customer journey and user journey

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Customer Journey Design
Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

Buyer's Journey Template
Future State Template
Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

How did you hear about our company?
What first attracted you to our website?
What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

Social channels.
Email marketing.
Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

Customer journey map meeting to improve the customer journey experience

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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A comprehensive guide to effective customer journey mapping

A brand's user experience shapes its target audience's entire perception of your organization. Maximize audience engagement with customer journey mapping.

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Incorporating customer journey mapping into your web design process helps elevate consumer engagement to drive loyalty and sales.

Many in-house teams and web designers strive to better serve users by optimizing their customer experience (CX). Considering how your customers use your platform or service helps you see your website from a user perspective, letting you shape your design to better meet their needs. To achieve this, web designers can look to customer journey mapping.

A particularly handy tool for user experience (UX) design , this process helps teams understand who their users are and how to fulfill their expectations, guiding development decisions for improved audience engagement. Learn more about customer journey mapping and how you can implement it to enhance your CX.

User journey mapping: an overview

User journey mapping, also known as customer journey mapping (CJM), maps a website visitor's experience from their perspective. Presented through a visual diagram, the customer journey map charts the user’s path as they seek information or solutions, starting at the homepage and tracking their routes across other menus and links.

To create a customer journey map, you begin by researching who users are, what they want from your site, and how positive or negative their experiences have been.

There are two main purposes for mapping your customers’ journey.

1. Improve customer experience

This is the ultimate goal of CJM. Site navigation can be especially tricky to assess because you’re already familiar with the layout. A fresh perspective on your site often uncovers overlooked details such as navigation issues or broken links.

By conducting research on UX trends and visually mapping your results, you’ll identify any parts of your design that confuse or frustrate visitors. This process also reveals areas that work well, which you can repurpose elsewhere in the design.

2. Maintains ease-of-use as your site grows

A customer journey map can make even a simple site more straightforward to navigate. When your website or business grows, you may need to add content and features to accommodate the expansion. Implementing customer journey mapping ensures your website's fundamental flow remains intuitive and that new material and features are easily discoverable and usable.

Primary user journey map types

There are various ways to approach customer journey mapping based on the specific insights you’re seeking. The end result of each map will look similar, but the focus of each is different — which changes the information it offers. Here are three standard types of maps to get you started.

Current state

The current state map is the most common type. It evaluates your website’s present state to better understand visitors’ current experiences, helping identify improvement opportunities for its existing design.

Future state

A future state map explores a hypothetical "ideal" website, considering the visitor’s experience if every site component were optimized. This map is helpful when planning a total redesign or a specific change. When you collect user research and translate the results into your map, you can present a visual outline to your client or company for a straightforward explanation.

Persona-based

A persona-based map lays out the journey of a single designated type of user, or persona (which we will define below). This type of diagram is useful when optimizing your website for a specific sector of your audience with particular needs.

Learn best practices for integrating the workflows between design and development in this free webinar.

The 5-step customer journey mapping process

Once you’ve set clear goals for your map’s achievements, you can select the appropriate diagram type. To begin visualizing your user journey, follow this five-step process.

1. Define the map’s scope

Your map may focus on just one customer interaction or outcome, such as finding the newsletter sign-up sheet or making a payment, or it could cover the entire website’s navigation. A focused scope helps you troubleshoot a problem area or ensure an especially critical element functions properly. Alternatively, a larger-scope map provides a big-picture perspective of how the site works as a whole. Creating a comprehensive map is more complex, but high-level mapping helps comprehend the entire user experience from beginning to end.

2. Determine your user personas

A persona describes a particular type of visitor using your site. When imagining and defining these users, you can assign a name to each and include details about who they are, what they’re looking for, and why.

Focus on users who contribute most to your business goals, consulting your marketing or sales teams for insights. To define your customer personas, explore current user behavior through surveys, online reviews, and email list responsiveness.

For example, if you’re creating a website for a store that sells artisanal coffee-making tools, your personas could be:

The gift giver. This user only knows a little about coffee but wants to select an impressive gift for someone else. They’ll need help with purchase decisions, so they might interact with an FAQ or chat feature before visiting the products page. They may also leave your site if overwhelmed by options, so it’s important to offer helpful information proactively. This will keep them engaged and more likely convert them to paying customers.
The coffee nerd. This person is knowledgeable and always seeks the highest-quality tools, so easily accessible product details and customer reviews are important to them. To support their user experience and encourage them to purchase, ensure these elements are easily discoverable.
The tourist. This user is on vacation and looking for a cute brick-and-mortar shop to visit. They aren't interested in your online store, but an appealing photo of your physical store with easily accessible hours and location information may convince them to come by in person.

These three types of users have very different needs and goals when visiting your website. To capture all of their business, create a map for each of them to ensure you accommodate their specific wants and circumstances.

3. Give the personas context

User context is the “when” and “how” of each persona visiting your site. A user will have a different experience loading your site on a mobile device than on a laptop. Additionally, someone in no rush may use your website differently than someone looking more urgently with a specific purpose.

Figure out when, how, and in what mindset your personas most commonly visit your site to map their experience accurately. This context has very concrete impacts on your finished design. If visitors tend to look for one specific page whenever in a hurry (like contact or location information), placing those details on the front page or prominently linking to it will smooth the user experience for those users.

Here’s an example of how to place a persona in context.

Persona: Jo is an apartment hunter in her early 20s and is still in college. She's looking for off-campus housing for herself and some roommates. The collective group values location and cost more than apartment features.

Context : Jo is in a hurry and trying to visit as many apartments as possible. She’s looking at property rental websites that clearly state apartment addresses in each listing.

Method : Jo is browsing the sites on her iPhone.

4. List persona touchpoints

Touchpoints mark when the user makes a purchase decision or interacts with your user interface (UI) . They include visitors' actions to move toward their goals and consider each associated emotion. The first touchpoint is how they reach your website — such as tapping a social media ad, clicking on a search result, or entering your URL directly.

First, list each action the visitor took and their corresponding emotional reactions. Subsequent touchpoints include instances when they navigate a menu, click a button, scroll through a gallery, or fill out a form. When you diagram the route through your site in an A-to-Z path, you can place yourself in the persona's mind to understand their reactions and choices.

A met expectation — for example, when clicking a "shop" button takes them to a product gallery — will result in a positive emotional reaction. An unmet expectation — when the “shop" link leads to an error page — will provoke an adverse reaction.

5. Map the customer journey

Illustrate the user journey by mapping these touchpoints on a visual timeline. This creates a narrative of users’ reactions across your entire service blueprint. To represent your users’ emotional states at each touchpoint, graph their correspondences like this:

The map helps you understand the customer experience as a whole.

For example, based on the diagram above, touchpoint 3 is the largest navigation challenge on the website. The graph also shows that the user's mood eventually rebounds after the initial setback. Improving the problem element in touchpoint 3 will have the biggest impact on elevating the overall user experience.

Customer journey mapping best practices

Now that you understand the mapping process, here are some best practices to implement when charting your customer journey.

Set a clear objective for your map: Define your CX map’s primary goal, such as improving the purchase experience or increasing conversions for a specific product.
Solicit customer feedback: Engage directly with customers through surveys or interviews so you can implement data-driven changes. Ask users about their journey pain points and invite both positive and negative feedback on the overall navigation.
Specify customer journey maps for each persona: To specifically serve each customer persona, consider charting separate paths for each based on their behaviors and interests. This approach is more customer-centric, as not all user types interact with your website the same way.
Reevaluate your map after company or website changes: As your business scales, your website must evolve — and so will your customer’s path. Review your map when making both large and small website adjustments to ensure you don’t introduce new user challenges. Navigational disruptions can frustrate visitors, causing would-be customers to leave your site and seek competitors .

Optimize your user journey map with Webflow

A user journey map is only as effective as the improvements it promotes. When redesigning your website based on insights your map provides, explore Webflow’s vast resource bank to streamline your design processes.

Webflow offers web design support with diverse guides , tutorials , and tools for straightforward web design. Visit Webflow today to learn how its site hosting , e-commerce , and collaboration resources support enhanced user experience for better engagement.

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How the User Journey Impacts Your Success

User journeys play a large role in business success. Learn what a customer journey map should include, read examples, and discover how to improve your customers' experience.

A user or customer journey, sometimes visualized as a journey map, is the path a person follows as they discover a product, service, or brand, learn about it, consider spending money on it, and then make a decision to purchase—or not. Not every user journey ends in a conversion, but it is typically the goal.

Creating a customer journey map can help drive sales, because when you better understand your user's journey, you can provide the information or encouragement they need to commit and become a customer.

Let's look at a couple of examples of user journeys.

User Journey Example: Under-caffeinated Chuck

Chuck is downtown and he wants a cup of coffee. His journey might look something like this:

Chuck feels drowsy on the way to work and realizes that he wants coffee. He is in a downtown area and has several choices.
He looks around and sees a local cafe with organic fairtrade coffee, a cheap coffee chain that also offers donuts, and another internationally franchised cafe known for their sustainably grown coffee.
He considers distance from his current location, expected prep time, his budget, and his values—he appreciates both sustainable agriculture and supporting local businesses.
He knows that 2 or the 3 options offer coffee that match his ethics about food, and although the franchised cafe with sustainable coffee is slightly closer, he prefers going to the local cafe where he can also do more to boost his city’s economy. The local cafe is also typically faster because it’s less crowded.
He chooses the local cafe with sustainably sourced coffee.

This is a straightforward example of a user journey. A more in-depth example might include asking an employee for information or, if the journey is entirely online, searching for information, looking up reviews, comparing the competition, and considering the cost.

How to create an accurate user journey

To map an accurate customer journey, you need to know your customers and how they discover your brand. To create customer profiles, begin by learning about the demographics of customers who already shop with your brand. This profile is an outline of your target customer’s interests, pain points, income level, age range, location, and more. The entry point is where they become aware of your brand. In the 2 examples above, both had street-level entry points, but other entry points include online searches, word-of-mouth recommendations, as well as social media, television, and print ads.

Consider all the entry points that might lead customers to your brand. Then generate user journeys from those points using your customer profiles to target similar audiences. After that, you'll need to refine your journey maps to turn shoppers into buyers.

Your goal is to guide your potential customers along their journey as much as possible. This will also help you reduce or eliminate barriers to conversion like by answering questions, making the right offers, and providing clarity when it’s needed.

The stages of the user journey

Each user journey is unique. But no matter what customer profile you're dealing with, or what their point of entry is, the structure of all customer journeys has stages in common:

Consideration

Your goal at each of the first 3 phases of the journey is to improve the chances of purchase and retention. Every point on the journey has a connection to every other point, especially when the goal is to motivate and maintain customer loyalty and drive customers through retention and back through the whole process again.

In the awareness phase, the user learns about or is reminded of your product or service, usually as a response to something they need or desire. The awareness phase can follow a previous purchase, which means that the retention phase was a success, leading them around to begin the cycle again.

Here, the user looks at the virtues and the flaws of your brand and any other brands also up for consideration. This is when pricing, value, customer service, branding, communication, and other factors come into play.

At this point, the user has looked at the relevant differences among the available options. If there's any information about your product or service that the customer hasn't been able to find at this point, it could mean losing the sale.

Here, the user either makes a purchase or doesn't. But this isn't the end of the journey—keep in mind that they may be buying from you because another brand is not available to serve their needs at the moment. This is your chance to curry favor with such customers: Your e-commerce platform should be easy to navigate, your customer service should be on point, and any discounts you may have on offer should be extended.

Now that a customer has purchased from you, you want to retain their loyalty. It's a good idea to check in with them after their purchase: Ask for feedback, tell them about complementary products or updates to your services, and try to discover ways to increase their satisfaction in the future. When they reenter the awareness phase, you want positive interactions and friendly and complete customer service to follow them into the next round of consideration.

