Journey Mapping: What, How and When to use Journey Maps
So what is a journey map?
A journey map is pretty much what the word says it is: a mapped out journey of someone’s experience. This so called “journey” visualises the relationship of a person with an organisation, product, brand or service over a specific time period and over various channels. It can refer to anything from buying groceries, to using a mobile subscription service, installing a TV or even a classical client — agency project experience. This mapped out journey becomes a visual tool, that helps us see nitty gritty bits behind a relationship and discover the emotions that people experience during a specific interaction.
Sounds good, now when do I use it?
Journey Maps can be used for pretty much any situation that you want to know more about. It’s a great tool for putting yourself into your customer’s shoes and finding out what they experience when they are engaging with you and your product. So whether it’s mapping out how your users interact with your newest shoe from awareness to purchase or the entire e-learning experience for a learner from login to completion — it’s up to you to decide what experience and which part of it you’d like to map out and know more about.
Ok, I know what it is, now HOW do I do it?
- What you’ll need: post its (don’t forget to use the ultimate post it life hack), sharpies or thick black pens, a long piece of paper to map out the journey (wrapping paper is great, because it’s endless), sticky tape and some team members to brainstorm with.
- Pinpoint the beginning and the end: You can make your journey map as complex or simple as you want, remember that it is a flexible, dynamic tool and it can shrink and grow endlessly. However it is important to define the start and finish of the journey you want to look at. Taking the shoe example, this could range from awareness through an e-mail newsletter to actual purchase or the journey can merely look the shop experience from entering to exiting.
- Do your research: Try gather a healthy mix of qualitative and quantitative data for your research. For quantitative information you can use website stats, social media numbers, secondary research and other data about your audience. Make sure you put in the time to gather enough qualitative research, you can do interviews with your customers, perform observations and much more. When we wanted to find out more about our client’s experience, we called them up and had quick phone interviews with open-ended questions. People like to talk, so don’t be afraid to ask.
- Create a persona: You might already have your persona before your research, or create one with the generated insights. Personas are important in order to really empathise with the person whose journey you’re looking at, by giving them a name and a face it’s easier to identify with them and find out what their pain points are.
- Start mapping: You know the beginning and end of your journey and you know the person who is going through the experience. Now you can add the “emotion scale” with a +/- and start mapping out the touchpoints and what the persona is seeing, feeling, hearing, asking, thinking at each point. Remember to think beyond your specific organisation. What else is going on in your persona’s life at the moment? What other products and services are they using? Look at how they switch between tasks, devices and places and try think of these gaps and mark them.
- Time to ideate: You’ll soon start seeing patterns, extreme high points and low points, now you can start brainstorming on ideas on how to change, enrich and diffuse certain areas and think of ways to engage your customers and add value to their experience.
- Share the journey: Leave your journey out for the world to see. Let it hang for a bit and revisit it. Share it with others in your organisation. Others will have a different perspective and maybe they have ideas or see something you’ve missed. We’re also big fans of co-creation, so why not show it to customers and see what they have to say about it and look at their reactions to your new ideas.
- Digitize your journey: Once you’ve got a solid journey you can digitize it with tools like smaply or realtimeboard. Also if you work in remote teams like we do, you can use a digital journey to work and collaborate on from the very beginning.
Ready to uncover insights?
As you can see a journey map tells a story and makes your customer’s experience visible. It uncovers each touchpoint and helps you discover underlying insights. It puts the user in the centre of your design problem and makes the highs, the lows of their experience with your product visible. In the end it can help you answer “what if” questions and be an aid to help you brainstorm innovative ideas for your next product, service or to improve your customer relationship.
I’d love to hear how your experience was with mapping out your user’s journey! Did you come across anything unusual? Did you manage to generate a new idea and implement it? Feel free to share your experiences here…
*This article was originally published in German on the Cleverclip Blog.
