Journey Map

What is a journey map?

Journey mapping helps you understand, record and share the experience of a person using your service. It is the process of creating a visual representation of your user steps using one or multiple services.

Journey mapping is a powerful tool to visualise complex journeys and is key to understanding user's needs, emotions, challenges and opportunities.

Why use a journey map

Understanding your user’s 'journey' through your service helps: 

  1. Structure conversations with your users - the map tool itself provides a guide 
  2. Show your service as your users experience it, demonstrates their agenda and the challenges they face in achieving what they need from you. 
  3. Avoid pre judging what you should be exploring - helps you find problems and opportunities that are important in the day to day experience of your user.  
  4. Show the challenges or opportunities in context of the whole experience, you can see implications of any changes you might make on the full user journey. Helps you focus on the right changes at the right points. 
  5. Uncover frustration and work arounds ready to be resolved while pointing to things that work well and should be supported. A journey can also highlight opportunities to improve or change things for the better. 
  6. Collect suggestions for improvement from your users. 

When to use a journey map

Before the interview:

  • Create a Conversation Guide to help you lead the interview
  • Print the Conversation Guide
  • Print the Event Cards

During the interview:

  • Use the Event Cards to help you capture data
    • As it is often difficult for people with lived experience to remember when some things have happened, you can cut the Event Cards sheets so participants can move things around
  • Take verbatim notes and quotes

After the interview:

  • Organise your Event Cards and take a photo to capture their order
  • Choose one of the journey map templates in the package
    • Reflect on the themes that came out in the interview and what information you want to highlight
  • Create your journey map

Download Event Cards

How to use this tool

There are many ways to approach journey mapping and to visualise a user's journey. We included some templates to get you started, but they are not prescriptive.

It is important to take a moment to think about the purpose of your journey map and what information you'd like to highlight.

 

Examples from practice

Hints and tips

  • When you don't have direct access to service users, you could use personas to help you complete the chart then check your understanding for accuracy and gaps
  • Draw out the emotional experience of users as you work across the chart
  • Use the data from multiple Journey Maps to create a full picture of the user experience and to inform an ideal user journey