user journeys against specific mobile and desktop screens that designers have been working on (Spotify model). Not only does it visualize user’s experience *in* the product — it also maps key actions to key screens that the teams must relentlessly focus on. More in the newsletter → https://lnkd.in/eQnd6K-c -- 👋🏼 I'm Vitaly Friedman, a UX lead who loves design, usability, writing, checklists and running UX workshops. You can find some useful UX resources in the “Featured” section in my profile and in the Smart Interface Design Patterns video library (https://lnkd.in/d4CNaTxR). Thanks for reading, everyone! 🥳

Are you generating enough value for users net of the value to your company? Business value can only be created when you create so much value for users, that you can “tax” that value and take some for yourself as a business. If you don’t create any value for your users, then you can’t create value for your business. Ed Biden explains how to solve this in this week's guest post: Whilst there are many ways to understand what your users will value, two techniques in particular are incredibly valuable, especially if you’re working on a tight timeframe: 1. Jobs To Be Done 2. Customer Journey Mapping 𝟭. 𝗝𝗼𝗯𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲 (𝗝𝗧𝗕𝗗) “People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.”  – Clayton Christensen The core JTBD concept is that rather than buying a product for its features, customers “hire” a product to get a job done for them … and will ”fire” it for a better solution just as quickly. In practice, JTBD provides a series of lenses for understanding what your customers want, what progress looks like, and what they’ll pay for. This is a powerful way of understanding your users, because their needs are stable and it forces you to think from a user-centric point of view. This allows you to think about more radical solutions, and really focus on where you’re creating value. To use Jobs To Be Done to understand your customers, think through five key steps: 1. Use case – what is the outcome that people want? 2. Alternatives – what solutions are people using now? 3. Progress – where are people blocked? What does a better solution look like? 4. Value Proposition – why would they use your product over the alternatives? 5. Price – what would a customer pay for progress against this problem? 𝟮. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 Customer journey mapping is an effective way to visualize your customer’s experience as they try to reach one of their goals. In basic terms, a customer journey map breaks the user journey down into steps, and then for each step describes what touchpoints the customer has with your product, and how this makes them feel. The touch points are any interaction that the customer has with your company as they go through this flow: • Website and app screens • Notifications and emails • Customer service calls • Account management / sales touch points • Physically interacting with goods (e.g. Amazon), services (e.g. Airbnb) or hardware (e.g. Lime) Users’ feelings can be visualized by noting down: • What they like or feel good about at this step • What they dislike, find frustrating or confusing at this step • How they feel overall By mapping the customer’s subjective experience to the nuts and bolts of what’s going on, and then laying this out in a visual way, you can easily see where you can have the most impact, and align stakeholders on the critical problems to solve.

You don’t have to be an expert to map out a customer journey that makes sense. Believe it or not, creating a customer journey map is less about fancy tools and more about genuine insights. Here’s a quick guide: 1. Develop your customer profile. Get to know your customers better by looking at data from surveys, interactions, and social media. Build a detailed profile that truly captures their needs and behaviors. 2. Chart the customer lifecycle. Map out the journey from the first time they hear about you to when they make a purchase. Get to grips with what drives them forward or holds them back at each stage. 3. Sync goals with customer expectations. Make sure what you're offering matches up with what your customers are hoping to achieve at each step of their journey. This boosts both satisfaction and loyalty. 4. Identify key touchpoints. Find out where your customers interact with your brand across different platforms. Make these interactions as meaningful and consistent as possible to keep them engaged. 5. Evaluate goal fulfillment. Keep checking to see if your customers are reaching their goals. Use their feedback to fine-tune your approach and improve how you connect at each touchpoint. By putting these steps into action, any business can revolutionize the way it engages with customers, creating richer experiences and driving better results. What strategies have worked for you, or what hurdles have you faced? #customer #journey #business

How many of you use Journey maps AND Storymaps in your work? Definition below. Journey maps are about understanding - they document what users currently experience, often with emotional highs and lows, pain points, and touchpoints across their entire interaction with your product or service. They're diagnostic tools to build empathy and spot problems. Story maps are about building - they organize what you're going to create, showing the backbone of user activities horizontally and slicing them vertically into releases. Patton's whole point was to keep the user's workflow visible while you prioritize and plan iterative delivery. The core difference: Journey maps look at the current state to find opportunities. Story maps organize future work to maintain coherent user flow across releases. In practice, you'd use a journey map to discover that users struggle with onboarding, then use a story map to plan how you'll build better onboarding across sprints while making sure you don't lose sight of the complete workflow. Journey maps can span multiple products and channels (they might go to your website, call support, use the app). Story maps are bounded to what your team is building.

One of the standout talks for me at UXPA Amsterdam last week was Andrew Schall’s “Building the Bridge – How to Connect Current and Future State Journey Maps.” Andrew leaned into a Wizard of Oz metaphor, where the Emerald City represents the future-state vision—and journey mapping is how your team gets there. (The next time you need to represent your diverse stakeholders, may I suggest a Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, and a couple of witches? 🤣 Honestly, feels like the perfect cast to represent the stakeholders we all juggle!) Here are a few things that stuck with me: 🟢 Right altitude = right alignment I often talk about levels of zoom when mapping: Macro (high-level, end-to-end journeys) vs. Micro (focused on a specific feature or interaction). Andrew frames this as Altitude and recommends working at the mid-altitude level for both current state & future state maps. It’s the sweet spot: detailed enough to drive action, high-level enough to align teams. 🟢 Journey mapping is a team sport Andrew and I share the belief that mapping is most effective when done collaboratively—because each character (yes, back to the Wizard of Oz!) brings a different perspective. 🟢 Quant + Qual = a richer map In addition to grounding the journey in qualitative insights, Andrew incorporates Experience Quality Scores (EQS)—a composite of attitudinal and behavioral data that reflects the quality of a user’s experience across both individual moments and the full journey. Scores range from -5 to 5, with zero as the baseline. (see photo) 🟢 Alignment on next steps + ownership are essential Andrew uses the MoSCoW framework (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) to prioritize opportunities in workshops. (Link to more info in comments.) We also agree that workshops must end with concrete next steps—not just a list of ideas. As Andrew put it: “No one leaves the room until there’s commitment to do those things.” 🟢 Define success for the future state As teams envision the future state, Andrew encourages articulating clear success indicators. He uses a UX KPI canvas to help stakeholders define both attitudinal and behavioral signals of success. (see photo) I was especially excited to see how ServiceNow is operationalizing journey mapping—not as a one-off deliverable on a couple of teams, but as a strategic tool for aligning teams from understanding the problem space all the way through delivering solutions. Seems to me they’re way ahead of the curve with this way of working. Is your company also operationalizing journey mapping? I’d love to connect. I’m always on the lookout for great case studies for my course Best Practices for Journey Mapping. Want to learn more? Andrew is teaching a Persona & Journey Mapping Masterclass starting July 7—or check out his book on Amazon. (Links in comments.) #UXPA2025 #JourneyMapping #ServiceDesign #UXResearch #OperationalizingUX #ExperienceStrategy