customer journey mapping design thinking

• Reviews / Why join our community?
• For companies
• Frequently asked questions

Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

Customer journey maps are visual representations of customer experiences with an organization. They provide a 360-degree view of how customers engage with a brand over time and across all channels. Product teams use these maps to uncover customer needs and their routes to reach a product or service. Using this information, you can identify pain points and opportunities to enhance customer experience and boost customer retention.

“ Data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.” — Paul Boag, UX designer, service design consultant & digital transformation expert

In this video, Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how you can include journey maps in your design process.

• Transcript loading…

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

Customer journey maps are research-based tools. They show common customer experiences over time To help brands learn more about their target audience. 

Maps are incredibly effective communication tools. See how maps simplify complex spaces and create shared understanding.

Unlike navigation maps, customer journey maps have an extra dimension—time. Design teams examine tasks and questions (e.g., what-ifs) regarding how a design meets or fails to meet customers’ needs over time when encountering a product or service. 

Customer journey maps should have comprehensive timelines that show the most essential sub-tasks and events. Over this timeline framework, you add insights into customers' thoughts and feelings when proceeding along the timeline. The map should include: 

A timescale - A defined journey period (e.g., one week). This timeframe should include the entire journey, from awareness to conversion to retention.

Scenarios - The context and sequence of events where a user/customer must achieve a goal. An example could be a user who wants to buy a ticket on the phone. Scenarios are events from the first actions (recognizing a problem) to the last activities (e.g., subscription renewal).

Channels – Where do they perform actions (e.g., Facebook)?

Touchpoints – How does the customer interact with the product or service? What actions do they perform?

Thoughts and feelings – The customer's thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map helps you understand how customer experience evolves over time. It allows you to identify possible problems and improve the design. This enables you to design products that are more likely to exceed customers’ expectations in the future state. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

Before creating a customer journey map, you must ask yourself why you're making one in the first place. Clarify who will use it and what user experience it will address.

Conduct Research

Use customer research to determine customer experiences at all touchpoints. Get analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence. Leverage customer interviews, surveys, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

Watch user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen talk about how user research fits your design process and when you should do different studies. 

• Copyright holder: Unsplash. Copyright terms and license: CCO Public Domain. Link: https://pixabay.com/en/clay-hands-sculpting-art-69...
• Copyright holder: Unsplash. Copyright terms and license: CCO Public Domain. Link: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-shirt-an...
• Copyright holder: Indecent Proposer. Copyright terms and license: CC BY-NC 2.0 Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/indecent_proposal/14...
• Copyright holder: Anna Langova. Copyright terms and license: CC0 1.0 Link: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php...
• Copyright holder: Conmongt. Copyright terms and license: CC0 Public Domain Link: https://pixabay.com/en/hourglass-time-time-lapse-clock-1623517/

Review Touchpoints and Channels

List customer touchpoints (e.g., paying a bill) and channels (e.g., online). Look for more touchpoints or channels to include.

Make an Empathy Map

Pinpoint what the customer does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a given situation. Then, determine their needs and how they feel throughout the experience. Focus on barriers and sources of annoyance.

Sketch the Journey

Piece everything—touchpoints, timescale, empathy map output, new ideas, etc.). Show a customer’s course of motion through touchpoints and channels across the timescale, including their feelings at every touchpoint.

Iterate and Refine

Revise and transform your sketch into the best-looking version of the ideal customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders

Ensure all stakeholders understand your map and appreciate how its use will benefit customers and the organization.

Buyer Journey vs User Journey vs Customer Journey: What's the Difference?

You must know the differences between buyer, user, and customer journeys to optimize customer experiences. A customer journey map is often synonymous with a user flow diagram or buyer journey map. However, each journey gives unique insights and needs different plans.

Customer Journey

The customer journey, or lifecycle, outlines the stages a customer goes through with a business. This journey can vary across organizations but includes five key steps:

1. Awareness : This is the first stage of the customer journey, where the customers realize they have a problem. The customer becomes aware of your brand or product at this stage, usually due to marketing efforts.

2. Consideration : Once customers know about your product or service, they start their research and compare brands.

3. Purchase : This is the stage where the customer has chosen a solution and is ready to buy your product or service.

4. Retention : After the purchase, it's about retaining that customer and nurturing a relationship. This is where good customer service comes in.

5. Advocacy : Also called the loyalty stage, this is when the customer not only continues to buy your product but also recommends it to others.

The journey doesn't end when the customer buys and recommends your solution to others. Customer journey strategies are cyclical and repetitive. After the advocacy stage, ideally, you continue to attract and retain the customers, keeping them in the cycle. 

There is no standard format for a customer journey map. The key is to create one that works best for your team and product or service. Get started with customer journey mapping with our template:

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

The buyer's journey involves the buyer's path towards purchasing. This includes some of the steps we saw in the customer journey but is specific to purchasing :

1. Awareness Stage : This is when a prospective buyer realizes they have a problem. However, they aren't yet fully aware of the solutions available to them.

2. Consideration Stage : After identifying their problem, the buyer researches and investigates different solutions with more intent. They compare different products, services, brands, or strategies here.

3. Decision Stage : The buyer then decides which solution will solve their problem at the right price. This is where the actual purchasing action takes place.  

4. Post-Purchase Evaluation : Although not always included, this stage is critical. It's where the buyer assesses their satisfaction with the purchase. It includes customer service interactions, quality assessment, and attitudinal loyalty to the brand.

All these stages can involve many touchpoints, including online research, social media interactions, and even direct, in-person interactions. Different buyers may move through these stages at different speeds and through various channels, depending on a wide range of factors.

User Journey

The user journey focuses on people's experience with digital platforms like websites or software. Key stages include:

1. Discovery : In this stage, users become aware of your product, site, or service, often due to marketing efforts, word-of-mouth, or organic search. It also includes their initial reactions or first impressions.

2. Research/Consideration : Here, users dig deeper, exploring features, comparing with alternatives, and evaluating if your offering suits their needs and preferences.

3. Interaction/Use : Users actively engage with your product or service. They first-hand experience your solution's functionality, usability, and usefulness to achieve their goal.

4. Problem-solving : If they encounter any issues, how they seek help and resolve their issues fall into this stage. It covers user support, troubleshooting, and other assistance.

5. Retention/Loyalty : This stage involves how users stay engaged over time. Do they continue using your product, reduce usage, or stop altogether? It includes their repeated interactions, purchases, and long-term engagement over time.

6. Advocacy/Referral : This is when users are so satisfied they begin to advocate for your product, leaving positive reviews and referring others to your service.

Download this user journey map template featuring an example of a user’s routine. 

Understanding these stages can help optimize the user experience, providing value at each stage and making the journey seamless and enjoyable. 

Always remember the journey is as important as the destination. Customer relationships start from the first website visit or interaction with marketing materials. These initial touchpoints can influence the ongoing relationship with your customers.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is valuable yet has limitations and potential drawbacks. Recognize these challenges and create more practical and realistic journey maps.

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

Customer journey maps often risk simplifying complex customer experiences . They may depict varied and unpredictable customer behaviors as straightforward and linear. This simplification can lead to misunderstandings about your customers' needs and wants. As a result, you might overlook customers' diverse and unique paths. 

Always remember that real customer experiences are more complex than any map. When you recognize this, you steer clear of decisions based on simple models.

Resource Intensity

Creating detailed customer journey maps requires a lot of resources and time. You must gather extensive data and update the maps to keep them relevant. This process can strain small businesses or those with limited resources. 