How to improve a user’s journey

The key to getting the most out of the user's journey is to know your customer as well as possible. This is why a customer profile and all the possible entry points into the journey are important to understand as you define your customer journey . You want an extensive, complete, and accurate profile of the various kinds of people who shop for the products or services you offer.

You need to consider possible entry points into the user's journey. Here’s an example: A woman named Carla is in search of new headphones. She knows that she could travel to her local mall to search for just the right pair, and then she wouldn’t have to wait for them to be delivered. But she also knows that by shopping online, she can more easily compare more options. In this example, a business that sells headphones would need to consider all of the paths that Carla may take to find their products. She could visit a store where they are sold, she might search online, or she might find the right pair through an ad on social media or an email promotion.

The customer profile, the entry point into their journey, and what you have on your shelves (whether brick-and-mortar or online) should all flow together to make a coherent experience for each potential customer.

Build user journey maps

A user journey can be mapped with flow charts or diagrams that take the needs, wants, and habits from a given customer profile and trace a journey from entry point and awareness to retention and back through again. Ideally, you want a journey map for each user starting at each possible point of entry. You're going to need several versions of each user journey map, with different paths based on entry point, previous purchases, email engagement, and so on.

Your goal is to be able to anticipate and answer questions a customer might have before they move on to make a purchase. After they've made a purchase, you want to make sure that the retention phase directs them back to the beginning of the journey. It's all about communication—you need to keep in touch to let them know how you can meet their needs, promote new products or services you have on offer, and get them hooked via rewards and discounts.

That's where Mailchimp's Customer Journey Builder comes in. Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing and e-commerce platform, allowing you to send marketing emails, newsletters, product and service updates, and everything else you need to keep your customers engaged and satisfied. With Mailchimp, you can also create your business website, employing best practices that will help you turn potential customers into brand-loyal repeat customers. Remember, the customer journey doesn't have to end with the purchase, and Mailchimp is here to make sure it doesn't.

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

Consideration

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

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The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

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Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

Hero image of a man at a coffee shop, holding a credit card while on the phone, with a computer in front of him

When I was a kid, I remember watching my parents switch between different credit cards to get the best rewards for a particular purchase. They almost always pulled out the American Express first because (as they explained to me) the base reward rate was higher than even the sector-specific perks offered by other cards. Twenty years later, when I decided to get a high-end credit card, Amex was the first one that came to mind.

Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.

Table of contents:

Customer journey map template

Parts of a journey map, stages of the customer journey, advanced customer journey mapping tips, types of journey maps, customer journey mapping example, what is a customer journey map.

A customer journey is the path a person takes to move from general awareness to prospective customer to (in the ideal scenario) brand loyalist . A customer journey map is a visual document that traces this path through all of the interactions, or touchpoints, a person will have with a brand.

Think back to any recent purchase of your own, and try to trace your own customer journey:

When and where was your first contact with the product or service?

How many channels of communication with the company did you have available?

How was the contact you had, if any? Was it personal or formulaic?

Were your problems, if any, solved? If so, were they solved in a timely manner?

What do you now know about the brand besides the product or service itself?

Of course, every customer is different. But you can't create a customer journey map for every individual—and you don't need to. Instead, you can segment your audience into customer personas and create a map for each.

The customer journey vs. the user journey vs. the buyer journey

What's the difference between the customer, user, and buyer journeys?

The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

In a world where there are multiple high-quality options for just about every product on the market, brands need to foster long-term relationships with their customers to prevent them from being poached by competitors who offer a better customer experience .

Here are the main benefits of the customer journey mapping process:

Touchpoint optimization: With a clear understanding of what your touchpoints are and where they occur, you can track and adjust them based on how they perform.

Enhanced customer experience insights: Through customer profiling and a better overview of all the touchpoints that make a journey, you can acquire more precise and actionable customer experience insights.

Improved product development: Thoughtful and intentional journey planning creates more opportunities for meaningful customer feedback, which gives businesses better information to improve their product.

The customer journey map includes additional details within each phase (which I'll discuss in more detail later) to help you strategically plan your customers' touchpoints and move them closer to a purchase.

This customer journey map template is separated into five stages along the leftmost column, with guiding questions to help plan the customer's experience in each stage.

Screenshot of customer journey map template.

Below, we'll walk through each part of the customer journey map and how to use it.

If you're already familiar with journey mapping, you can start filling in the template right away. Otherwise, here's a quick walkthrough of what goes in each section.

What is the customer doing?

In this section, you'll jot down the main things that the prospect, lead, or customer is doing during this stage. For example, if you're a personal trainer, an awareness stage key step might include something like "Prospect wants to get in shape." Or if you offer an email newsletter app, an expansion and advocacy stage key step might be "Customer upgrades their plan."

Each stage will likely have more than one key step or milestone—that's good. You should be specific enough to be able to create touchpoints, content, and marketing campaigns geared toward each milestone.

What is the customer thinking?

Next, put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what questions they might have at each stage. In the awareness stage, it might be things like "How can I do X better?" or "What is [your product name]?" In the consideration phase, questions like "Is this worth my time/money?" or "Will this help me solve my problem?" will come to the forefront.

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

After you've outlined what your customer is thinking at each stage, align each question with the relevant touchpoint that could address each concern.

Not all existing touchpoints will be a part of the planned customer journey . For example, I seriously doubt that American Express's customer journey map includes a milestone labeled "Customer gets a free ride because her friend has an Amex card and gets $15 in Uber cash each month." However, each question must have at least one touchpoint that directly and specifically addresses the customer's needs and questions at that point.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

When you have a question or milestone that doesn't have a corresponding touchpoint, you've found a gap in your customer journey. That means customers at this stage are going to be left with unmet needs and unanswered questions, and may look more seriously at competitor products as a result. It's essential to develop touchpoints to fill this gap and prevent losing potential customers at a key milestone.

Graphic demonstrating an example of the parts of the customer journey.

The customer journey map can be split into five phases: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty.

Customers can't decide whether or not they want your product if they don't know that it exists. In the earliest phase of the customer journey, a business's goal is to reach the individual and, ultimately, attract them to the brand.

For a small- to medium-sized business, the work of this stage involves reaching out directly to consumers via channels like advertising , SEO , and social media . For a household name like American Express, this stage is dedicated to ensuring the impression their brand makes is a positive one.

Consideration

Once potential customers are aware of your brand, the next phase they enter is called "consideration" or "research." This is when the customer's perspective shifts from simple awareness of your brand's existence to an understanding of the value that you have to offer them.

During this phase, the brand's goal is to design touchpoints that demonstrate to the user why their product can solve a problem or improve an experience that's specific to that person. This can be done using guides and how-tos, partnerships with other brands , and ads that portray a customer problem being solved.

Some businesses also include a mini-stage called "Intent" or "Onboarding," when the customer has decided they're interested in the product and is testing it out. The company's goal in this stage is simply to provide an exceptional user experience—they want to make sure the product works as intended and the customer's questions and requests are handled well.

A business can identify customers that are primed for conversion based on behavior in the consideration stage. Someone who signs up for a newsletter isn't a hot sales prospect quite yet, but when they start opening more emails and spending more time on the site, that's when brands know they're ready for a conversion push.

Types of conversions vary depending on the type of business and industry. Examples of conversion pushes include:

An abandoned cart email pushing a browsing shopper to complete a purchase

A physical mail offer pushing a potential customer to open an account

A seasonal campaign highlighting why a product is perfect for a particular holiday, celebration, or event

When a conversion is successful, a potential buyer becomes an actual customer. The goal in the retention stage is to demonstrate to the customer why they were right to make their purchase, and set them up to make more purchases or renew services in the future.

The retention stage is also where the user experience or user journey begins. The company's job in this phase, then, is to provide the best possible user experience. Easy installation, frictionless customer service, and—this part should be obvious—a product or service that works well and provides the user what they need are all key components to improved customer retention.

Brand loyalty

In the final customer journey phase, users go from run-of-the-mill satisfied customers to active advocates for your business.

You can encourage brand loyalty by offering exceptional customer service, referral programs, and loyalty discounts and exclusives.

Keep in mind: a customer doesn't need to be a zealot for your company to be an unintentional brand advocate. One of the biggest reasons I made the decision to apply for Amex's high-end card is because my best friend has it. She didn't specifically recommend it to me, but I became interested after experiencing a lot of the card benefits vicariously through her.

Everything we've covered up to this point will only get you as far as a basic customer journey map. That doesn't mean, however, that your customer journey map will be good . Once you have the basic journey mapping structure down, you'll want to take steps to continually improve your map's effectiveness.

Survey your customers and customer teams

When designing touchpoints and determining where and how customers interact with your business, don't guess—your existing customer base is a valuable resource you can tap for a firsthand customer perspective. You can i ncentivize customers to participate in surveys and fill out feedback forms by offering discounts and perks in exchange.

Talk to your customer-facing employees, too. The people who work directly with customers day-to-day will have more accurate information about how to interact with them.

Automate customer data collection

High-quality, premium experiences are defined by their high level of personalization, and that personalization is only possible if you have information about your customer. It's not possible to sit there and take notes on every person who interacts with your brand, but it is possible to automatically collect lead data from customer interactions and have them collated in your CRM tool .

Set up your contact management platform to automatically tag contacts with information like gender, age, products they've bought, events they've attended, what types of emails they open consistently and what emails they regularly ignore, whether their purchases indicate that they have pets or children, and so on. The more information you have, the better your customer experiences will be.

Tweak for B2B, B2C, and SaaS industries

The nature of the customer journey is different for SaaS, B2B, and B2C companies. A B2B company's interactions with prospects might include in-person conferences, while a SaaS company's touchpoints will be mostly digital. Companies that sell to consumers will need to think through individual people's experiences in a way that B2B companies don't. A company whose products are designed for emergencies will need to think through crisis scenarios instead of day-to-day customer experiences.

Tweak your customer journey categories to fit your company, product, and industry. Using a generalized or poorly-fitting customer journey map will result in vague and unhelpful interactions with your brand.

Create multiple maps for different journeys

When people refer to the customer journey, they're typically talking about the overarching journey from awareness to brand loyalty that we outlined above. However, you can map any part of the customer journey and experience.

Do you target college students? Replace the five stages with four academic quarters and map their experience over the course of a year.

Is your product designed to be used in the car? Map the customer journey through each hour of a long road trip.

Zooming in to create detailed maps of different aspects of the customer journey will help you create even more specifically tailored customer experiences.

The template above follows the standard stages of the customer journey, but it's not the only way to do your customer journey mapping.

Two other commonly-used journey maps are the "Day in a life" journey map and the customer support journey map. We've provided the key elements of both below, as well as customer journey map templates for each.

Day/week/month in the life map

The best way to map mini-journeys within the larger customer experience lifecycle is with a "Day in a Life" journey map . This map plots the same things as the general customer journey map—key milestones, questions, touchpoints, and gaps—but over a particular period of time instead of over the course of the entire relationship.

This map includes space for you to record the buyer persona's name, occupation, and motto, but these are really just shorthand for key persona characteristics. If you're selling baby diapers, for instance, your persona's occupation would be "parent," even if the person in question is also an accountant.

The "motto" should be a condensed version of your persona's primary mindset with regard to their wants, needs, and pain points. The motto for an expecting first-time parent might be, "I'm excited but nervous—I have to make sure I'm prepared for anything."

Template for a day in the life journey map.

Use the column headers to set your time frame. If you're marketing to expecting parents, the time frame might be the nine months of a pregnancy, or you might map an expectant mother's experiences through a single day in her third trimester. At each stage, ask yourself the same questions:

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand? Alternatively: how could our brand provide value at each stage?

A day in the life customer journey map will not only help you zoom in to develop more tailored experiences, but it will also give you insights into what might be useful to add or improve in your product or service.

Support experience map

One of the most common, and most significant, customer/brand interactions is the customer support journey . A frustrating customer service experience can turn someone off of your brand and product entirely, while a particularly impressive experience can immediately convert a regular user into a brand advocate.

