Journey Mapping Resources

Journey maps are stories of how your users or customers interact and engage with your product. Typically, a journey map includes the user experiencing a problem, searching for a solution, coming across your product as the solution, using your product, and ultimately having their original problem alleviated.

Download a free design thinking workshop. This workshop download includes a PowerPoint, printable assets and brainstorming guides, activities to facilitate meaningful conversations, and special presenter notes to help guide you through administering the workshop. The workshop is designed to work for both small tight-knit teams and large interdepartmental organizations.

A user empathy map is a visual tool for product developers who want to gain a deeper and more personal understanding of a certain subset of users. A standard user empathy map focuses on what the user says, thinks, does, and feels throughout their engagement with your product or service process. User empathy maps should be created and analyzed by your team in order to form a consensus on how they believe their users react emotionally to certain aspects of their product.

User Centered Design (UCD) is an iterative practice in which user needs, data, and feedback are continually incorporated into the product design process. The goal of UCD is to tailor your product around the real requests of the user base. It's easy to get caught up in a long term company plan or vision and lose sight of who will really be the judge of your product: the users.

Agile Development is an approach to software development that focuses on rapid feature rollouts with constant iterations based on interdepartmental consultations and user feedback. It is a project management framework that is based on incremental developments with each stage in the process being tested, and basing the next iteration or product pivot on the feedback or results of the end users.

User Experience mapping, also known as UX mapping, is the process of creating step by step visual flows of experiences users have with your product while trying to achieve a certain objective. For most products, there isn't a singular pathway to achieve a goal. Think of it as if you're a restaurant owner. All customers coming into your restaurant are hungry and want food. Some want pasta, others want a sandwich, or some might just want a drink. Though their end goal may be similar or the same, the flow and path they take to achieve their goal can be radically different. A UX map is a depiction of the user interacting and engaging with your product until they achieve this goal.

Customer Journey Mapping is the practice of creating flows to show how customers will interact with your product or organization when trying to complete a certain objective. That objective could be trying to contact a customer service rep, implementing software into an existing system, requesting a refund or account upgrade, or a full cycle process such as product discovery to trial to engagement to purchase. Any actions or objectives your customers or users are aiming to achieve can be journey mapped to fully understand their process.

Journey Maps are narrative stories of your users that allow you to see how a customer may have a need for your product, how they would come across your product, and how your product can benefit them. Creating these maps lets us realize where we may have flaws or gaps in our marketing strategy or use case scenarios. Having a real and relatable customer story allows us to come up with the most logical solutions for our problems.

Customer Journey Maps are narrative stories of your users that allow you to see how a customer may have a need for your product, how they would come across your product, and how your product can benefit them. Creating these maps lets us realize where we may have flaws or gaps in our marketing strategy or use case scenarios. Having a real and relatable customer story allows us to come up with the most logical solutions for our problems.

Using personas for product development is extremely helpful, but you already know that. Sometimes the hardest part about using personas is getting your coworkers to start using them as well. This free persona packet provides easy, relatable, printable persona resources that inspire productive persona brainstorming sessions. You can print these resources and share them with your team, or create your own personas from scratch. Either way, you can start incorporating personas into your product development process today!

Customer Journey Maps are narrative stories of your users that allow you to see how a customer may have a need for your product, how they would come across your product, and how your product can benefit them. Creating these maps lets us realize where we may have flaws or gaps in our marketing strategy or use case scenarios. Having a real and relatable customer story allows us to come up with the most logical solutions for our problems.

Customer Journey Mapping is an extremely effective way to "walk a mile" in your prototypical customers' shoes. Start your map by focusing on a particular problem the customer is having. Acknowledge that this problem exists, and look for ways to solve it. By the end of your map, you should know how your product improves the customer's quality of life and gets rid of their problem. That becomes your sales pitch.

This is the fourth part of our Illustrated Guide to Product Development series. Part of product development is understanding your customers. Customer Journey Mapping is the process of looking at the end-to-end series of events that make up the entire story of before your product/service, using your product/service, and after. These maps can become quite long and involve many actors or personas. They may not even be linear. By examining these different customer journeys, it is possible to identify key use cases that your product/service needs to do incredibly well. This should include anything that is currently causing a lot of customer grief (often for no good reason), and use cases that really improve the core product offering.