You need to balance the need for comprehensive mapping with available resources. Efficient resource management and prioritization are crucial to maintaining effective journey maps.

Risk of Bias

Creating customer journey maps carries the inherent risk of biases . These biases can arise from various sources. They can impact the accuracy and effectiveness of the maps. 

Alan Dix, an expert in HCI, discusses bias in more detail in this video.  

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

Assumption Bias: When teams make decisions based on preconceived notions rather than customer data.

Selection Bias: When the data doesn’t represent the entire customer base..

Confirmation Bias : When you focus on information that supports existing beliefs and preferences. Simultaneously, you tend to ignore or dismiss data that contradicts those beliefs.

Anchoring Bias : Relying on the first information encountered (anchor) when making decisions.

Overconfidence Bias : Placing too much trust in the accuracy of the journey map. You may overlook its potential flaws.

These biases may misguide the team, and design decisions based on these maps might not be effective.

To address these biases, review and update journey maps with real user research data. Engage with different customer segments and gather a wide range of feedback to help create a more accurate and representative map. This approach ensures the journey map aligns with actual customer experiences and behaviors.

Evolving Customer Behaviors

Customer behaviors and preferences change with time. A journey map relevant today can become outdated. You need to update and adapt your maps to reflect these changes. This requires you to perform market research and stay updated with trends and customer feedback. 

Getting fresh data ensures your journey map stays relevant and effective. You must adapt to evolving customer behaviors to maintain accurate and valuable customer journey maps.

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

Capturing emotions accurately in customer journey maps poses a significant challenge. Emotions influence customer decisions, yet you may find it difficult to quantify and represent them in maps. Most journey maps emphasize actions and touchpoints, often neglecting the emotional journey. 

You must integrate emotional insights into these maps to understand customer experiences. This integration enhances the effectiveness of customer engagement strategies. You can include user quotes, symbols such as emojis, or even graphs to capture the ups and downs of the users’ emotions..

Misalignment with Customer Needs

Misalignments in customer journey maps can manifest in various ways. It can impact the effectiveness of your strategies. Common misalignments include:

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

Not seeing or serving the varied needs of different customer types.

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

Engage with your customers to understand their needs and preferences if you want to address these misalignments. Incorporate their direct feedback into the journey map. This approach leads to more effective customer engagement and satisfaction.

Over-Reliance on the Map

Relying too much on customer journey maps can lead to problems. These maps should serve as tools rather than definitive guides. Viewing them as perfect can restrict your responsiveness to customer feedback and market changes. Treat journey maps as evolving documents that complement direct customer interactions and feedback. 

Make sure you get regular updates and maintain flexibility in your approach. Balance the insights from the map with ongoing customer engagement. This approach keeps your business agile and responsive to evolving customer needs.

Data Privacy Concerns

Collecting customer data for journey mapping poses significant privacy concerns. Thus, you need to create a balance. You must adhere to data protection laws and gather enough information for mapping. 

You need a careful strategy to ensure customer data security. Stay vigilant to adapt to evolving privacy regulations and customer expectations. This vigilance helps maintain trust and compliance.

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

Take our Journey Mapping course to gain insights into the how and why of journey mapping. Learn practical methods to create experience maps , customer journey maps, and service blueprints for immediate application.

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer journey map requires visually representing the customer's experience with your product or company. Harness the strength of visual reasoning to understand and present this journey succinctly. Instead of detailing a lengthy narrative, like a book, a well-crafted map allows stakeholders, whether designers or not, to grasp the journey quickly. It's a democratized tool that disseminates information, unifies teams, and aids decision-making by illuminating previously unnoticed or misunderstood aspects of the customer's journey.

The customer journey encompasses five distinct stages that guide a customer's interaction with a brand or product:

Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a need or problem.

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

Purchase: The customer decides on a solution and makes a purchase.

Retention: Post-purchase, the customer uses the product and forms an opinion.

Advocacy: Satisfied customers become brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences.

For a comprehensive understanding of these stages and how they intertwine with customer touchpoints, refer to Interaction-Design.org's in-depth article .

A perspective grid workshop is a activity that brings together stakeholders from various departments, such as product design, marketing, growth, and customer support, to align on a shared understanding of the customer's journey. These stakeholders contribute unique insights about customer needs and how they interact with a product or service. The workshop entails:

Creating a matrix to identify customers' jobs and requirements, not initially linked to specific features.

Identifying the gaps, barriers, pains, and risks associated with unmet needs, and constructing a narrative for the journey.

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

Discuss the implied technical and non-technical capabilities required to deliver this value.

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

The ultimate aim is to foster alignment within the organization and produce a user journey map based on shared knowledge. 

Learn more from this insightful video:

Customer journey mapping is vital as it harnesses our visual reasoning capabilities to articulate a customer's broad, intricate journey with a brand. Such a depiction would otherwise require extensive documentation, like a book. This tool offers a cost-effective method to convey information succinctly, ensuring understanding of whether one is a designer or lacks the time for extensive reading. It also helps the team to develop a shared vision and to encourage collaboration.  Businesses can better comprehend and address interaction points by using a journey map, facilitating informed decision-making and revealing insights that might otherwise remain obscured. Learn more about the power of visualizing the customer journey in this video.

Pain points in a customer journey map represent customers' challenges or frustrations while interacting with a product or service. They can arise from unmet needs, gaps in service, or barriers faced during the user experience. Identifying these pain points is crucial as they highlight areas for improvement, allowing businesses to enhance the customer experience and meet their needs more effectively. Pain points can relate to various aspects, including product usability, communication gaps, or post-purchase concerns. Explore the detailed article on customer journey maps at Interaction Design Foundation for a deeper understanding and real-world examples.

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting areas for improvement. This ensures that products or services meet users' needs effectively.

The process fosters team alignment, ensuring everyone understands and prioritizes the customer's perspective.

It helps identify pain points, revealing opportunities to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

This visualization allows businesses to make informed decisions, ensuring resources target the most impactful areas.

To delve deeper into the advantages and insights on journey mapping, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on key takeaways from the IXDF journey mapping course .

In design thinking, a customer journey map visually represents a user's interactions with a product or service over time. It provides a detailed look at a user's experience, from initial contact to long-term engagement. Focusing on the user's perspective highlights their needs, emotions, pain points, and moments of delight. This tool aids in understanding and empathizing with users, a core principle of design thinking. When used effectively, it bridges gaps between design thinking and marketing, ensuring user-centric solutions align with business goals. For a comprehensive understanding of how it fits within design thinking and its relation to marketing, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on resolving conflicts between design thinking and marketing .

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 aspects.

A user journey map is a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service. It only considers digital channels, one user persona, and functional and quantitative aspects.

Both are useful to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. However, they have different scopes, perspectives, and purposes. A customer journey map provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience across multiple channels and stages. A user journey map provides a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service.

While user journeys might emphasize specific tasks or pain points, customer journeys encapsulate the entire experience, from research and comparison to purchasing and retention. 

Customer journey maps and service blueprints are tools to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. A customer journey map shows the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It focuses on the front stage of the service, which is what the customers see and experience. It considers different user personas and emotional aspects.

A service blueprint shows how a service is delivered and operated by an organization. It focuses on the back stage of the service, which is what the customers do not see or experience. It considers one user persona and functional aspects. What are the steps that the customer takes to complete a specific task or goal within the service? What are the channels and devices that the customer interacts with at each step?