This journey map is a bit different in that it doesn't just map touchpoints; it maps functional interactions between the customer and customer service representatives as well as the behind-the-scenes activities necessary to support the customer-facing team.

This map starts when the support ticket is opened and ends when the customer's issue is resolved. The top row of the map is simple: what is the customer doing at each stage in the support process?

Next, you'll record the corresponding actions of your customer-facing, or "frontstage" team. This includes both employees' actions and the systems engaged in the support process. For example, if the first step of your customer support process is handled by a chatbot or automatic phone system, these will go in the technology row. If the customer moves forward to request to speak with a representative, then the second stage is where your "employee actions" row will come into play.

Finally, the bottom row is for behind-the-scenes activity performed by employees who don't interact with the customer at all. For example, if the customer representative needs to get information from another department to answer the customer's questions, the other department's involvement will be recorded in the "backstage actions" section of the map.

To put it all together, here's an example customer journey map for a gym.

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

"I can't go up a flight of stairs without getting winded; I need to get my health and fitness on track."

"I wish I knew someone who could recommend this gym."

Encounters:

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

Success stories on social media in a front-and-center location, like a saved Instagram Stories collection or a pinned post

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

"This gym looks clean and modern from the photos."

"I hate calling the gym, but I'd like to learn more about personal training or class options."

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

A live chat box on the gym's website for prospective customers to ask questions about the facility or membership options before visiting

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

"The staff was friendly and it was easy to sign up."

"I wish I could see what classes they offer and weekly schedules without having to visit the gym."

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

A mobile app where members can track their progress, access class schedules, book personal trainer sessions, and receive personalized workout recommendations

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again."

"I wish I knew someone who could work out with me."

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

Community-building events like workshops or challenges to foster a sense of community and support among members and staff

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes

"My coworker would love this gym since it's so close to work."

"I love that teacher. I'm going to try some of her other classes."

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

A loyalty rewards program for members' continued commitment and engagement that offers exclusive discounts, merchandise, or access to premium services

Graphic of an example customer journey map.

Your customers' spending habits, interests, challenges, and problems are always changing, and your customer journey maps should adapt along with them. But with so much data to track, it's a good idea to connect your insights to CRM software. Then you can automate your CRM to create specific, valuable experiences for your customers without breaking a sweat.

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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience. In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

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Illustrating the user experience with customer journey maps

To truly build great products, you need to understand the thought process of customers before and after they purchase from you. However, sometimes product managers oversimplify this by assuming that you only need to know what the user wants/needs while they’re interacting with the product. The reality is it’s vital to have information that captures before, during, and after.

Illustrating The User Experience With Customer Journey Maps

To do this, you’ll need to create a customer journey map. In this article, you’ll learn what a customer journey map is, what they’re useful for, and read examples of ones in practice.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a flowchart that depicts the various stops that customers make before, during, and after purchasing.

Product teams can refer to their customer journey maps for various reasons. In fact, different roles have different uses for them — product designers can use them to identify and then solve customer/user problems, UX designers can use them to design smooth customer/user experiences, marketers can use them to plan effective marketing campaigns, and so on.

Real-life examples of customer journey maps

To better understand how you can use customer journey maps, as well as what you can gain from them, let’s take a look at some real-life examples from successful companies. While reading through these, try to make a mental note of things that you see that might be effective for your own product. Each case is specific, so seeing a number of different ones should illustrate some of the key similarities and differences.

My favorite customer journey map example is from Spotify. Although it doesn’t depict the entire customer journey like most customer journey maps do, it’s clean and easy to understand. The objective was to increase the number of users sharing music using Spotify, thus the purpose of the customer journey map was to learn where in the customer journey users would want to be able to do so.

Let’s break it down:

Most customer journey maps are segmented into stages, where each stage encapsulates a moment in the journey where customers do something significant. For example, the moment at which customers become aware of the brand or product might be labeled, “awareness stage.”

Next, what customers actually do at each stage is clearly described. This part is typically fueled by different types of research (e.g., the awareness stage might be fueled by a “Where did you first hear about us?” question in a survey). This particular customer journey map would’ve been fueled by session recordings exclusively since it focuses on what customers do on an app.

After that, customer journey maps usually declare the goals/expectations of customers. In this example, this has been replaced with their thoughts. Goals/expectations reveal intent whereas thoughts reveal needs, wants, outcomes, solutions, and other insights. Thoughts are useful but too vague by themselves — I recommend displaying both!

At this point it doesn’t really matter what comes next, but Spotify has opted to display the touchpoints. Touchpoints are where the steps of a stage take place. On this journey, most of the steps take place on the Spotify mobile app while a few others take place on WhatsApp and Messages.

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Touchpoints are usually labeled or described (at the awareness stage you might even see an intangible “word of mouth” touchpoint), but since customers only touch down on apps on this journey, Spotify has chosen to display its app icons.

In addition, Spotify has combined the touchpoints with the ‘actors’ involved in them, providing an even clearer image of what’s happening at each stage. Displaying the actors isn’t as popular as it once was, but they’re nice to have if they don’t make the customer journey map look cluttered.

Other things that you might see on a customer journey map include general insights for added context, the customer emotions of each stage, the business objectives of each stage and any KPIs (key performance indicators) used to track them, any opportunities/plans to improve the customer experience of a stage, and NPSs (net promoter scores).

The most obvious thing about this customer journey map after having observed the Spotify customer journey map is that it’s not organized like a table. This layout makes it harder to pinpoint specific snippets of information:

To add to the cognitive overload there are a few visual cues that are meant to symbolize something, but it’s not immediately clear what. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid visual cues, just that they need to be clear. Putting that aside though, showing where customers interact with customer service representatives, drop off, come to a halt, and skip stages is a nice touch and does present a richer story.

However, what’s missing from the story is the prologue and epilogue — how do they become aware of the product, what are their motivations for investigating it, and what do they feel and think after using it? For B2B (Business-to-Business) products where the customer isn’t necessarily a user, knowing what happens before and after can be even more critical than knowing what happens during.

To wrap this one up on a positive note though, I like that TurboTax displays the customer journey map’s NPS (that’s the number in the top-right corner). A customer journey map’s NPS represents how likely customers are to recommend the brand to friends, family, or colleagues based on the journey in question.

Right away you’ll see that some stages (e.g., “problem identification” and “problem analysis”) are categorized by an overarching stage (“define need— one to two weeks” in this case). This creates additional reference points and provides more clarity:

This particular example also specifies the timeframe of each “superstage,” since the customer journey takes place over several weeks. Keep in mind that your customer journey map might need something that no other or few other customer journey maps have.

“Relevance” refers to how important each stage is. Now I know what you’re thinking, shouldn’t they all be important? Well with a good customer experience the answer is yes, but to achieve that you’d first need to improve or even remove stages with low-to-medium relevance, and the first step towards doing that is identifying them.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that most customer journey maps depict the customer emotions using emojis, which is often the clearest way to do so. However, considering a retirement home for one’s parents can be a very emotional process not easily summarized by emojis, which is why this customer journey map explicitly puts the customer’s “thoughts” and “feelings” into words. You can also use words and emojis when it feels right to do so, like Spotify.

A bit further down on the customer journey map you’ll see “tactics”, which are basically the business objectives of each stage. It’s not enough to keep customers flowing, they must be converting or on their way to converting.

Rail Europe

Rail Europe’s customer journey map is fairly ordinary, but what it includes before and after the actual map is noteworthy. At the top (so before the map) you’ll see “guiding principles” — these are essentially general insights for added context. At the bottom it lists “opportunities” for improvement, prompting investigation and thus another iteration of the customer journey map. These provide stakeholders with more of the story as they jump into the map and also opportunities to improve the story as they finish up with it:

Without these, you risk the customer journey map becoming a static resource that goes out of date.

Key takeaways

As you can see, customer journey maps provide a useful way of visually displaying the interactions a user has with your product. What works for one product doesn’t necessarily work for another, so it’s important to tailor your map to the goals that you have.

Is there a particular customer journey map that stands out to you? Or do you have a different example that you’d like to share? If so, please do so in the comment section below, and thanks for reading!

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7 Differences Between Customer Journey vs. User Journey

20 September, 2023

In today’s business landscape, where brands and websites vie for our attention, understanding the nuanced differences between Customer journey vs. User journey can be the key to unlocking a seamless online experience.

While the terms might seem interchangeable, they each hold a distinct role in shaping how we interact with businesses and their digital platforms.

In this article, we’ll explore the seven key differences between customer journey and user journey and why they matter for your business.

Differences Between Customer Journey Vs. User Journey

Customer journey and user journey are two phrases that are frequently used in this context. While they may sound similar, they represent distinct aspects of the customer experience.

Well, before heading to the details, let’s make your further reading easier through this quick table below highlighting the key points of the user journey vs customer journey.

1. Knowing the Fundamentals(Definition )

Customer Journey

The customer journey refers to the entire end-to-end experience that a customer undergoes when interacting with a brand or business. It encompasses all the touchpoints to interact with the customers , both online and offline, from the initial awareness of the brand to the post-purchase interactions and beyond.

This concept focuses on building and maintaining a long-term relationship with the customer, fostering loyalty and satisfaction.

User Journey

In contrast, the user journey is a narrower concept that concentrates specifically on the steps and interactions a user takes within a digital platform, such as a website or mobile app. It emphasizes optimizing the user’s experience, ensuring usability, and enhancing satisfaction while navigating through the digital interface.

The customer journey has a broad and encompassing scope. It extends across the entire spectrum of interactions that a customer has with a brand, product, or service. This journey involves both online and offline connection points. It begins when you first discover the brand, and continues as you research products, make a purchase, get post-purchase support, and stay engaged over time.

It considers various channels and platforms, including social media, websites, physical stores, customer service centers, and more. Essentially, the customer journey covers every aspect of the customer’s relationship with the brand, aiming to create a holistic and positive experience.

the user journey has a more focused and limited scope. It concentrates exclusively on the interactions and experiences of a user within a specific digital platform or interface, such as a website or mobile application.

User experience is concerned with the user’s navigation through the digital environment, including actions, decisions, and reactions while using the platform. It primarily revolves around ensuring the usability and efficiency of the digital interface, making it user-friendly, intuitive, and satisfying.

The user process does not extend beyond the boundaries of the digital experience, making it narrower in scope compared to the customer journey.

3. Different Goals and Objectives

80% of customers are more likely to buy when businesses offer a personalized experience.

The primary goal of the customer journey is to nurture and maintain a long-term relationship between the customer and the brand. It aims to create a positive and memorable experience at every touchpoint, from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions and beyond.

Objectives :

Building brand loyalty is a key objective of the customer journey. It seeks to turn first-time customers into repeat buyers and advocates for the brand. The customers are satisfied with their overall experience is crucial to ensure this includes providing excellent customer service and addressing any issues promptly.

The customer journey aims to shape a positive perception of the brand, ensuring that customers associate it with trustworthiness, reliability, and value. Brands can maximize the customer’s lifetime value by encouraging repeat purchases and upselling additional products.

User Journey

This is the core point where you find differences between customer experience vs. user journey but at the same root.

The primary goal of the user journey is to optimize the user’s experience within a specific digital platform, such as a website or mobile app. It focuses on usability, functionality, and overall satisfaction.

Ensuring that users can easily and efficiently complete tasks within the digital interface is a core objective. This includes intuitive navigation and clear information presentation. Encouraging user actions that align with the platform’s goals, such as making a purchase, signing up, or engaging with content.

Striving to provide users with a positive and enjoyable experience, can lead to higher retention rates and positive reviews. Continuously gathering user feedback and data to make improvements and enhancements to the digital platform.

4. Consideration Variation

Customer Journey

The customer journey mainly includes a great variation in touchpoints such as social media interactions, email communications, in-store visits, customer service calls, and more.

It encompasses a wide range of touchpoints, both online and offline. This variation in touchpoints includes social media interactions, email communications, in-store visits, customer service calls, and more. Customers talk to brands in many ways. They use websites, apps, stores, social media, and even print. All these ways make communication between customers easy.

