Journey Maps: More than Office Wall Art

Defining the Customer and Problem Context

It’s a familiar story – your business wants to become more “customer-centric” and someone cleverly suggests, “Create a journey map!” Your team spends an entire day in a workshop, sometimes with a graphic facilitator, drawing out what you think is a journey map. You proudly hang it up on the wall so that everyone in the office remembers to keep the customer in mind. It’s big, it’s beautiful… and it sits untouched for months. It’s really cool wall art for the office, but what’s the point?

Human-centered design and customer-centricity are buzzwords that are often talked about but not always thoughtfully implemented into the business. Journey mapping exercises are thought of as an “outside” activity to regular operations. But in order to maximize the value from these exercises, journey mapping should be a process that is embedded into the inner workings of the business. There isn’t a single journey map that describes your customers’ experience. A journey map will look different depending on the problem you are trying to solve and the context of that problem space. Journey mapping is a problem-solving process that helps your team unlock new opportunities of exploration.

Before going into a journey mapping exercise – identify what issues you are facing as a business. Define the problem area you’d like to address and keep this problem area in mind as you set the stage for the journey map. For example, let’s say you are an e-commerce site that is experiencing a slowdown in sales. You may use data to help narrow down problematic areas of the funnel, such as conversion from site visit to sale.

Then, state a definitive goal you would like to achieve from the journey mapping process. Perhaps it’s: “Improve current state of the online purchase experience” or “Understand barriers in customer discovery” or “Develop innovative offering that improves loyalty”. Whatever it is, make it clear and specific. With this objective in mind, you will create a current state journey map to understand the underlying human behavior and context that is driving the problem.

But first, you absolutely must go out and talk to real people. That doesn’t mean sending out surveys and collecting responses on a Likert scale. I’m talking face-to-face conversations of 30 minutes or more. Observe people making purchases on the website without guidance from you, ask them to describe thoughts and feelings at each step of your experience, identify their desires and motivations outside the context of your product or offering. Of course, you can always get started making an assumptive map, but these need to be validated with real customers and should definitely change.

We do all of this because the most important piece of a journey map isn’t simply the process a customer takes make a purchase on your website. We want to know who we are solving for (i.e. which type of customer) and why they take certain steps- those underlying needs and desires that drive them along each step. And the only way to get that kind of information is to deeply understand customers through real conversation. I’m not saying that surveys aren’t important or useful (they are!), it’s just that they don’t paint a complete picture. It’s amazing what can be revealed in a synchronous, real-time conversation that simply can’t be captured in a survey.

Make the Journey Map Meaningful

Unfortunately, many journey maps I’ve seen look like simple process flows of the steps a user takes to reach a desired business outcome, with no further information. While these flows are likely correct, they aren’t helpful or meaningful in any way.

First, it is absolutely crucial that the desired outcome is one from the customer’s perspective. For the business, the desired outcome might be: “make a sale”. From the customer’s perspective it might be: “find jeans that fit my body type” or “find jeans that fit my budget”.

Second, a journey map is more than just a process flow. It should include the customer’s perception of their own experience and the value they are extracting- that is, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling? Take all of the great data you collected from customer conversations to describe these details. It should also include the channels through which that value is being extracted – what are the touchpoints and environments supporting the experience?

Thirdly, insert data into your map. This may be reviews, verbatims, or other qualitative evidence you may have to illustrate customer’s thoughts and feelings. It can also be quantitative data such as customer service, business performance, or cost and revenue data that are associated with different parts of the customer experience. This data is needed to support and drive future actions.

And finally, be sure to maintain focus and the right level of detail. As you decide what to include or not include in the journey map, continually refer back to the goal that you defined in the beginning. Are the details you are focusing on getting you closer to that goal?

Example User Journey by Bhavani Sp via Behance

Take Action with Journey Maps

As you are mapping, be sure to identify the most important moments of truth- or interactions with the customer that will make or break a customer’s inclination to choose you over an alternative. The quantitative and qualitative data helps point you towards these moments. Business objectives and intuition can help your team prioritize the ones that need immediate attention. There should be obvious and clear actions that your team is ready to tackle.

It’s important to delineate all the processes, tools, and people that support the moment(s) of truth you are focusing on. This connects the underpinnings of your business to the customer’s perception and will reveal instances of cohesion or incoherence. It’s helpful to start making your map in physical world with butcher paper and post-it’s so you can move things around on the fly. But once you start adding more detail, it is helpful to create a digital version that is easily shared.

Finally, it’s time to move on to the best part – ideate solutions, prototype and test them with users, and design the future state map. Share the maps throughout the organization. Train employees on updated processes and how they influence the customer journey. Bring customers in on the changes and get feedback. Journey mapping should be a starting point, an impetus for change. The process should produce very real, tangible outputs if done the right way.

More Resources:

Designing a Journey Map? Consider These Tips, IDEO

Don’t Make A Journey Map, by Shahrzad Samadzadeh

You Aren’t Journey Mapping, by Annette Franz CX Journey

The views in this article are purely my own. In no way is this article related to, informed by or endorsed by my employer.