For an immersive dive into customer journey mapping, consider enrolling in the Interaction Design Foundation's specialized course . This course offers hands-on lessons, expert guidance, and actionable tools. Furthermore, to grasp the course's essence, the article “4 Takeaways from the IXDF Journey Mapping Course” sheds light on the core learnings, offering a snapshot of what to expect. These resources are tailored by industry leaders, ensuring you're equipped with the best knowledge to craft impactful customer journey maps.

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Journey Maps by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

Take a deep dive into Customer Journey Maps with our course Journey Mapping .

This course will show you how to use journey mapping to turn your own complex design challenges into simple, delightful user experiences . If you want to design a great shopping experience, an efficient signup flow or an app that brings users delight over time, journey mapping is a critical addition to your toolbox. 

We will begin with a short introduction to mapping — why it is so powerful, and why it is so useful in UX. Then we will get familiar with the three most common types of journey map — experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints — and how to recognize, read and use each one. Then you will learn how to collect and analyze data as a part of a journey mapping process. Next you will learn how to create each type of journey map , and in the final lesson you will learn how to run a journey mapping workshop that will help to turn your journey mapping insights into actual products and services. 

This course will provide you with practical methods that you can start using immediately in your own design projects, as well as downloadable templates that can give you a head start in your own journey mapping projects. 

The “Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project” includes three practical exercises where you can practice the methods you learn, solidify your knowledge and if you choose, create a journey mapping case study that you can add to your portfolio to demonstrate your journey mapping skills to future employers, freelance customers and your peers. 

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

Indi Young will provide wisdom on how to gather the right data as part of your journey mapping process. She has written two books,  Practical Empathy  and  Mental Models . Currently she conducts live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was a founder of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was an early innovator in journey mapping. 

Kai Wang will walk us through his very practical process for creating a service blueprint, and share how he makes journey mapping a critical part of an organization’s success. Kai is a talented UX pro who has designed complex experiences for companies such as CarMax and CapitalOne. 

Matt Snyder will help us think about journey mapping as a powerful and cost-effective tool for building successful products. He will also teach you how to use a tool called a perspective grid that can help a data-rich journey mapping process go more smoothly. In 2020 Matt left his role as the Sr. Director of Product Design at Lucid Software to become Head of Product & Design at Hivewire. 

Christian Briggs will be your tour guide for this course. He is a Senior Product Designer and Design Educator at the Interaction Design Foundation. He has been designing digital products for many years, and has been using methods like journey mapping for most of those years.  

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

14 ux deliverables: what will i be making as a ux designer.

• 1.2k shares

What are Customer Touchpoints & Why Do They Matter?

• 3 years ago

How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact

• 2 years ago

How to Resolve Conflicts Between Design Thinking and Marketing

How to Create a Perspective Grid

• 10 mths ago

4 Takeaways from the IxDF Journey Mapping Course

The Power of Mapping

User Story Mapping in Design

Open Access—Link to us!

We believe in Open Access and the  democratization of knowledge . Unfortunately, world-class educational materials such as this page are normally hidden behind paywalls or in expensive textbooks.

If you want this to change , cite this page , link to us, or join us to help us democratize design knowledge !

Privacy Settings

Our digital services use necessary tracking technologies, including third-party cookies, for security, functionality, and to uphold user rights. Optional cookies offer enhanced features, and analytics.

Experience the full potential of our site that remembers your preferences and supports secure sign-in.

Governs the storage of data necessary for maintaining website security, user authentication, and fraud prevention mechanisms.

Enhanced Functionality

Saves your settings and preferences, like your location, for a more personalized experience.

Referral Program

We use cookies to enable our referral program, giving you and your friends discounts.

Error Reporting

We share user ID with Bugsnag and NewRelic to help us track errors and fix issues.

Optimize your experience by allowing us to monitor site usage. You’ll enjoy a smoother, more personalized journey without compromising your privacy.

Analytics Storage

Collects anonymous data on how you navigate and interact, helping us make informed improvements.

Differentiates real visitors from automated bots, ensuring accurate usage data and improving your website experience.

Lets us tailor your digital ads to match your interests, making them more relevant and useful to you.

Advertising Storage

Stores information for better-targeted advertising, enhancing your online ad experience.

Personalization Storage

Permits storing data to personalize content and ads across Google services based on user behavior, enhancing overall user experience.

Advertising Personalization

Allows for content and ad personalization across Google services based on user behavior. This consent enhances user experiences.

Enables personalizing ads based on user data and interactions, allowing for more relevant advertising experiences across Google services.

Receive more relevant advertisements by sharing your interests and behavior with our trusted advertising partners.

Enables better ad targeting and measurement on Meta platforms, making ads you see more relevant.

Allows for improved ad effectiveness and measurement through Meta’s Conversions API, ensuring privacy-compliant data sharing.

LinkedIn Insights

Tracks conversions, retargeting, and web analytics for LinkedIn ad campaigns, enhancing ad relevance and performance.

LinkedIn CAPI

Enhances LinkedIn advertising through server-side event tracking, offering more accurate measurement and personalization.

Google Ads Tag

Tracks ad performance and user engagement, helping deliver ads that are most useful to you.

Share the knowledge!

Share this content on:

or copy link

Cite according to academic standards

Simply copy and paste the text below into your bibliographic reference list, onto your blog, or anywhere else. You can also just hyperlink to this page.

New to UX Design? We’re Giving You a Free ebook!

Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Design to learn about core concepts of UX design.

In 9 chapters, we’ll cover: conducting user interviews, design thinking, interaction design, mobile UX design, usability, UX research, and many more!

Customer Journey Mapping: The Windmill Guide to Design Thinking

• UX & Design

When embarking on a journey, especially one to an unfamiliar location, you do not leave anything to chance. You’ll need a plan for how to get there, and a map, whether traditional or digital, like Waze or Google Maps, will make the journey more pleasant.  

Similarly, having a graphic outline of how your potential customer experiences your product or service is critical to creating a memorable experience for them, which translates to better lead generation and increased customer retention, among other things.

Getting a customer to buy a product may appear to be a simple task. You make your product available, and your target customer sees it and purchases it. However, according to the most recent Baymard Institute data , the average cart abandonment rate across industries is 69.89 percent. In other words, seven out of ten shoppers abandon their shopping carts without making a purchase.

So, for your products to be successful, you must first understand the path your prospective customers take to reach your products, as well as what they need and value the most.

The Function of Customer Journey Maps in Design Thinking

In Design Thinking, getting to know your customers’ personas and understanding how they interact with your brand gives you a pretty good idea of how they will behave in the future. An excellent way to do this is through customer journey mapping.

A journey map is a detailed visualization that depicts the experience of a user-based persona as they use a specific product. It depicts the steps your customers take when interacting with your product or service.

A customer journey map specifies three elements:

• The points at which prospective and existing customers interact with your brand. 
• What the customer seeks at each point.
• The path they take from one point to the other, as they move towards buying your products. A map can be illustrated for an online experience, retail experience, or a combination of these.

Why should a company carry out customer journey mapping?

Making a customer journey map confers a lot of advantages that include:

Understanding your customers more —The better you understand the customer’s expectations, the more you can tailor their experience to fit their needs.

Make better measurable decisions —By following each milestone on the journey map, you can easily measure the progress of optimizing your product’s purchase process against the customer experience desired by your customers.

Identify and improve business processes —The mapping process brings together sales, marketing, and customer support to define what customers need to know before they buy, what they need after they buy, and how these interactions can be enhanced.