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren't.

Customer experience takes a long-term perspective, considering interactions that occur over an extended period. It involves nurturing relationships, building trust, and ensuring consistency across different touchpoints. As customers progress through their journey, their needs and expectations can vary significantly. Brands must adapt to these changing needs to maintain a positive customer experience.

The user journey primarily focuses on digital platforms and interfaces, which limits the scope of consideration to the online realm. User journeys revolve around specific interactions within a digital environment, such as navigating a website, using an app, or completing an online form.

For example, we can say about the customer match audience solution that is now the best partner for millions of businesses to connect with the right customers at scale.

Furthermore, user journeys frequently take a shorter-term view, focusing on immediate usability and user satisfaction during a single interaction or session.

User journeys often have a shorter-term perspective, emphasizing immediate usability and user satisfaction during a single interaction or session. Maintaining consistency within the digital interface is crucial in user journeys. Users expect seamless and intuitive experiences throughout their interaction with the platform.

5. Standards and Measurement

The standards for measuring the customer journey look at the whole picture of the customer’s experience, not just individual touchpoints. The key elements may include:

Tracking all interactions across channels
Survey customers regularly on their perceptions and satisfaction
Monitoring customer behaviors and pain points, and so on.

The standards for measuring the customer journey are often holistic and multifaceted, considering various touchpoints and customer interactions.

Measurement metrics:

CLV quantifies the overall value a customer contributes to a brand over the course of their relationship. It’s a critical metric for assessing the long-term impact of the customer journey. NPS gauges customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend the brand to others. Surveys and feedback mechanisms assess customer satisfaction at different touchpoints, providing insights into areas of improvement.

Monitoring how customers perceive the brand and its reputation is crucial. Social listening tools can help gauge public sentiment. tracking the rate at which customers disengage or leave the brand provides insights into areas of dissatisfaction.

Standards:

User journey measurement standards are typically more focused on usability, functionality, and user experience within digital interfaces mainly to engage with customers.

It measures the percentage of users who leave a webpage without taking any action. A high bounce rate can indicate a poor user journey. This metric keeps tabs on the portion of users who successfully carry out a preferred action, like making a purchase or signing up.

The amount of time users spend on a website or app can indicate engagement and interest.

Gathering user feedback through surveys, usability testing, and user reviews provides valuable insights into the user journey’s effectiveness.

6. Decision-making Process

The decision-making process is another main point where you will get a contrast between user experience and customer journey.

The decision-making process, also called the user or customer journey, this is essential. It helps us understand how people businesses use products or services and make choices.

For-66%-of-customers,-instant,-on-demand-engagement-in-a-critical-decision-making-factor-in-purchasing-goods-and-services

Although these expressions are occasionally used interchangeably, they have different meanings and are frequently employed in various contexts:

Customer Journey:

The phrase ‘customer journey’ is mainly about businesses and marketing. It includes all the times a customer interacts with a product or service—like when they think about it, buy it, and use it.

It usually starts when a customer realizes they need something or have a problem. Then, they look at choices and decide what to buy, and after that, they use the product, give feedback, and maybe become loyal customers.

Marketers and businesses use customer journey mapping to better understand and optimize these stages, with the aim of enhancing the overall customer experience and driving customer satisfaction and retention.

User Journey:

The term User journey is often associated with the design and usability of digital products, websites, or software applications. It represents how a person navigates a digital connection. The first connection point is where it all starts. After that, users navigate, carry out tasks, and may come back or make purchases.

User experience (UX) designers and product developers use user journey mapping to identify pain points, improve usability, and enhance the overall user experience of a digital product.

7. Implementation Focus

The fundamental distinction between the customer journey and the user journey in terms of implementation focus is in the emphasis placed on them and how they are applied in various contexts:

The implementation focus of the customer journey is primarily oriented toward marketing, sales, and overall customer experience management. Businesses and organizations use customer journey mapping and analysis to understand and enhance the entire end-to-end experience a customer has with their brand, product, or service.

Implementation efforts may involve optimizing marketing strategies, improving customer service touchpoints, tailoring product offerings, and building brand loyalty. The primary goal is to maximize customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value by delivering a seamless and satisfying experience at every stage of the journey.

The implementation focus of the user journey is centered on the design and usability of digital interfaces and experiences. User journey mapping is used by UX (user experience) designers, product managers, and developers to create user-centric digital products and applications.

In the digital age, we might focus on the user interface (UI), simplify navigation, increase accessibility, and make sure users can accomplish their goals with ease. The primary goal is to create a user-friendly and efficient digital experience that leads to higher user satisfaction, engagement, and conversion rates.

Conclusion

While both customer journeys and user journeys are essential concepts for businesses, they serve different purposes and require distinct approaches. Understanding these differences is crucial for tailoring strategies that enhance both the overall customer experience and the usability of digital platforms.

By recognizing the unique characteristics of each journey, companies can tailor their strategies to better meet the needs of their audience, ultimately driving success in the digital landscape.

Rafeoun Islam

Hi, this is rafeun Islam. I am a content writer and I write SEO-optimized content that helps to push traffic to the website. Currently, I'm working on content marketing, social media marketing, and affiliate marketing.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

The State of UX Hiring Report 2024

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service.

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app.

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage?

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro .

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders.

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs.

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process.

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product.

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity.

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where.

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following:

A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable.

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
Define your persona and scenario
Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions
Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
Identify opportunities
Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

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1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own.

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map.

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases.

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with.

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy .

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online.

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way.

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant.

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”.

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog.

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product.

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights.

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps?

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process.

For more how-to guides, check out:

The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
How to Conduct User Interviews

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Difference between Customer Journey and User Journey.

Por Silvia Aguilar | Mar 17, 2021

In the digital age, more and more terms appear and become common to use, however, they are often used in the wrong way, including the Customer Journey and the User Journey, it is quite common to hear that these are used without any differentiation, because it is assumed that a customer and a user are the same.

Now, is it important understand the difference between Customer Journey and User Journey.

Well, in certain scenarios it is, since not doing so can generate a problem when trying to understand the environment, behavior and thinking of the person during the process or Journey (Customer Journey or User Journey).

First, we must understand what each one of them is, the customer journey or customer journey is a visual representation from one end to the other of all the connections that someone has with a company or organization, in all relevant points of contact, whether digital. or physical, it includes the behaviors, emotions, objectives and the environment of the clients.

On the other hand, user journeys or user journeys are focused on being able to represent in detail how the users' navigation is proposed to be on each page of our website, mobile application, etc. These include the objectives of each page or step that the user must perform, as well as the functions and characteristics that are key to completing a certain task and the navigation flow, all of this as assumptions that are tested in later phases of the process of UX design.

With the previous definitions we can identify three major differences between a customer journey and a user journey:

3. The Customer Journey is about the purchase process and the User Journey about the use process : as its name says, the customer journey is that process that a buyer goes through to finish fulfilling the final objective, if they know to the brand even when it needs post-sale services, while the user journey is focused on the experience of using a single channel that is digital and delves into how a person can navigate within that platform.

With all the above we understand that the Customer Journey and the User Journey are two different terms and require to be distinguished, however, they cannot be taken with separate parts of a company since they must work together to generate more conversions. It can be said that within the Customer Journey umbrella that User Journey enters to give a great customer experience through the digital channel.

<<Read More: 7 reasons to use the SIPOC to create your Customer Journey Map >>

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UX Customer Journey — How to Map Out User Experience

Customer journey maps are effective visualizations that help organizations understand their customers and create better experiences. Product teams use these journey maps during the design process to solve usability issues, streamline user experiences, and identify opportunities that help the organization achieve its business goals.

Creating customer journey maps requires research, collaboration, the right tools, and an appropriate visualization format. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to streamline journey mapping, which we cover later in this article.

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What is a UX Customer Journey?

A customer journey represents the steps customers go through when interacting with a product, service, or business process. Companies use journey maps to visualize this end-to-end process and identify customer needs across multiple touchpoints.

User journey map vs. customer journey map

While the theory and application are similar, there is a slight difference between a user journey map and a customer journey map:

User journey map : A visual representation of the steps to complete a specific task or goal.
Customer journey map : A broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints, including all the interactions with an organization.

Benefits of mapping the customer journey

Mapping customer journeys offer many benefits for organizations and teams, notably improving user experience and customer satisfaction by identifying pain points and opportunities.

Some key benefits of customer journey maps include:

Enhanced customer understanding: helps organizations gain insights about their target audience’s needs, preferences, motivations, and pain points by visualizing the experience from the customer’s point of view.
Pinpoint issues and opportunities: allows teams to identify which steps cause difficulty or frustration for customers. Conversely, the organization can find areas for improvement and innovation.
Streamlined and consistent experiences: organizations can identify and fix inconsistencies and gaps across multiple touchpoints, creating a more cohesive and consistent user experience.
Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty: by streamlining and optimizing product processes, organizations improve customer satisfaction leading to increased loyalty, recommendations, and growth.
Informed decision-making: journey maps help teams across the organization make decisions about design, development, marketing, etc. Many organizations use these visualizations to prioritize features, updates, and investments.
Cross-functional collaboration: customer journey maps allow organizations to visualize how customers pass through each department, creating opportunities for teams to collaborate and find ways to improve the customer experience at each touchpoint–UX design, marketing, customer support, social media, etc.
Creating benchmarks and continuous evaluation: organizations can use customer journey maps to evaluate projects and how products evolve and improve with releases.

Customer Personas – The Foundation for Customer Journey Maps

A user persona (customer persona) is UX research artifact design teams use as a fictional representation of a user group, including their demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points.

These user personas are the foundation for customer journey maps because they provide the framework for understanding how different types of users engage with the organization and its products.

For example, if a company is designing a fitness app, the research team might create personas for three primary user groups:

Yoga practitioners

These three user personas will have different needs, priorities, goals, challenges, and ambitions. Their interactions with your brand and how they enter customer journeys will also differ.

Incorporating personas into the customer journey

User personas give designers a start and end goal for customer journey maps. They can use the persona’s behavioral patterns to highlight how these users interact with a product or service and tailor content that meets their needs.

Returning to our fitness app example above: Researchers learn that yoga users prefer to use the desktop application at home, while gym-goers use the mobile app in their local gym. The runners view their daily running program on a mobile device before their run and don’t view the app again until they return.

The customer journey maps for these three users will look completely different, each with varying steps, challenges, and goals.

This example demonstrates how customer journeys for each persona vary and the importance of separately acknowledging each group’s needs, behaviors, challenges, and goals.

Stages of a Customer Journey

There are several key stages of a customer journey:

Awareness: the moment someone becomes aware of your brand through social media, paid ads, word-of-mouth, etc.
Consideration: customers research your product and compare it to others by reading reviews, comparing prices, and evaluating features.
Onboarding: once customers decide to use your product, they set up an account and learn to use its features . If your product uses a freemium model, these people may be users before converting to paying customers.
Engagement: customers regularly use and engage with your product, its features, and its content. During engagement , they often upgrade to paid services and make purchases.
Support: customers may require support during their journey. Organizations must answer questions (customer service, docs, etc.), identify ways to streamline experiences, and reduce support queries.
Retention & loyalty: when customers have positive engagement and support experiences, they will continue using the product and recommend it to others.

Touchpoints and Channels

Touchpoints and channels are points of interaction between a brand and its customers.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the interaction points between a customer and a brand, including physical, digital, and emotional. Some touchpoint examples include paid ads, social media posts, customer service interactions, and product experiences.

Channels are the mediums or platforms delivering these touchpoints–for example, social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), email marketing, ad channels (Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads), digital products, and physical locations (stores, service centers, events, etc.).

Organizations map these touchpoints and channels to identify areas for improvement and optimize the customer experience.

Emotions, Motivations, and Pain Points

Understanding a user’s emotions, motivations, and pain points throughout the customer journey is crucial, as these elements drive user actions and decision-making.

