🧰 Design Methods Toolbox

# Journey Map

# Phase: 🔎 Problem seeking
Focus: Empathize

IN BRIEF

Time commitment: 1 day (though allow time for iterations)
Difficulty: Easy/moderate
Materials needed: A collaborative space (physical or virtual), drawing or spreadsheet tools (stickies may be helpful for moving things around as the map develops)
Who should participate: User experience designers, project/product owners, developers, community specialists
Best for: Getting a bird's-eye view of the steps, sequences, frustrations and feelings that make up your user's interactions with your product

# About this tool

Journey mapping is a helpful tool when you're ready to outline stepwise the major interactions a user makes with your product or service, but you don't yet need to go into too much detail. In addition to enumerating concrete interactions and putting them in order, it also opens up the opportunity to discuss how users may feel about those interactions. Like many of the tools in this toolbox, it can go into as much detail as required, and can also be expressed in a number of ways: as a diagram, overlaid against a storyboard or other means of mapping out user interactions sequentially, or simply laid out in a table — instructions for which are as follows:

  1. Create a table in which your columns will be types of users (or personas and your rows the activities or steps those users take.
  2. Gather the steps or behaviors those users must take in order to reach their end state. If some steps/behaviors are common to multiple personas, note that as well; it can help indicate frequency or overall importance.
  3. Order the steps/behaviors in the table by persona, ideally grouping into phases or stages of activities if those exist.

If you're looking for something a bit more complex, consider migrating your original table into a task flow analysis (opens new window), which is a boxes-and-arrows flowchart of tasks that can also indicate branches, dependencies and other points of interconnectivity between different user journeys.

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