Identify growth opportunities —You can use the journey map to identify new growth opportunities for your company.

Run a tight customer-centric ship —During the mapping process, auditing your content can reveal areas where you are losing customers and how you can shore up and strengthen those areas.

Steering content priorities —It’s easy for teams to become distracted by a new and exciting idea. A journey map that expresses the needs of the target audience helps to ensure that the team stays true to what your audience wants and needs.

When should it be done?

Customer journey mapping can be do when your start-up wants to:

• Assess the gaps in your current service offering.
• Increase the personalization of customer interactions for each customer profile or segment.
• Create a more effective marketing strategy for your new products and services.
• Recognize how each customer persona’s service experience differs.
• Develop a new experience while keeping the important moments in mind.
• Compare your competitors’ journeys to yours and create better differentiators.

Download our free customer journey map template

If you’ve downloaded Windmill Digital ’s free Customer Journey Map template, you can make and customize it to meet the needs of your brand or product.

But, before you begin creating your customer journey map, let us explain how to fill it successfully. We’ll go over what each component represents and what to expect from each question.

The 7 Key Components of the Journey Map

• Name/ Persona

A user persona is a fictitious character representing a distinct customer segment of your start-up. When creating this persona, be sure to consider characteristics like background, demographic, lifestyle, character, information sources available to them, as well as shopping preferences. The information to build user personas can be gathered through user interviews , empathy maps , surveys, etc.

• The Phases (Step 1-7)

A customer journey map includes significant milestones in the customer journey. You’ll begin by drafting the path your business intends for a customer to take to reach a goal. Using the typical buying process stages, you’ll list each stage horizontally. 

This section of the customer journey map details the action a customer takes at each stage of the buying process. List out every action your customers take all through their interaction with your company. Whether clicking on a CTA link in your email or searching on Google.

Take note if customers take too many actions to get to their goals. Finding a solution to this by cutting down the number of steps a customer needs to take can feel risky, but it will pay off in higher conversion rates.

• Thinking and Feelings

Emotion drives everything your customer does. And their emotions change depending on where they are in their journey.

If your process is lengthy or complicated, they may experience a variety of emotions at each stage. Including these emotions on the journey map can help you mitigate negative journey emotions so they don’t become synonymous with your brand.

• Pain point voting dot

Where there is a negative emotion, there’s a pain point that caused it. Adding pain points to your customer journey map can help you identify which stage your customer is experiencing negative emotions and deduce the reason why.

For example, one of your customers could love your product but abandon their cart upon discovering unexpectedly high or hidden delivery charges.

• Improvement pain point

Improvement pain points are where you and your team plan on how to potentially mitigate these pain points. 

This segment aims to improve your purchasing process so that your customers have few or no issues with it and have positive emotions when they patronize your business.

For example, one way to alleviate the pain points associated with delivery charges could be to provide a FAQ page where customers can learn more about the charges.

• Touchpoints

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is a point at which your customer can form an opinion about your company. Touchpoints can be found anywhere your company has direct contact with potential or existing customers. Customer touchpoints can include a pop-up ad, interactions with your employees, notifications and error messages, and even a Google review.

Customer journey mapping is not a one-time event. The customer journey is subject to change, and your brand must be prepared to adapt. However, the template provided here should give you a good start in better understanding your customers’ journey as they interact with your company, brand, products, partners, and people.

Remember to map out the various journeys taken by the persona representing your various customer segments. This can be time-consuming, but worthwhile because boosting customer retention percentages by just 5% can maximize profits by 25% to 95% .

Facing a digital product challenge?

As guide and partner, let us help you deliver impactful change and delight your customers.

More articles

What is Innovation Strategy? Overview, Key Benefits, and Examples

How to Build a Customer Experience Strategy in 10 Steps

Product Design Bundle and save

User Research New

Content Design

UX Design Fundamentals

Software and Coding Fundamentals for UX

• UX training for teams
• Hire our alumni
• Journal of UX Leadership
• Our mission
• Advisory Council

Education for every phase of your UX career

Professional Diploma

Learn the full user experience (UX) process from research to interaction design to prototyping.

Combine the UX Diploma with the UI Certificate to pursue a career as a product designer.

Professional Certificates

Learn how to plan, execute, analyse and communicate user research effectively.

Learn the principles of content design, from mastering tone and style, to writing for interfaces.

Understand the fundamentals of UI elements and design systems, as well as the role of UI in UX.

Short Courses

Gain a solid foundation in the philosophy, principles and methods of user experience design.

Learn the essentials of software development so you can work more effectively with developers.

Give your team the skills, knowledge and mindset to create great digital products

Join our hiring programme and access our list of certified professionals.

Learn about our mission to set the global standard in UX education

Meet our leadership team with UX and education expertise

Members of the council connect us to the wider UX industry

Our team are available to answer any of your questions

Fresh insights from experts, alumni and the wider design community

Read stories from our students who have made successful careers in UX after completing our course

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.

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

What is UX? Why has it become so important? Could it be a career for you? Learn the answers, and more, with a free 7-lesson video course.

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.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UI DESIGN]

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

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get the best UX insights and career advice direct to your inbox each month.

Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter

You'll now get the best career advice, industry insights and UX community content, direct to your inbox every month.

Upcoming courses

Professional diploma in ux design.

Learn the full UX process, from research to design to prototyping.

Professional Certificate in UI Design

Master key concepts and techniques of UI design.

Certificate in Software and Coding Fundamentals for UX

Collaborate effectively with software developers.

Certificate in UX Design Fundamentals

Get a comprehensive introduction to UX design.

Professional Certificate in Content Design

Learn the skills you need to start a career in content design.

Professional Certificate in User Research

Master the research skills that make UX professionals so valuable.

Upcoming course

Build your UX career with a globally-recognised, industry-approved certification. Get the mindset, the skills and the confidence of UX designers.

You may also like

The ultimate guide to mobile app design: Follow these UI principles & best practices

The best online survey tools to use in 2024

What is colour theory? A complete introductory guide

Build your UX career with a globally recognised, industry-approved qualification. Get the mindset, the confidence and the skills that make UX designers so valuable.

Designorate

Design thinking, innovation, user experience and healthcare design

Customer Journey Mapping: A Complete Guide for Designers

According to the Digital Trend 2015 Report, customer experience is crucial to stand out from competitors. Suppose there is a single type of data to identify the success of the design outcome. In that case, I will choose the customer experience, it is the crucial element behind the design of any product or service to address customers’ needs and solve their problems. However, customer experience is more complex than we think. It involves several factors, such as satisfaction, education, and loyalty. Those factors can affect consumer experience through their journey while using any product or service, regardless of the nature of the delivery’s digital or physical evidence. Therefore,  consumer journal mapping  can help us to visually learn more about our consumers’ experience and visually map each of the customer touchpoints during their interaction with the product.

Several studies highlighted that attracting a new customer is 6X to 7X more expensive compared with the effort, time, and cost spent to keep the existing customer happy and engaged with the product or service, and one of the critical tools to achieve this goal is the customer   journey maps, which we will explore and illustrate in more details its practical application. 

What is Customer Experience?

But before digging into customer journey mapping . We need to understand the consumer experience, which refers to the experience the consumer gains as they interact with the product or service’s touch points. This experience involves human actors (e.g. consumers, employees and designers) and non-human actors (e.g. physical evidence and touchpoints). Customer experience extends through a timeline before, during and after using the product. To map and improve the consumer experience, we need to build a strategy based on collected data about the consumer experience, develop the product by considering this strategy, and finally track customer experience after applying this strategy. And to start this sequence, a clear understanding of consumer experience is required. This is where the consumer experience research comes in.