Here is a rough outline of how these core user elements relate to each other:

Emotions: The feelings people experience at each stage of the customer journey, including excitement, happiness, frustration, disappointment, and anger. Designers use empathy maps to visualize these emotions across the customer journey.
Motivations: The reasons why people take action at different stages of the customer journey.
Pain points: The challenges or obstacles customers experience during a customer journey.

By identifying these factors at each stage of the customer journey map, product teams can create solutions to reduce and mitigate problems while streamlining customer experiences.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

Select the appropriate format and tools for your journey map

The format and tools required for your journey map will depend on its complexity, level of detail, and available resources. Here are some tips:

Consider your audience: who is the journey map for, and what are their needs? Do you need a high-level overview or a detailed step-by-step analysis?
Choose a format: the level of detail will dictate the structure and medium of your journey map, including flowcharts, diagrams, infographics, and spreadsheets.
Use tools: there are many tools for creating and sharing high-quality journey maps, including Lucidchart, UXPressia , Canva, Miro, Mural, and design tools.
Find collaborators: identify teams, stakeholders , and departments that can offer insights and different perspectives about your customers to make journey maps as accurate and relevant as possible.

Collect and incorporate data from various sources

List the touchpoints and channels customers will have with your brand for the specific journey, including website, social media channels, customer service, etc.
Gather research data from customer surveys, user research, user interviews, analytics (product, social media, etc.), and other relevant sources.
Analyze the data to identify patterns, trends, and behavior . The key is to find common customer pain points and friction across the journey.
Create a visual representation of your customer journey, illustrating touchpoints and interactions and noting customer emotions, motivations, and pain points at each stage.

Visualize the customer journey in a clear and engaging way

Use your research to create a visualization of your customer journey. Start by sketching the journey and touchpoints or create a simple flow diagram mapping each step.

We recommend using customer journey map templates from Mural , UXPressia , or Miro to streamline the process and produce beautiful visualizations to share with your organization. You can even use a free whiteboard tool like Google Jamboard or create your journey map in a spreadsheet.

Recommended reading from UXPressia: Customer Journey Mapping Mistakes and How to Avoid Them .

Customer Journey Map Examples of Templates

Here are some customer journey map examples of templates that you may use at work or as an inspiration for your own visualizations.

user journey map interaction design example min

Design, Prototype, and Test Customer Experiences with UXPin

Prototyping and testing are crucial for iterating and evolving customer experiences. Designers must assess various user experiences within a customer journey to ensure they’re free of roadblocks, usability issues, and friction.

Product design teams can use UXPin’s advanced features to build prototypes that accurately replicate the final product experience. These interactive prototypes give designers meaningful, actionable feedback from usability participants and stakeholders to iterate and improve. Create beautiful, intuitive product experiences your customers will love with UXPin. Sign up for a free trial .

Build prototypes that are as interactive as the end product. Try UXPin

by UXPin on 17th April, 2023

UXPin is a web-based design collaboration tool. We’re pleased to share our knowledge here.

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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user persona and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created.

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate.

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session.

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful?

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

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Team members are skilled at understanding , empathizing and resolving requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

Creating the user's backstory is an important part of user journey mapping.

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User Journey vs User Flow: Differences and Similarities

Understanding the user experience is crucial for designing successful digital products. User journeys and flows help designers create a plan that meets users’ needs and marketing goals. The differences and similarities of user journey vs user flow impact UX design and help improve user experience.

In this blog, we will explore the differences and similarities between user journey and user flow, understand how these concepts impact UX design, and discuss how they can improve user experience.

What is A User Journey?

A user journey is how a user interacts with a product or service from their perspective. Visually, it’s called a user journey map. This map includes different steps and situations, captures key touchpoints, highlights the user’s emotions as they interact with a business, and includes other layers of the journey map.

The user or customer journey begins when customers interact with a company. It starts when they first hear about the company, either online or from friends, and goes through every interaction until they’re done, feeling either happy or unhappy. User research will help you to create a user journey.

User journey maps focus on what users want and how they feel as they move through each step. They follow their steps, stage by stage, identifying the channels they use, gathering their quotes, listing their actions, highlighting journey-related problems, and offering ideas on how to address them.

Key elements of a user journey include:

Persona: User characteristics, motivations, and goals.
Stages: Steps a user takes when interacting with a business.
Touchpoints: Interactions users have with a product or service.
Emotions: User feelings and reactions throughout the journey.
Goals: User’s desired outcomes driving their behavior.
Pain points: Frustrations or obstacles users may encounter.
Opportunities: Areas for improvement based on user feedback.
Metrics: Quantitative measures to evaluate user journey success.

What is A User Flow?

A user flow shows the steps users take to reach their goals during their journey. It’s different from a user journey because user flow focuses on the technical side of how users interact with a product or service.

User flows explain the technical details of one stage in the user journey. For instance, if the stage is installation, the user flow will cover the specifics of this stage:

What dialog windows show up.
What they say.
Which buttons to click next.

User flows are important for developing or redesigning interfaces. They introduce the addition of new features and the adjustment of a service or product. They help identify inconsistencies in user steps, missing hints, unnecessary actions, bugs in the process, and more. Additionally, you can use user flows to communicate design ideas and collaborate with stakeholders effectively.

Key elements of a user flow include:

Entry point: Where the user enters the product or service, such as a homepage.
Actions: The user’s steps to complete a task or achieve a goal.
Decision points: Points where the user must make a decision to proceed.
Feedback: Information provided to the user throughout the process.
Exit point: Where the user leaves the product or service.
Obstacles: Barriers or challenges that may prevent the user from completing their task.
Context: The user’s environment, situation, or mindset that influences their behavior.
Time: The duration of each step and the overall time to complete the process.

What is The Difference Between User Journey vs User Flow?

User journeys and flows are two different types of user experience mapping, each serving distinct purposes in UX design. While both map out a user’s path, they do so in different ways, with specific focuses and scopes.

What are The Similarities Between User Journey vs User Flow?

Although the user journey and user flow are different ideas, they have many similarities and are useful for UX design.

Both focus on the user: User journey and user flow aim to improve the user experience.
Improving user experience: Both concepts work towards understanding how users interact with a product to make their experience smoother.
Monitoring user interactions: Both user journey and user flow track how users use a product over time.
Identifying user goals and problems: Both help designers prioritize improvements by determining what users want and where they face difficulties.
Communication tools: Both can be used to explain ideas to others, like stakeholders and developers.
Understanding user needs: Both give insights into what users need, helping prioritize changes and features based on what users do and want.

How to Create A User Journey Map?

Creating a user journey map is essential for understanding and improving the user experience. A user journey is your user’s story. And just like any good story, the details make all the difference. Here’s how you can create an effective user journey map:

Build your team: Get people from different departments, like marketing, sales, and customer support, to help.
Think like your users: Imagine what your users feel, want, and do at each step of their journey.
Map the touchpoints: Find where users interact with your product, like visiting your website or calling customer support.
Outline the journey stages: Write down the main steps of the user’s journey, from first hearing about your product to becoming a loyal customer.
Fill in the details: Add what users are trying to do at each stage, what they do, and any problems they face. Use real data and feedback to make your user journey map accurate.

To ensure your users have a good experience, using real data is important, not guesses. Keep improving the user journey regularly because it can change. Working with experts like UX designers and customer support teams helps you better understand users and make the user journey mapping match their real experiences.

How to Create A User Flow Chart or Diagram?

A user flow diagram is a visual representation of the steps a user takes to complete a task or achieve a goal within a product or service. It helps designers and developers understand the user experience and identify areas for improvement in a product or service. Here’s how you can create one:

Identify the Goal: Decide what the user needs to do. It could be purchasing, signing up, or completing a task.
List Key Steps: Break down the user flow into smaller steps. Start with the big picture, then add details.
Define Decision Points: Figure out where the user has to make choices. These could include picking options, giving information, or taking action.
Map the Flow: Draw the user flow using a chart or diagram. Use symbols and arrows to show each step and how they connect.
Consider Errors: Consider what could go wrong. Plan alternative paths when things don’t go as expected.
Review and Improve: Once you’ve created your flow chart, check it to ensure it’s correct. Based on feedback or testing, make changes.

Combining User Journeys and User Flows

Understanding how users interact with a product involves looking at both their overall journey and the specific paths they take. User flows zoom in on particular journey parts to give a closer look.

For example, consider someone new to a medical practice. Along their journey, they might check out the practice’s website or view test results online. By mapping out the steps for these tasks, you can get more details about what they’re experiencing.

But sometimes, teams find it hard to link these views together because of how they are set up, because they do not have a complete way to measure everything, or because they do not have enough people with the right skills and time.

It’s really important to know the user experience when they visit your website. This helps you grow in the future and plan how customers go through your website. Once you can see how people use your website and why they stick around or leave, you can use QuestionPro CX to ask them questions and get feedback.

QuestionPro CX is a customer experience management software that can assist businesses in creating customer journey maps by offering a variety of features. You can create a detailed user journey map template using QuestionPro CX. This tool can help you gain valuable insights into your customers’ experiences.

Explore the capabilities of QuestionPro CX today.

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How to Create Effective Journey Maps: Learnings from the IxDF Course

A low conversion rate (below 2%) usually means a website struggles to keep visitors interested. Journey mapping helps identify why visitors leave quickly and tracks every step of a user's interaction with a website. The goal is simple: to create a smooth, enjoyable journey to make users return. Learn the secrets of journey maps with the IxDF course, Journey mapping . This course shows you how to pinpoint improvement areas effectively and how to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

Have you ever found yourself lost on a website, unsure where to click next? Frustrating digital experiences make us want to give up and leave. This is why journey mapping is so important. It's a strategic approach in UX design that lays out a user's path through a product or service. When you understand each step a user takes, you can create more intuitive and enjoyable experiences.

In journey mapping, you plot a course to guide users from one point to another. This method reveals the pain points and moments of delight in a user's product interaction. When you smooth out these critical junctures, you can craft solutions that meet and exceed user expectations.

“ Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” - Joe Sparano

Journey mapping equips us with the insights needed to refine the user experience and create first encounters with your product, both positive and memorable. Since 94% of first impressions relate to a website's design, it’s critical to make an excellent first impression through a well-mapped user journey. A solid understanding of journey mapping principles can transform a confusing or mediocre user experience into one that’s engaging and seamless.

To create seamless user journeys, you must understand the journey mapping process in detail. Look at the fundamental aspects you should explore to craft better digital experiences.

Journey Mapping: The Essentials

Journey mapping enables teams to visualize the user's experience from initial contact through various interactions to the final goal. Let’s run through the basics.

What is Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping creates a detailed visualization of a user's experience with a product or service. It maps out each step a user takes. It highlights their feelings, motivations and challenges. This process helps you identify pain points and opportunities to enhance the user experience.

Watch Matt Snyder, Head of Product & Design at Hivewire, discuss journey mapping in UX.

Transcript loading…

Why Journey Mapping Matters

Journey mapping matters because it shows where users face struggles and frustrations. If you understand these issues, you can make your websites or services better. This means happier customers who are more likely to return and recommend the product/service to others.

Consider the process users follow to book a flight online. The user's journey begins with the search for flights. Here, they might encounter their first obstacle: a confusing interface. This moment could lead to frustration. It may push them towards a competitor's website. Journey mapping would reveal this pain point and allow you to simplify the search process.

Next, the user selects a flight. If the site bombards them with too many upsell options, like seat upgrades or extra baggage, it might overwhelm them. A well-designed journey map would highlight this issue. It may suggest a more streamlined and helpful upsell process, not pushy.

Finally, the user reaches the payment section. A complex checkout process with unclear pricing and surprise charges can deter them from completing the purchase. Journey mapping pinpoints this critical moment. You may have to recommend a clearer, more concise checkout flow.

If you map out this journey, your design team can:

Simplify the flight search interface to reduce initial frustration.

Streamline the upsell process to enhance the user experience without overwhelming them.

