The Customer Journey Map

What is the best way to understand customer pain points during the process of purchasing an item on a shopping site? Or the problems users face while signing up for the company weekly newsletter online? One main way to discover how to deal with these issues is through a customer journey map. A journey map helps designers look at the entire flow or journey of the process a user might go through while completing a task or reaching a goal.

Customer journey mapping is a powerful way to picture the customer experience in total. The complete user experience is represented and visualized in a map with its many different dimensions in one deliverable. It is a fantastic tool for identifying insights, opportunities for innovation, and potential frustrations. They are versatile representations of a current or future state of the user experience with or without a solution. Journey maps can show a portion or one part of the user experience or the entire from beginning to end and anything in between.

A customer journey map takes many forms but typically appears as some type of infographic. Whatever its form, the goal is the same: to teach organizations more about their customers.

Conceptboard

How and Where to Start

A customer journey map starts by learning about your users. Many organizations will already have some of this data available from previous inquiries and designers will need to research that past data. It is helpful to gather existing data to see what is still relevant and what needs change. From this point, a journey map can take on many different forms but should contain some main elements.

1. A persona or specific user experience
2. A situation with a sequence of events combined with an end goal or expectation
3. Stages of the journey through a particular scenario
4. Behavior, Mentality, and Emotions involved as the user goes through the journey
5. Optimizing the experience through insights and opportunities

In conclusion, customer journey maps have a number of benefits. Designers are able to explore the user experience from beginning to end. Look at each phase of the journey in more detail if needed, and find opportunities for improvement. Examining multiple angles of the journey helps the designer work to improve the overall experience for each user. Emotions and expectations or considered when looking at pain points and then solutions are formulated. In the end, everyone in the process from designers to developers and marketers has an artifact to explore that helps demonstrate the user journey to stakeholders.