Customer experience research is an investigation and analysis of the consumer journey, the interaction between the consumers and the product or service to understand their experience, pain points (frustration), and satisfaction as they move from one step to another. The research also investigates the consumers’ behaviour, perception and practice through this journey. Several qualitative and quantitative tools can be used in consumer experience research, such as customer journey maps, interviews, questionnaires, observation, think-a-loud, user stories, and diary notes.

Don't miss any free design thinking templates, tools, and articles. Join my newsletter!

What is a Customer Journey Map?

The customer journey map (or a customer experience map) is a visual representation or diagram that tells the story of your consumers’ experience when using a product, system, or service, such as visiting a retail store. It helps us to build insight into consumers’ goals, customer expectations, the touch point with the product, and their emotions through this journey. Figure 2 shows the anatomy of the customer journey map and its main elements.

The customer journey map can be presented in different formats, including drawing on a whiteboard, digital diagrams, and infographics. These diagrams use other research methods to visualize and organize deep research for your customer’s experience. Customer journey mapping enables the use from:

• Exploring  consumers’ experience as they interact with the system. The exploration helps us to decode the process into different elements. 
• Identify  the pain points and the problems in the system associated with each step in the journey.
• Identify  the opportunities to innovate by improving the consumer experience.

We seek to collect information about the consumer experience during the customer journey mapping. While each customer journey map can include different data based on the consumer experience that needs to be investigated, there are common data essential in each journey map, such as:

• Behaviour  – This part answers the consumer’s actions in each journey step.
• Attitude  – What the customers” feel and say about their interaction with the system.
• Experience  – There are two parts to the experience. The first part is the on-stage experience, such as what the customers experience as they interact with the system. The second part is the unidentified experience or needs that the consumers may not be aware of. as I discussed earlier in The Double Diamond Design Thinking Process and How to Use it.

The Importance of the Customer Journey Mapping

The  human-centred design  focuses on customer needs and experience to drive innovation and customer retention, which can only be achieved with a deep understanding of the customer experience. Therefore, customer journey maps are a powerful tool for designers and companies to reach a consumer-centric product. The customer journey mapping can drive the below benefits for the product or service:

• Build a shared understanding of the customer’s behaviour and experience when using the product or service.
• Learn how customers use the product or service based on real-life examples.
• Identify the pain point that causes a bad emotional experience for the customers.
• Reduce or eliminate the negative factors that affect the customer experience.
• Identify the communication problems customers face when interacting with the touchpoints, such as the application interface, help desks, or customer support service.
• Build key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to evaluate the product to collect feedback to improve the future version.

Types of the Customer Journey Maps

As highlighted earlier, customer journey mapping is based on what information we need to collect from customers. Therefore, the different types of customer journey maps are based on the aim of conducting customer experience research. Generally, there are four types as following:

Current state customer journey maps

This is considered the most commonly used customer journey maps as it involves exploring the customer’s experience with a current offering by the company. It aims to explore the customer experience as they use this product or service, such as booking a flight or making a doctor’s appointment.

Day in the life customer journey maps

This map explores customers’ experiences as they go through specific daily experiences. By mapping this experience, we can identify the opportunity we can provide customers to solve their problems and address their needs.

Future state customer journey maps

Like the Day in Life map, the Future State map helps us find opportunities by envisaging customers’ experiences. Although this map starts with assumptions and previous experience, it is helpful as a starting point to build a testable experience for consumers.

Service Blueprint

Unlike the above journey maps, the service blueprint aims to map the different steps in the service and how it is linked to the company structure, such as employees, resources, and overall strategy.

Defining the Customer Persona (buyer persona)

Building the customer journey map requires deeply understanding of customers’ personalities and experiences. Customers’ character has an essential impact on their purchase behaviour, experience and achieving customer loyalty. To understand this nature, we need to have a representation of the target customer. Personas are fictional characters that represent our target customers. It includes the customer’s demographic information, financial information, goals, purchase preferences, and experience. Personas can be visualized using illustrations, sketches or any persona template applications such as UX Pressia.

Persona isn’t static but constantly refined throughout the project, especially when conducting our research to identify the target audience’s characteristics. Once our market research is completed, we have precise details about our persona. Usually, products and services target more than one target audience in a multi-segmentation structure to increase the market reach and return on investment. In this case, we usually have more than one persona. The primary persona is the main persona we target while designing the product, and secondary personas that can also be considered in the design process.

Types of Personas

There are several ways to categorize personas according to our target of the categorization, such as the persona target or emotional status that affects its purchase behaviour. In terms of the target, personas can be categorized into four types:

• Goal-oriented Persona  – In this persona type, the target customer aims to achieve a specific goal when interacting with the system. The aim of creating the persona is to identify the customer’s goals and how this affects the process and the interaction with the different elements in the system. 
• Role-Based Persona  – This type is similar to the goal-oriented persona but focuses on the customer’s role while interacting with the system. This type of persona is data-driven based on qualitative and quantitative data. The customer role while interacting with the system is the core focus of this persona and the data collected to represent it.
• Engaging Persona  – Unlike the above two types, the engaging persona focuses on interacting with the system. It examines customers’ emotional status, behaviour, psychology, and background. This persona aims to build empathy with the customer experience.

How to Create a Persona

As highlighted earlier, the persona is a dynamic tool that keeps changing as we build clarity about our customers. Even though customers’ behaviour may change, it requires optimizing the persona accordingly. To go through this journey to build and unstained your consumer through personas, the following general steps can help you develop this clarity.

• Define the focus customer (Proto-persona) In the beginning, companies have different levels of understanding of their customers. Some companies need to learn about their customers, especially when developing a new service. On the other hand, some companies have a profound understanding of their customers. This previous experience helped us to develop the so-called proto-persona. It is not an accurate persona, but it helps as a standing point to start identifying the market sample and start the market or design research.
• Conduct design research I highlighted the design research, focusing on action research, reflection, customer experience, and qualitative data. Once we have the prototype persona, we start designing the research plan and the methodologies to start market research. Several methods could be used, either qualitative or quantitative. However, in design research, quantitative data is usually used to understand the qualitative nature of customer experience.
• Data analysis Once we collected and organized the data from the previous step. We analyze the data and try to understand the customer’s profile, experience, and behaviour. The narration and looking for themes help us to identify the holistic customer’s experience rather than looking for details.
• Building the persona Once we understand the customer experience, we must build the target customer’s detailed and accurate persona. Personas can be creative and represents the information visually to be easily recognized. Several tools can help us build creative persona layouts, such as  UX Pressia , 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map?

The customer journey map we need to create is based on the data we need to collect from the consumer as we conduct marketing research or user research if we would like to make a digital user journey map. Creating the customer journey maps follows the main  critical thinking  stages; understand, reflect, and implement. Based on this flow, the creation of the customer journey maps follows the below main three stages:

Stage 1: Understand (Research)

At this stage, the design and marketing teams work together to understand customer behaviour through deep research into their experience while using the product. Before starting the research, the team defines the key elements of the journey map. At this stage, a team is recruited to collect the data using different research methods, as described below.