Revise the checkout process for clarity and ease. You must encourage the completion of the purchase.

Watch this quick video that explains the power of mapping.

How Journey Mapping Improves UX

Journey mapping provides a clear framework to analyze and optimize each touchpoint in the user's journey. It allows you to:

Identify and eliminate barriers that cause frustration or abandonment.

Enhance features that users find valuable.

Design with a holistic understanding of the user's experience.

Journey Mapping Variations

Journey mapping comes in different forms. Each one offers unique insights into the user experience. These variations can help you apply the right approach to your UX challenges. You’ll learn about these variations in detail in our journey mapping course.

Experience Maps

Experience maps are the broadest form of journey maps. They map out the overall human experience in different situations. You can use these maps for more than product or service interactions. Their goal is to get a broad understanding of human behaviors and feelings.

For example, consider mapping the common experience of commuting. This could include various methods like walking or biking to public transport. Experience maps can help you spot common issues and chances for improvement. They prepare you for more detailed studies.

Example of an Experience map for ordering a car through an app. It shows the actions, problems, emotions, quotes and opportunities that relate to the user.

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps narrow the focus. They focus on how a person interacts with a specific product or service. These maps help us understand a customer's experience with a business.

A customer journey map includes the following elements.

Customer persona : This defines a typical customer. You create a character that represents a part of your customer base.

Phases : Stages of the customer journey. It typically includes Awareness, Research, Consideration, Purchase and Support.

Touchpoints : These are all interaction points between the customer and your brand across different phases. This interaction may happen through marketing materials, digital presence, staff interactions, purchase process and post-purchase follow-up.

Customer thoughts, actions and emotions : Detail what customers think, do and feel at each touchpoint. Use surveys and direct feedback for accuracy.

Opportunities : You list the chances to improve the customer's experience, solve any issues they face and make their journey smoother.

For instance, with a music streaming app like Spotify, a customer journey map would show how a user finds, chooses and uses the app. It would point out their main steps and where they might have problems.

An example of a customer journey map for a music streaming app. It tracks interactions from the initial visit to the response. It also highlights emotions and thoughts at each stage.

Service Blueprints

Service blueprints build on what we learn from customer journey maps . Unlike journey maps, which focus on the customer's experience, service blueprints give us a peek into how the service works behind the scenes. They show how different parts of the service work together to support the customer's journey.

The anatomy of a service blueprint showing all the key processes in different phases. (described below)

A service blueprint maps out five key areas:

Physical evidence: This is anything the customer can see, touch or interact with, like a website or a product. It includes all the physical parts of the service.

Customer's actions: These are the steps customers take when they use the service. The service needs these actions to meet the customer's needs.

Frontstage: This area is all about what the customer interacts with directly. It's the part of the service the customer sees and uses.

Backstage: These are the parts of the service that happen out of the customer's view. They support the frontstage but remain hidden to the customer.

Supporting actions: These are the behind-the-scenes processes that make sure the service operates smoothly.

The Role of Research in Effective Journey Mapping

You need comprehensive data—both qualitative and quantitative—to create an accurate and useful journey map. This process involves understanding the problems your users face and the potential solutions. Here’s an overview of key steps to collect the necessary information.

Research Problems and Solutions

Identify the problems and opportunities within the user experience. You must look at the issue from two angles: the problem space and the solution space.

In the problem space, you aim to understand the user's challenges, needs and pain points. You typically do this through qualitative user research , such as user observation and interviews. Quantitative methods like surveys can also contribute. You don’t need to consider the existing solutions.

A straightforward perspective grid for a person aiming to become an expert drummer. This individual needs a clear path, access to drums and some instruction.

In the solution space, you ideate potential solutions to problems you identified. This shift requires a creative approach. You aim to explore various ideas that effectively address users’ needs and evaluate those in usability sessions or A/B testing.

A simple perspective grid for a Rhythm Road customer. This customer is between coaching sessions. They need help from Rhythm Road to remember to practice.

Organize Your Research

A perspective grid helps you organize and synthesize the data collected from your research. You can use it to ensure the remainder of the journey mapping process proceeds smoothly. It allows you to categorize insights based on different user perspectives or personas . This step helps you understand the experiences and expectations of your user base.

To create a perspective grid, list your user personas along one axis and the stages of their journey along the other. Fill in each cell with the Gaps/Barriers/Pain/Risks relevant to that persona at each stage. This visualization helps you identify commonalities and differences across the journey.

How to Create Journey Map Variations

Each journey map variation helps you achieve specific goals. Let's explore how to create experience maps, customer journey maps and service design blueprints.

How to Create an Experience Map

An Experience Map involves a five-step approach.

Plan your experience map : Determine the scope. Decide who needs to participate in the workshop. Consider a cross-disciplinary team for better insights.

Customer research : Gather factual data along with user stories and analytics. This step helps you fill knowledge gaps.

Run the workshop : An all-day event where diverse voices collaborate. You must plan the event for productive outcomes.

Create your experience map : Turn the workshop findings into a visual map. This map should outline general common experiences related to your field.

Use your experience map : Apply what you learned to make decisions and improvements in your organization.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Follow these seven steps to map out the detailed interactions users have with your organization:

Define your objectives : Determine what you aim to achieve with the map.

Gather Information : Understand your customers’ behaviors, needs and how they interact with your product.

Identify customer touchpoints : Note how customers interact with your product. Then, understand how these touchpoints affect their experience.

Outline key stages of customer experience : From the customer's perspective, map the sequence of events. Document all events from initial contact to post-purchase support.

Start mapping : Use diagrams or digital tools to visualize the journey. Include touchpoints, emotional responses and any other relevant factors.

Validate your results : Get feedback from customers and internal teams to ensure accuracy.

Analyze your map : Compare it against your goals to see if it meets customer expectations.

How to Create a Service Design Blueprint

Service design focuses on the internal workings of a service. It outlines frontstage and backstage actions. Here’s how to develop a Service Design Blueprint:

Find support : Assemble a cross-disciplinary team and secure stakeholder buy-in.

Define the goal : Set a clear scope and business objective for the blueprint.

Gather research : Unlike customer journey mapping, a blueprint requires more internal research. It includes direct observations and employee interviews.

Map the blueprint : Organize a workshop to determine the five elements encountered throughout the service delivery.

Refine and distribute : Enhance the blueprint with contextual details. Then, distribute it to stakeholders to communicate the internal processes.

The Role of a Journey Mapping Workshop (and How to Do It Right)

The effectiveness of journey mapping hinges on a detailed and well-organized journey mapping workshop. This is when teams work together to understand and improve customer experiences.

Here’s how to navigate the pre-workshop preparation and conduct the workshop.

Before the Journey -Mapping Workshop

Preparation is key. Assemble a diverse team to bring a wide range of views. Prioritize the customer personas and scenarios you'll focus on to maintain a clear focus. Share existing research with all participants to get everyone on the same page. They should understand the journey's context.

Build a Collaborative Team

Journey mapping thrives on collaboration. Include people from various departments to ensure a holistic view of the customer journey. Don’t forget to invite stakeholders who will decide on the final approach. This team will help you create the map and implement its findings.

Prioritize Actors and Scenarios

Focus on specific customer personas and how they interact with your service. It helps you create a more targeted and actionable journey map. If you cover multiple personas or scenarios, plan how to manage this complexity.

Share and Analyze Existing Research

Compile and review all data related to the journey. This may include user experience studies, marketing analysis and customer feedback. Share information before the workshop to help everyone understand the starting point.

Assign Pre-Workshop Tasks

Assign homework to make the participants well-prepared. It includes background reading and key questions related to the journey. This pre-engagement makes the workshop more effective.

During the Journey-Mapping Workshop

The workshop should be an active and engaging process. It starts with building a basic understanding. Then, you map the customer's experience and brainstorm ways to improve it.

Establish the Foundation

You bring everyone on the same page to begin. Everyone should understand journey mapping principles, existing research and input methods. Use engaging activities like trivia to refresh key concepts and energize the group.

Map the Current State

The team would create an assumption-based map of the current journey. This should reflect the team’s collective understanding. Offer attendees a template to identify pain points with ease:

" requires ______ to achieve ______."

" requires ______, allowing them to ______."

For instance: "Bob requires an easier method to compare choices, allowing him to avoid feeling swamped."

Note : It’s important to avoid using the first person , like "As a I want...". This format can be repetitive and time-consuming in documents full of user stories. It also shifts important information into sentences that make them harder to scan and understand. More importantly, you must not assume the user's perspective as that can lead developers to project their own experiences and biases onto users.

Make the map open to revisions. Use customer interviews for this phase to validate assumptions and gain fresh insights.

Vision the Future State

Use the identified pain points to brainstorm ideas to improve the customer journey. Encourage teams to think big and use metaphors in their ideas. This prevents them from focusing too early on specific solutions, like features. Sketch and critique potential future interactions to translate these ideas into tangible designs.

You need the positive aspects on green sticky notes. You can mark areas for improvement on yellow ones. The critiques help refine the ideas.

Now, merge the best elements from these individual sketches into a unified future-state flow. You can then share this consolidated journey with the whole workshop team. It will help you paint a picture of what the improved customer experience could look like.

After the Journey -Mapping Workshop

The work doesn’t end when the workshop does. Quickly share the outcomes and next steps to maintain momentum. Further test and refine the ideas generated during the workshop. It’ll bring meaningful changes to the customer journey.

Share Workshop Insights

Document and distribute the workshop's findings to all participants and stakeholders. This includes:

The journey maps created

Identified pain points

Future state designs

Keep everyone informed for continued engagement and support in implementing changes.

Bring Ideas to Life

Translate the workshop's conceptual ideas into prototypes for user testing . This iterative design and feedback process helps refine the solutions into actionable improvements to the customer journey.

Continuously Refine the Process

With each workshop, gather feedback on what worked and what didn’t to improve future sessions. This continuous improvement ensures that journey mapping remains a productive and insightful tool for your organization.

This might seem like a lot, but if you want to learn about how to set up workshops, the journey mapping course can help you. You’ll learn how to:

Increase understanding

Create visions

Guide evaluations

Plan experiments

Build a workshop plan

About the Journey Mapping Course

Journey mapping is a 7-week course that will help you solve complex design problems with simple, user-friendly solutions. You’ll learn the right journey-mapping process for your goals and master data collection and analysis with a perspective grid. Create key journey maps: experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints. Gain skills to run a journey mapping workshop and turn insights into real solutions.

This course will help you if you want to design smooth shopping experiences, easy signup flows or engaging apps. Start with journey mapping basics. Understand its power and role in UX design. Learn to identify, read and use various journey maps. Gain data gathering and analysis skills. Then, finish with the ability to create journey maps and lead workshops.

Make sure to benefit from practical techniques and downloadable templates. Participate in three hands-on exercises in the " Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project. " These activities solidify your learning. They also offer an option to create a case study for your portfolio.

Learn from four industry experts:

Indi Young , founder of Adaptive Path, brings her deep understanding of data gathering in journey mapping. She wrote two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models .

Kai Wang shares insights from his experiences at CarMax and CapitalOne. She emphasizes journey mapping's organizational impact.

Head of Product & Design at Hivewire , Matt Snyder, presents journey mapping as an effective product development tool. He teaches the application of a perspective grid for smoother data-rich processes.

Christian Briggs , Senior Product Designer and Design Educator, guides you through this course with his extensive experience in digital product design and journey mapping.

This course caters to budding and intermediate designers eager to refine complex user experiences. It's ideal for:

Aspiring UX/ UI designers seeking foundational design skills.

Junior to mid-level designers aiming for advanced challenges and strategic team roles.

Product managers focused on crafting intricate experiences.

Join a global design community that shares knowledge. Collaborate, learn and grow with peers to enhance your design skills and career prospects.

Course Overview

Weekly lessons : We release each week with no deadlines.

Learning time : Approximately 9 hours and 54 minutes over the span of 7 weeks.

Where to Learn More

Enrollment for the Journey Mapping course is now open. It’s included in an IxDF membership.

To become a member, sign up here .

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Customer Journey Map Template

Map your customer journey and help your customers successfully get from A to B. Understand the reasoning behind their choices and design the best product experience and meet your customer's needs.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Customer Journey Map Template

A customer journey map, also known as a user journey map, is a visual representation of how customers experience your brand and company across all its touchpoints. In a customer journey map template, interactions are placed in a pre-made timeline to map out the user flow.

Since customers are the backbone of your business, it is important to understand their pain points, desires and needs so that you can create a customer-centric experience for them.

Many teams use customer journey mapping tools to visually represent customers' thought processes and emotions from their initial interaction until the end goal. This practice enables businesses to assess whether they are meeting their objectives. Doing so can improve their conversion rates and enhance the overall customer experience.

How to use Miro’s customer journey map template

Here are 6 steps to create a successful CJM using the customer journey mapping template. In each section, we will dive a little deeper, but remember, every customer journey map is different, so you may spend more time on one step compared to another.

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Identify your goal for the map. Identifying your ideal outcome will help set the foundations for a successful project.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

Why are you making a customer journey map?

Who is it specifically about?

What experience is it based upon?

Based on this, you may want to create a buyer persona. This is a fictitious customer with all their demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. Having a clear persona is helpful in reminding you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward them.

2. Identify your user personas and define their goals

Use the Game-Changer container on the template to identify your persona.

Answer these three questions:

What are their key goals and needs?

What do they struggle with most?

What tasks do they have?

Conduct user research to help you in this process. Survey customers to understand their buying journey, or ask the sales team or customer service representatives for feedback or the most frequently asked questions. You would want to hear the experience of people who are interested in your product and who have interacted with it to understand their pain points and what can be done to improve.

3. Highlight target customer personas

Once you’ve discovered all the different buyer personas that interact with your business, you will need to narrow the list down and select one or two to focus on.

A customer journey map is a specific journey one customer takes, so having too many personas on one map will not be a precise indication of their journey and not a reflection of their true experience.

4. Identify all possible customer touchpoints

Based on your research, you can now use this information to map out all the possible customer touchpoints your customer will face. Use the User Journey Map Template to add the outcomes you want your customer to achieve, and then map all the steps they need to take in order to achieve these outcomes.

List out all of the touchpoints your customer currently has, and then make another list of where you would like your customers to have additional touchpoints. Then check if there are any overlaps.

This step is vital as it can show you whether you have too few or too many touchpoints and gives you a rough idea of your current customer journey experience.

Touch points are not limited to just your website. Look at other areas such as:

Social media channels

Email marketing

3rd party reviews or mentions

Pro Tip: Run a quick Google search of your business and identify all the pages that mention your brand. Verify this using Google Analytics to see what brings in the most traffic.

This step is very important as it can help you understand things like, are the lack of touchpoints the reason why my customers are turning away? If there are more than expected, are they getting too overwhelmed?

5. Build the customer journey map and try it yourself!

Once you have gathered all the necessary information and identified all the touchpoints your customer will experience, it will finally be time to start building your own customer journey map.

Ensure that you note down every point your customer will touch your business. Remember to add their actions, needs, pains, and feelings to your customer journey map.

Creating the map alone isn’t the end of the process. You will need to go through the journey yourself and analyze the results. By going through the journey first-hand, you will see the areas where expectations might not have been met.

For each persona, go through every journey from beginning to end and take notes.

6. Adjust as needed

Once you have gone through each persona map, you will get a clearer understanding of what your customers are experiencing.

Ensure that all the needs are met and pain points are addressed. No matter how big or small the changes are, every single change has an impact. And this small impact could be the deciding factor for purchase, signup, or download.

Add all the opportunities and improvements you could introduce to your User Journey Map Template . Brainstorm with your team ideas to implement changes, and make sure you assign the right team members to each process.

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What should be included in a customer journey map template?

Every customer journey map will be different. No map is linear, so it is okay not to have a direct A to B Journey. Below we have compiled a number of points that may be included in a customer journey map template:

1. Significant milestones

In order to begin with a successful customer journey map, it is important to draft a path your customer will be journeying through to reach your business’s goal. This step is also useful as you can preemptively identify potential hiccups that might ensue here.

2. User engagement

This element is where you map out the details of how your customer will interact with your site or product. Think of how you would like this to be in order for you to achieve your goal.

3. Emotions

As we seek positive experiences, it is also important to ensure our customers feel relief, excitement, and happiness. Therefore, to mitigate any negative emotions, ensure you have a clear and concise process with appropriate branding to avoid creating negative opinions.

4. Pain Points

When your customers are experiencing a negative emotion, there is a reason why. Adding pain points to your customer journey map will help you identify the reasons behind them and come up with a solution to fix them.

5. Solutions

And finally, add solutions. Once you and your team have identified the pain points, brainstorm and implement solutions to improve your user experience.

How do I use a customer journey map template?

You can create your CJM with Miro’s free Customer Journey Map Template and customize it according to your brand or product needs. When using your own CJM template, remember to define the scope, what touchpoints you want to analyze, and who inside your organization has ownership of which step.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Using a user journey map template can be key to better understanding your customers. Customer journey mapping puts you and your team in the mind of the customer and helps you to visualize what they are experiencing at each stage and touchpoint with your business or product. Outlining the stages of interaction, while keeping the customer front and center, allows you to identify any pain points that could be improved. This will better not only the customer experience but will help with customer retention in the long run.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. Touchpoints can be found in places where your business comes in direct contact with potential or existing customers. A display ad, an interaction with an employee, a 404 error, and even a Google review can be considered a customer touchpoint. Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so it’s important that the different types of touch points are considered in your customer journey map because they can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

Your map should be a constant work-in-progress. Reviewing it on a monthly or quarterly basis will help you to identify gaps and opportunities for streamlining your customer journey further. Use your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks. It would also be helpful to schedule regular meetings to analyze any changes that might affect the customer journey.

Do all businesses need a customer journey map?

Customer journey mapping is important for businesses of all sizes. From SMBs to Enterprise. It is also important for all functions. From sales and marketing to customer service. There is no one size fits all for customer journey maps. Therefore, it is important to take time to personalise your own customer journey map to fully understand your own process and identify your own pain points.

Get started with this template right now.

Prototype Template

Works best for:.

UX Design, Design Thinking

A prototype is a live mockup of your product that defines the product’s structure, user flow, and navigational details (such as buttons and menus) without committing to final details like visual design. Prototyping allows you to simulate how a user might experience your product or service, map out user contexts and task flows, create scenarios to understand personas, and collect feedback on your product. Using a prototype helps you save money by locating roadblocks early in the process. Prototypes can vary, but they generally contain a series of screens or artboards connected by arrows or links.

Root Cause Evaluation Template

When you first encounter a complex situation, it's not common to immediately delve into its underlying causes and effects. Often, we grasp the overall picture but fail to separate the problem from its surrounding circumstances. Root Cause Evaluation provides a method to better understand the interconnected factors that have contributed to the current situation.

Features Audit Template

Desk Research, Product Management, User Experience

Add new features or improve existing features—those are the two paths toward improving a product. But which should you take? A features audit will help you decide. This easy, powerful product management tool will give you a way to examine all of your features, then gather research and have detailed discussions about the ones that simply aren’t working. Then you can decide if you should increase those features’ visibility or the frequency with which it’s used—or if you should remove it altogether.

Annual Calendar Template

Business Management, Strategic Planning, Project Planning

Plenty of calendars help you focus on the day-to-day deadlines. With this one, it’s all about the big picture. Borrowing from the grid structure of 12-month wall calendars, this template shows you your projects, commitments, and goals one full year at a time. So you and your team can prepare to hunker down during busy periods, move things around as needed, and celebrate your progress. And getting started is so easy—just name your calendar’s color-coded streams and drag stickies onto the start date.

Website Wireframing Template

Wireframes, User Experience

Wireframing is a method for designing a website at the structural level. A wireframe is a stylized layout of a web page showcasing the interface elements on each page. Use this Wireframe Template to iterate on web pages quickly and cheaply. You can share the wireframe with clients or teammates and collaborate with stakeholders. Wireframes allow teams to get stakeholder buy-in without investing too much time or resources. They help ensure that your website’s structure and flow will meet user needs and expectations.

Empathy Map Template

Market Research, User Experience, Mapping

Attracting new users, compelling them to try your product, and turning them into loyal customers—it all starts with understanding them. An empathy map is a tool that leads to that understanding, by giving you space to articulate everything you know about your customers, including their needs, expectations, and decision-making drivers. That way you’ll be able to challenge your assumptions and identify the gaps in your knowledge. Our template lets you easily create an empathy map divided into four key squares—what your customers Say, Think, Do, and Feel.

User Journey vs User Flow: What’s the Difference and Why You Need Both?

What’s the difference between user journey vs user flow? In UX design , there’s a lot of confusion about what these terms mean—even amongst experienced designers.

After all, they both describe a similar idea: a visual representation of a user’s actions when interacting with a product.

But despite their close relationship, they differ in several ways.

In this article, we’ll take a look at why you need both, the difference between them, and when to use each to improve your entire user experience.

Let’s get started.

User flow is a detailed representation of the path that shows the specific steps users take to complete a particular task.
User flows focus on identifying friction points in the journey and removing them from the UI design, keeping users on a happy path.
A happy path is the shortest path users can take to achieve their desired result without encountering any errors.
User flows are used by designers to map out feature functionality and technical requirements when building products.
The user journey is the representation of the overall experience a customer has while engaging with your product across their journey.

With a journey map, product teams can carry out user research, improve user flow , and design a personalized product experience.

Create a user journey map at the initial research phase of a project to understand user behavior and communicate the entire experience to stakeholders.
The key difference between a user flow and a user journey is that a user journey gives a macro view of a customer experience, while a user flow gives a more zoomed-in view of the actions of a user.
The key similarity between these two tools is that they’re user-centered.

Want to build a better user experience without the stress of coding from scratch? Book a demo call with the Userpilot team and get started!

What is a user flow?

A user flow is a detailed illustration that shows the specific steps a user takes to complete a task using your product.

Think of it as a visual map of all the UI interactions the user has.

A user flow is visualized with flow charts, made up of boxes and arrows. Each box represents a step in a user’s action, like entering information or clicking a button.

Example of a user flow

Let’s say we want to get users to create an account and complete their profiles. Here’s an example of what a signup flow might look like for a social media app:

The user launches the app and lands on the signup screen
The user clicks on signup to create a new account.
At the point of registration, they provide information like email and password
After the user creates an account, they’re asked to verify their email address
When they’ve successfully verified their email, they’re redirected to the profile page to set up their account
When this is completed, they save the changes and go to the home screen

The example stated above is known as a happy path . This simply means the path users take to achieve their desired result without encountering friction. In real life, however, things could go differently.

For instance, a user might take other alternative paths, like providing invalid credentials. These unhappy paths can be a gold mine when you’re looking into improving the user experience.

What’s the purpose of a user flow?

A user flow describes what a user sees on the screen and how they interact with the screen to move forward. This is critical for designing good product experiences, without getting lost in the details.

In summary, user flow should answer questions like:

What should the user see first?
How will they navigate between screens?
What do users want to accomplish when they use this feature?
What actions will users take at each stage of their journey?

It is also important to note that user flow is crucial for the development phase. Developers use this tool to translate designs into physical features.

Also, during a project, it’s possible to have several user flows.

So, every user flow diagram should have a name and a well-detailed description to communicate what each of the steps is and what it is accomplishing.

When should you use a user flow?

A user flow is used by designers to map out features and technical requirements. It can be used at any stage—before or during development—but it’s most effective when introduced in the early stages of the design process.

By understanding a user flow, you can analyze where a user drops off and debug the reasons before they become costly issues.

Did they encounter a bug? How can the flow be improved to reduce drop-off? Do we reduce the steps or the number of screens?