Elements of the Consumer Journey Map

Before conducting the research, the consumer journey map should include the below main elements:

• Define the Persona
• First, we should define the  customer persona  as we highlighted earlier. We can also build  persona empathy mapping , which allows the design team to understand the different feelings that visit the consumer while using the product or service. The personnel will represent the consumer sample used in the study.
• Define the Scenario
• The first step is to define the goal of conducting the consumer journey map. The scenario is usually a pathway of the consumer’s experience, such as buying a product from the store, booking a hotel room, or reaching technical support in a banking app. 
• Define the Journey’s Stages
• Then, we define the steps that the consumer needs to take to achieve this goal. For example, in the below consumer journey map example, the personnel needs to go through several steps to book a travel ticket. So, she goes through several steps to achieve this scenario.
• Define the Data needed.
• As mentioned, most consumer journey maps collect consumer data about their behaviour, attitude and experience. But, more data could be collected, such as the touch point channels.

Several consumer journey mapping tools can be used to create the persona and consumer map, such as:

Collect Customer Feedback

The recruited sample starts with the scenario steps and experiences the product as normal. While the consumer is using the product already, this time, the aim is to understand their experience. The consumers can provide the data based on their previous experience with the product if the scenario is the same, and they can give feedback on each step in the scenario. Several methods could be used to collect data from participants in the consumer journey mapping. The qualitative research methods can help us gain a sentimental idea about the participant’s experience, and these methods can include:

Interviews can be either structured or semi-structured. In the structured interviews, we ask the participants predefined questions with no change in the questions during the interviews. We ask them predefined questions in the semi-structured interviews, but we can elaborate with other questions during the interviews. 

Focus groups are a similar tool to interviews; the only problem is that participants may get influenced by the answers of others during the sessions.

Observation can be an excellent method to see the reaction during each consumer touch point. Still, it needs to detail the consumers’ experience and perception of the provided service.

Diary notes can be a good tool if the consumers record their experience during or after the interaction with the service. The problem with this tool is that it is not controlled, and there is no guidance while completing it. It is suitable for experienced participants who conduct the consumer journey map to evaluate the product or service.

On the other hand, the quantitive methods can be suitable to reach measurable but less sentimental data. The convenient quantitative way to use the consumer journey map is the survey. Different types of surveys can be helpful to get feedback from consumers, such as:

Customer Effort Score (CES): It measures the level of customer experience by assessing how effortlessly customers can interact with your product or service, address support problems, or access required information. The customers provide their effort ratings on a scale of 1 to 7.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): The questionnaire is designed to predict whether a customer may use the service again. Therefore, it measures customers’ experience and satisfaction with the brand.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It assesses the consumer’s experience based on one straightforward question, such as, “How satisfied were you with your experience?” The participants’ responses are based on a rank from 1 to 5 to measure their satisfaction.

Stage 2: Reflect

Once we have the data collected, we start by analyzing it and identifying the pain points that face consumers through their journey. The results from the quantitative methods are more accessible to interpret than the qualitative data. To analyze data collected through qualitative methods, the  thematic analysis  is a coherent tool for understanding the emerged themes from the qualitative data analysis. Once we have the analyzed data, we investigate the different opportunities to improve consumers’ experience, which can involve  brainstorming  and  solving problems . 

Design thinking brainstorming  tools can help us explore the different opportunities by finding the connections between other elements of data we collected, such as the below tools:

Online mind maps: flexible online brainstorming helps us to decompile the different bits of data and see how they link together to find opportunities through the visual connection between them. Another relevant tool for mind maps is the  Affinity Diagram , which allows us to organize different data based on their relation.

Reversed brainstorming :  Sometimes, we get stuck in the ideas, and finding solutions becomes challenging. This method reverses the situation by making problems more complex from different perspectives.

SCAMPER :  The SCAMPER explores the potential solutions by exploring seven possible solution areas (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Rearrange).

Starbursting Technique : This is another technique to explore ideas by asking five questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? And How?

Finding solutions can also involve trying to identify the root causes of the problem to find practical solutions that eliminate the causes of consumer unsatisfied experiences such as:

5 Whys : In this effective method, we ask the “why” question five times until we reach the root cause of the problem.

Fishbone Diagram : In this diagram, we explore the causes of the problem based on six main perspectives: people, methods, machines, materials, measurements, and the environment. 

Stage 3: Implement

After understanding the customer experience, the team should have a clear vision of the pain point that faces the customer and how to brainstorm how to overcome it by building an action plan. This plan should address these issues faced by the customer with solutions. The action plan should clearly define the timeframe and budget required to improve the product or the service to enhance customer satisfaction. The plan should include the stakeholders working n implementing these changes.

After implementing these changes, another customer journey map should be created to evaluate customer satisfaction with the new changes and if further improvement is needed. Note that the design of a product or service is an iterative process; there are always ways to improve it as the customer experience change due to the changes in the culture, education, and new technologies.

The above example went through one customer journey map template. Yet, there are varied templates and shapes of the customer journey maps depending on the visualized information, the team’s creativity, and the tool used to create the map.

In sum, customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for the company to understand their customer experience and work to improve it in the next versions of the product or service. It allows companies to collect data about the consumer and organize it in a visual form that all the stakeholders in the project can easily track. As a result of this understanding, the team can build an action plan to improve the consumer experience, which will positively reflect on the project’s success in the market.

Note: This article was first published on the 15th May 2017.

Dr Rafiq Elmansy

I'm an academic, author and design thinker, currently teaching design at the University of Leeds with a research focus on design thinking, design for health, interaction design and design for behaviour change. I developed and taught design programmes at Wrexham Glyndwr University, Northumbria University and The American University in Cairo. Additionally, I'm a published book author and founder of Designorate.com. I am a fellow for the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and an Adobe Education Leader. I write Adobe certification exams with Pearson Certiport. My design experience involves 20 years working with clients such as the UN, World Bank, Adobe, and Schneider. I worked with the Adobe team in developing many Adobe applications for more than 12 years.

You May Also Like

Design Thinking Books You Must Read (updated)

Can you think that following a design thinking process with five steps turns you into a creative innovator?! Believe me, it isn’t and never has been this way. The spread

Applying Design Thinking in Education to Fight Extremism

Last week, we woke up to the terrible attacks in Paris, and the world is still mourning the more than 150 killed in the incident. A couple of days before,

How to Use the Fishbone Diagram in Root Cause Analysis?

Solving problems is considered an initial part of designers’ practice as they aim for user-centred design. The target that requires root-cause analysis of problems using tools such as the Fishbone

How to Use Mind Mapping for Better Thinking

During brainstorming meetings and problem-solving sessions, many outputs are shared and presented in fractals. Many of the design thinking methods we discussed aims to direct the attendees thinking towards a

How Inclusive Design Reshaped Microsoft Products

Twenty years ago, I used to be a Windows operating system user and always asked myself; why is it so complicated? The screen is full of functions with minimum consideration

How Design Thinking Approaches Problems

Design thinking is widely known as a strategy to successfully address complex problems and build products that address consumers’ needs. Many word-leading design companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, IKEA, Lego

2 thoughts on “ Customer Journey Mapping: A Complete Guide for Designers ”

I would create the personas after the data collection. In that way you can analyse the data, detect characteristics and specific behaviours of the various customers and based on that create more realistic personas. regards, roeland

Thanks for sharing your ideas, this is clever idea, having daft persona will surely help the researchers to know what they are looking for and the questions they need to ask.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign me up for the newsletter!

✨  New article: Psychology of UX Writing .