These are questions that can be answered by mapping the user flows.

What is a user journey in UX?

A user journey , also known as a customer journey, is the experience your customers have when interacting with your product at each touchpoint.

Think of it as the “story” of all the interactions and experiences between a user and your product, starting from the awareness stage to the activation point .

A user journey is a comprehensive tool.

Unlike user flows, it takes into consideration the overall customer experience, including the customer’s emotions, pain points, and expectations across various channels.

With a user journey, you can identify gaps in the customer’s experience and how you can improve.

Example of a user journey

User journey maps can be built in different stages and for multiple user personas. For example, you can map:

A day in the life journey to discover the activities of your users on a regular day- this helps you better understand them and how they interact with multiple products, not just yours. It also makes you more mindful when making decisions.
The current state of your user and how the product and experience are so you can uncover friction points in their journey.
The future state user journey map to predict what their experience will look like. This often involves assumptions.

What’s the purpose of a user journey?

A user journey tracks users’ behavior when they’re interacting with your product.

A well-designed user journey map will give you insights into your personas’ minds to see what they’re thinking, feeling, and seeing at every point of interaction.

It also identifies possible friction points and potential areas for improvement.

The bottom line is, that without “seeing” the user’s journey, it’s hard to work on improving the overall product experience.

When should you use a user journey?

Customer journey maps should be created during the research phase of a project. Using this tool, project teams can capture a complete picture of the customer’s journey and see the product from the user’s point of view.

A journey map is also a great tool to walk stakeholders through the entire user journey, irrespective of their technical background.

In addition to this, customer journey maps also serve as a way to track user interactions and obtain feedback at every touchpoint that is valuable for product improvements.

With the collected feedback, it’s easy to prioritize the features important to the users.

What is the difference between user journey and user flow?

User journeys and user flows are two different types of user experience mapping. Although they both map out the path of a user, they do so in different ways.

The key difference between a user journey and a user flow is that a user journey focuses on the overall experience of an individual user, while a user flow focuses on each step in the design process. Here are other things that make them different:

The number of users considered

A user flow concentrates on individual micro-interactions, while user journeys examine the macro-interactions of multiple user personas at once. Because of this, it’s often easier to create and maintain a user flow than a full-blown user journey map.

The purpose

User journey helps you understand the overall experience of your customers at different touchpoints. User flow, on the other hand, outlines the process that each user takes to achieve their goal.

The specificity of actions

User journeys are more generic. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of customer behavior across different platforms (mobile apps, web apps, etc.). In contrast, user flows are a lot more detailed and centered around one interface, e.g. web apps, capturing one step at a time.

The key focus

A user journey is experience-focused; it deals with the users’ experience at each stage of interaction. User flow is action-focused; it concentrates on the details of the actions a user takes.

Time range measured

User flow details the steps taken at a specific time, whereas a user journey map concentrates on the steps taken over time—from the awareness stage to when they actually buy from you.

What are the similarities between user flows vs user journeys?

Now that we’ve covered the differences between user flow vs user journey, it’s time to focus on what they have in common. Here are some similarities:

They both have a common end goal—the user
Both focus on creating the best user experience
Both monitor how a user interacts with a product during its lifecycle
Both tools are used for identifying users’ goals and pain points
They can also be used as a communication tool for stakeholders and developers
They give us insight into users’ needs and which features to prioritize

What comes first, user flow or user journey? Do you need both?

The short answer is neither.

Just like it’s hard to know if UI or UX comes first, it’s hard to tell if the user flow should come before the user journey. But here’s a better way to look at it.

The user interface (UI) is mapped using user flows. This means that the user flow determines what appears on the user’s screen at different times.

Meanwhile, the user experience is mapped using user journeys. They go hand-in-hand with each other.

Start by mapping the main stages of the user journey, then add experience details with user flow maps. Also, it’s important to note that user journeys are used to map the entire journey of a user or specific interactions for a more granular view.

For example, you can map a user’s journey from trial signup to the activation point.

This will help you to understand the main steps the users go through to convert. It will also reveal points of drop-off and why. That is why it’s best practice to create multiple flows that look at the UI steps the user takes.

Both user flow and user journey are great tools for creating an enhanced user experience. While user flows describe the specific steps a user takes to complete an action, the user journey considers the emotional response to each step.

Combining both tools creates a good user experience that increases customer satisfaction.

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The 3 competencies of journey management.

Summary: Managing journeys requires a continuous practice of 3 interdependent competencies: collecting insights, analyzing them to drive design strategy, and orchestrating journey experiences for users.

5 minute video by 2024-04-24 5

Kim Salazar
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The Practice of Customer-Journey Management

User journeys should be managed like products — by people and teams with specialized, journey-dedicated roles who continually research, measure, optimize, and orchestrate the experience.

Video Author

Kim Salazar is a Senior User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Salazar combines her background as a developer and education in Computer Science with her user experience expertise, particularly around complex applications, to bring well-rounded insights to her work.

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COMMENTS

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]
6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams. Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is convenient for cross-functional teams to provide feedback. Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team so they always keep the customer in mind.
How to Create Customer & User Journey Maps (+Examples & Template)
A user journey map (also called a customer journey map) visually represents a typical user's path when using a product. It's a popular user experience research technique that reveals how users interact with and use a product over time - starting with your new user onboarding flow.. The purpose of journey mapping is to get inside the head of your users, allowing you to make meaningful ...
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A customer journey map is a chart that displays the stages your customers experience when interfacing with your business. ... for one user and two editors. Starting price . $7 per user per month ...
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The main job of a UX designer is to make products intuitive, functional, and enjoyable to use. By creating a user journey map, you're thinking about a product from a potential customer's point of view. This can help in several ways. User journey maps foster a user-centric mentality. You'll focus on how a user might think and feel while ...
Customer Journey Map: Definition & Process
A customer journey map and a user journey map are tools to understand the experience of users or customers with a product or service. A customer journey map is a broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It considers physical and digital channels, multiple user personas, and emotional and qualitative ...
A comprehensive guide to effective customer journey mapping
To create a customer journey map, you begin by researching who users are, what they want from your site, and how positive or negative their experiences have been. There are two main purposes for mapping your customers' journey. 1. Improve customer experience. This is the ultimate goal of CJM.
What is the User Journey? [Definition + Examples]
A user or customer journey, sometimes visualized as a journey map, is the path a person follows as they discover a product, service, or brand, learn about it, consider spending money on it, and then make a decision to purchase—or not. Not every user journey ends in a conversion, but it is typically the goal. Creating a customer journey map ...
Customer Journey Stages: The Complete Guide
User Experience. Run concept tests, pricing studies, prototyping + more with fast, powerful studies designed by UX research experts. ... A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map ...
Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)
The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey. Benefits of customer journey mapping
How To Create A User Journey Map: Examples + Template
Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad. To see how this works, consider a practical example.
Journey Mapping 101
Definition of a Journey Map. Definition: A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative.
Illustrating the user experience with customer journey maps
A customer journey map is a flowchart that depicts the various stops that customers make before, during, and after purchasing. Product teams can refer to their customer journey maps for various reasons. In fact, different roles have different uses for them — product designers can use them to identify and then solve customer/user problems, UX ...
7 Differences Between Customer Journey vs. User Journey
Gathering user feedback through surveys, usability testing, and user reviews provides valuable insights into the user journey's effectiveness. 6. Decision-making Process. The decision-making process is another main point where you will get a contrast between user experience and customer journey.
How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)
How to create a customer journey map (step-by-step) Here's how to create a user journey map in 6 steps: Choose a user journey map template (or create your own) Define your persona and scenario. Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions. Fill in the user's thoughts, emotions, and pain-points. Identify opportunities.
Difference between Customer Journey and User Journey.
1. The Customer Journey considers physical and digital channels, while the User Journey only considers digital channels: as we mentioned earlier, the customer journey takes into account from start to finish all the interaction points that the customer has with the organization, from the moment He knows it until the after-sales service, so he ...
UX Customer Journey
Here is a rough outline of how these core user elements relate to each other: Emotions: The feelings people experience at each stage of the customer journey, including excitement, happiness, frustration, disappointment, and anger. Designers use empathy maps to visualize these emotions across the customer journey.
User Journeys vs. User Flows
What Is a User Journey? User journey: (Or customer journey) A scenario-based sequence of the steps that a user takes in order to accomplish a high-level goal with a company or product, usually across channels and over time. The underlying goal of a user journey is high-level. Describing the journey will involve understanding the experience of a user across many points of interaction, because ...
Customer Journey Insights: What Are They and How to Collect Them?
If it's your first customer journey analysis, adopt a more holistic approach. That's how you identify the most urgent areas for improvement or pick some low-hanging fruit. SMART goal-setting framework. 2. Map out the complete customer journey. A user journey map is a visualization of: Key user journey stages (awareness, consideration, etc.).
Customer Journey Mapping
Set the stage (5 min) It's really important that your group understands the user persona and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the ...
Customer Journey Maps vs. User Journeys
A long time ago (circa 2014) I developed a reasonably complex UCD methodology for multi-channel customer journey mapping — the kind of thing that requires qualified UX or Service Design ...
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The user or customer journey begins when customers interact with a company. It starts when they first hear about the company, either online or from friends, and goes through every interaction until they're done, feeling either happy or unhappy. User research will help you to create a user journey.
How to Create Effective Journey Maps: Learnings from the IxDF Course
Customer Journey Maps. Customer journey maps narrow the focus. They focus on how a person interacts with a specific product or service. These maps help us understand a customer's experience with a business. ... For instance, with a music streaming app like Spotify, a customer journey map would show how a user finds, chooses and uses the app. It ...
Customer Journey Map Template
A customer journey map, also known as a user journey map, is a visual representation of how customers experience your brand and company across all its touchpoints. In a customer journey map template, interactions are placed in a pre-made timeline to map out the user flow. Since customers are the backbone of your business, it is important to ...
How to Conduct Research for Customer Journey-Mapping
Sample Customer-Journey Research Plan. 1. User Interviews. 1a. Conduct in-person user interviews to uncover first-hand stories specific to all relevant phases of the customer journey; use sticky notes to allow participants to map their steps as they talk. 1b.
What Are Customer Journey Touchpoints and How To Use Them Effectively?
Customer touchpoints are crucial: Every customer interaction, from the first ad to post-purchase support, is an opportunity to influence customer's perception and build a lasting relationship. Customer journey mapping is key: Creating a customer journey map is essential to visualize and understand all the touchpoints, allowing for strategic ...
User Journey vs User Flow: What's the Difference and Why Use Both?
A user journey, also known as a customer journey, is the experience your customers have when interacting with your product at each touchpoint. Think of it as the "story" of all the interactions and experiences between a user and your product, starting from the awareness stage to the activation point. A user journey is a comprehensive tool.
The 3 Competencies of Journey Management (Video)
Summary: Managing journeys requires a continuous practice of 3 interdependent competencies: collecting insights, analyzing them to drive design strategy, and orchestrating journey experiences for users. 5 minute video by 2024-04-245. Kim Salazar. Topics: Customer Journeys,journey mapping,service design. Customer Journeys Customer Journeys.

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

What is the customer journey?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

You're all set!

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

1. Use customer journey map templates.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

5. List out all touchpoints.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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1. Improve customer experience

2. Maintains ease-of-use as your site grows

Primary user journey map types

Current state

Future state

Persona-based

The 5-step customer journey mapping process

1. Define the map’s scope

2. Determine your user personas

3. Give the personas context

4. List persona touchpoints

5. Map the customer journey

Customer journey mapping best practices

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See how XM for Customer Frontlines works

What is the customer journey?

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

What are the essential customer journey stages?

Customer journey: Pre-sale

Awareness stage

Consideration stage

Customer journey: Sale

Decision stage

Customer journey: Post-sale

Retention stage

Advocacy stage

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Why are the customer journey stages important?

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

1. Perform customer journey mapping

2. Listen like you mean it

3. Get personal

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