Customer Journey Mapping

A customer journey map visualizes a person’s process to accomplish a goal tied to a specific business or product. It’s used to understand and address customer needs and Pain Points.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of User Needs and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization to communicate insights that will inform design processes.

Characteristics

• The map is tied to a specific product or service.
• It is split into 4 swim lanes: phases, actions, thoughts, mindsets/emotions.
• It reflects the user’s perspective:
• Including her mindset, thoughts, and emotions
• Leaving out most process details
• It is chronological.
• There is one map per persona/user type (1:1 mapping).

• UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
• 7 Ways to Analyze a Customer-Journey Map
• The 5 Steps of Successful Customer Journey Mapping
• When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps
• How Much Time Does It Take to Create a Journey Map?
• Blank Journey Map (PDF)
• Sample Journey Map (PDF)
• Journey Map Diagram (PDF)

Skip navigation

• Log in to UX Certification

World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Journey mapping 101.

December 9, 2018 2018-12-09

• Email article
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Twitter

Journey maps are a common UX tool. They come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. Depending on the context, they can be used in a variety of ways. This article covers the basics: what a journey map is (and is not), related terminology, common variations, and how we can use journey maps.

In This Article:

Definition of a journey map, key components of a journey map, journey-map variations, why use journey maps.

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. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.

The terms ‘user journey map’ and ‘customer journey map’ can be used interchangeably. Both reference a visualization of a person using your product or service.

While the argument can be made that the term ‘customer’ does a disservice to the method (because, especially for certain business-to-business products, not all of end users are technically customers, i.e., product buyers), alignment on what you call the map is far less important than alignment on the content within the map.

Journey maps come in all shapes and sizes. Regardless of how they look, journey maps have the following 5 key elements in common:

Scenario + Expectations

Journey phases, actions, mindsets, and emotions, opportunities.

The actor is the persona or user who experiences the journey. The actor is who the journey map is about — a point of view. Actors usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data.

Provide one point of view per map in order to build a strong, clear narrative. For example, a university might choose either a student or a faculty member as actor — each would result in different journeys. (To capture both viewpoints, the university will need to build two separate maps, one for each of the two user types.)

The scenario describes the situation that the journey map addresses and is associated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations. For example, one scenario could be switching mobile plans to save money, and expectations for it include to easily find all the information needed to make a decision.

Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated — for products that are yet in the design stage.

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events (such as shopping or taking a trip), describe a process (thus involve a set of transitions over time), or might involve multiple channels .

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario.

Here are some examples:

• For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be discover, try, buy, use, seek support.
• For big (or luxury) purchases (like buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
• For a business-to-business scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.

These are behaviors, thoughts, and feelings the actor has throughout the journey and that are mapped within each of the journey phases.

Actions are the actual behaviors and steps taken by users. This component is not meant to be a granular step-by-step log of every discrete interaction. Rather, it is a narrative of the steps the actor takes during that phase.

Mindsets correspond to users’ thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey. Ideally, these are customer verbatims from research.

Emotions are plotted as single line across the journey phases, literally signaling the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience. Think of this line as a contextual layer of emotion that tells us where the user is delighted versus frustrated.

Opportunities (along with additional context such as ownership and metrics) are insights gained from mapping; they speak to how the user experience can be optimized. Insights and opportunities help the team draw knowledge from the map:

• What needs to be done with this knowledge?
• Who owns what change?
• Where are the biggest opportunities?
• How are we going to measure improvements we implement?

There are several concepts closely related and thus easily confused with journey maps.

It is important to note that this section is only meant to help your personal understanding and clarification of these terms. It is not advised to debate or attempt to shift a whole organization’s language to abide by the definitions stated here. Instead, use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of another method that your team has not previously considered.

Journey Map vs. Experience Map

Think of an experience map as a parent to a journey map. A journey map has a specific actor (a singular customer or user of a product) and specific scenario (of a product or service), while an experience map is broader on both accounts — a generic human undergoing a general human experience.

The experience map is agnostic of a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding a general human behavior; in contrast, a customer journey map is specific and focused on a particular business or product.

For example, imagine the world before the ridesharing market existed (Uber, Lyft, Bird, or Limebike, to name a few). If we were to create an experience map of how a person gets from one place to another, the map would likely include walking, biking, driving, riding with a friend, public transportation, or calling a taxi. Using that experience map we could then isolate pain points: unknown fares, bad weather, unpredictable timing, paying in cash, and so on. Using these pain points, we would then create a future journey map for specific product: how does a particular type of user call a car using the Lyft app?

Journey Map vs. Service Blueprint

If journey maps are the children to experience maps, then service blueprints are the grandchildren. They visualize the relationships between different service components (such as people or processes) at various touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. They are extensions of journey maps, but instead of being focused on the user (and taking the user’s viewpoint), they are focused on the business (and take its perspective).

For the Lyft scenario above, we would take the journey map and expand it with what Lyft does internally to support that customer journey. The blueprint could include matching the user to a driver, contacting the driver, calculating fares, and so on.

Journey Map vs. User Story Map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities. Each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view; the description focuses on what the user wants to do, and how that feature will help. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”

A user story map is a visual version of a user story. For example, take the user story above (“As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”) and imagine writing out the different steps that the team plans for the user to take when using that functionality. These steps could be: logging in, beginning deposit, taking picture of check, and entering transaction details. For each step, we can document required features: enabling camera access, scanning check and auto filling numbers, and authorizing signature. In a user story map, these features are written on sticky notes, then arranged based on the product release that each functionality will be added to.

While, at a glance, a user story map may look like a journey map, journey maps are meant for discovery and understanding (think big picture), while user story maps are for planning and implementation (think little picture).

Although a journey map and user story map may contain some of the same pieces, they are used at different points of the process. For example, imagine our journey map for Lyft indicated that a pain point appeared when the user was in a large group. To address it, the team may introduce a multicar-call option. We could create a user story map to break this feature (multicar call) into smaller pieces, so a product-development team could plan release cycles and corresponding tasks.

The benefits of journey maps (and most other UX mappings ) are two-fold. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model for the whole team. Fragmented understanding is a widespread problem in organizations because success metrics are siloed; it is no one’s responsibility to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical goal of journey mapping, because, without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used to communicate an understanding of your user or service to all involved. Journey maps are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise, and that creates a shared vision. The maps can also become the basis for decision making as the team moves forward.

Journey mapping is a process that provides a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to address customers’ pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, create a better experience for your users.

Additional articles are available, discussing: 

• When to create customer journey maps
• The 5-step process
• Journey mapping in real life

Free Downloads

Related courses, journey mapping to understand customer needs.

Learn the process for capturing and communicating UX insights across complex interactions

Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience

Create a usable and cohesive cross-channel experience by following guidelines to resolve common user pain points in a multi-channel landscape

Interaction

Generating Big Ideas with Design Thinking

Unearthing user pain points to drive breakthrough design concepts

Related Topics

• Customer Journeys Customer Journeys
• Design Process

Learn More:

Please accept marketing cookies to view the embedded video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W13ext26kQ

Customer Journey Mapping 101

UX Design Critiques: 3 Tips for Effective Feedback

Megan Brown · 4 min

Journey Mapping: 2 Decisions to Make Before You Begin

Kate Kaplan · 3 min

Scenario Mapping for Design Exploration

Kim Salazar · 3 min

Related Articles:

The 5 Steps of Successful Customer Journey Mapping

Kate Kaplan · 6 min

Parking Lots in UX Meetings and Workshops

Sarah Gibbons · 5 min

When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps

User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s The Difference?

Kim Salazar · 5 min

Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

Alita Joyce and Kate Kaplan · 7 min

Luxury Shopping User Groups and Journeys

Kate Moran · 14 min

InVisionApp, Inc.

Inside Design

Journey mapping powers better design thinking

  •   apr 19, 2018.

Design thinking is a tool that equips stakeholders and product teams with a deep understanding of their users so that they can ideate, prototype, and test user-centered solutions.

That means the success of your team’s design thinking sessions hinges upon a solid foundation of user insights. Failure to know who you are solving for, what solutions they use today (if any), and what motivates and inhibits them means you’re operating in the dark. In other words, you’ll be doing what the overwhelming majority of organizations do by viewing design as an afterthought.

Related: Why you need design thinking and how to put it into practice

I’ve joined such design thinking sessions—where the user was not well understood but the team was expected to jump into ideation. More times than not, a discussion would break out about who the solution was for and why it was important. From that point, not only did ideation grind to a halt, but the team questioned the entire mission. Rightfully so.

If you don’t know who and why, you cannot answer how and what.

Read more from the New Haircut team: Designing a design team

So in this article, I’ll talk about one tool your entire team can rally around to answer who and why: a customer journey map .

With a customer journey map, the solutions your team ideates, prototypes, and tests will be much more informed—and they’ll ultimately save you from costly redos.

One more thing before getting started: It’s become popular for product people and designers to want to spend all of their energy focusing exclusively on the user. But your company’s journey, as it relates to your user, is vitally important to understand too. So I’ll also highlight how you can connect customer and business need inside your maps.

“If you don’t know who and why, you cannot answer how and what.”

Please keep in mind that this article will not cover the necessary problem framing , research, interviews, etc. that precede your map.

And if you’re specifically looking to understand the relationship between mapping and design sprints, this article will help you .

Alignment diagrams, or maps

My teammates are big fans of Jim Kalbach and his explanation of alignment diagrams—or, more simply, maps . We’ve learned a ton from his book, Mapping Experiences .

As Jim notes in the book, maps help to:

• Build empathy
• Provide a common “big picture”
• Break down silos
• Bring focus
• Reveal opportunities

Jim Kalbach ’s Mapping Experiences book is gold

There are several maps you can use, depending on the problem you’re solving, and the way the team prefers to visualize the journey:

• Service blueprints
• Customer journey maps
• Experience maps
• Mental model diagrams
• Spatial maps

Of those map types, I’ve used customer journey maps for the overwhelming majority of use cases I’ve worked through. That doesn’t mean the others are not effective. Again, it depends what you’re working on and how your team needs to visualize your user’s experience. Also, I predominantly work on building digital products; i.e. Service Blueprints are not as much a fit for my work.

So while I encourage you to read Jim’s book and decide which maps suits your project best, I’ll focus on this article on the application of a customer journey map.

Creating a customer journey map

As I’m preparing teams to create a journey map, the two questions I hear most are:

• How will it work?
• Who should attend?

I typically keep mapping sessions to within three hours. Anything more than that means we’re going too far too soon. The team will also burn out after three hours.

Certain exercises and experiences still need to be done in-person because technology disruptions will make you want to throw things. Creating a map is not one of them.

We use Mural to conduct the mapping session. It comes with lots of templates and frameworks to get you started. Eventually, you’ll develop your own library of templates to select from.

We begin by restating the design (business) challenge we’re tackling, and making sure the team is still aligned there. If they’re not, we spent no more than 15 minutes discussing and getting back on track.

Next, we create a proto-persona of whomever we currently consider our primary user.

By defining a proto-persona, we enable the team to visualize that user’s facts, behaviors, problems, and goals of our representative user.

Now, I realize that calling a single human being “representative” is an onion. We can have a week-long discussion about personas and jobs theories, while deconstructing who represents our prototypical user.

We try not to overthink this. We decide upon one person that best represents the personas / segments we previously defined, and invite them in. In the end, the goal is to confirm we know our user. So if after spending a few hours on a user map we discover we have the wrong one, we move on to the next one.

Then, with our proto-persona complete, we move on to our map.

A customer journey map

When creating your map, be sure to keep your design challenge and proto-persona in clear eyesight—you should be checking in with both references as you lay your map out.

The goal of this mapping exercise is to visualize the current state of your user. That means you’ll focus on filling in the purple User section.

Moving left to right through (green) stages, you discuss the actions, feelings, pain points, and desired outcomes your user experience.

Once this is done, we have the map printed out. We make it big enough that in future design thinking session, the entire team can huddle around it and collaborate.

We invite only two or three key team members to this session.

For one, the Product Owners (PO). Who the PO is will change significantly from company to company and project to project. It can be the CEO for one, the VP of Supply Chain for another, and the Head of Product for a third.

Regardless, the PO is the person who has the ultimate authority to move things forward (or kill them), as well as the greatest overall vision.

Next, if you can have a representative user join, amazing. Otherwise, if you can’t find that person, invite the best user proxy from your team (e.g. sales rep, customer service rep, marketing manager).

Finally, inviting a product person (e.g. Product Manager, Head of Product) is a great idea because they tend to have the most well-rounded picture of all of the moving parts.

Bringing the company’s journey into the map

Most business solutions fail because they focus exclusively on their business needs while completely neglecting the user.

So it’s appropriate that our map thus far has centered heavily on the user. However, if you’re not at all considering your company, you’ll miss opportunities to draw connections between the two.

In the blue (Company) section in the map above is where you can loop in the company’s activities, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, that map to the corresponding stage of the user’s journey.

Up until now, the majority of the map has been focused on the current state. The exception is the Opportunities row. While you should avoid the temptation to go deep into solution mode, this is your first chance, as a team, to begin thinking about how your company might impact or improve your user’s journey.

And finally, you bring your user and company together by ending your mapping exercise within the orange (Touchpoints) row. This can be virtual, in-person, digital, or physical.

Summarizing the benefits of journey maps

In the product and technology communities I’m a part of, I see so many product managers and designers asking for hard numbers on the benefits of things like design thinking and design sprints .

Some answers are easy. For one, you can talk about dollars saved by killing a project you invalidated before product development ever began. You can also mention the dollars saved or opportunity gains by bringing the right solution to market on the first try, versus building and rebuilding multiple times.

But then there are the soft benefits of design thinking that are hard to formulate in a spreadsheet or Keynote. A customer journey map is no different.

By creating a map, you visualize something that had previously been scribbled down in customer support calls or living inside people’s heads—each of whom have different language models and ways of describing your user and their journey. But because it’s now visual, anyone can look at it, contribute to it, dispute it, and use it.

It’s not easy to quantify, but the long-term benefits of a cross-functional team working efficiently and effectively will have a lasting impact on not only what the project the map is created for, but how people in the company generally trust one another and communicate when attempting to tackle big, important challenges.

For more on design thinking, check out the Design Thinking Handbook at DesignBetter.co .

by Jay Melone

Jay Melone is a Partner at New Haircut , a product strategy and training group based in NJ. They help product teams fall in love with the digital solutions they make, and how they make them. They offer design sprints , problem framing, and outcome-based roadmaps as part of their 4-week Product Transformation Program.

Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard Try Freehand

Get awesome design content in your inbox each week, give it a try—it only takes a click to unsubscribe., thanks for signing up, you should have a thank you gift in your inbox now-and you’ll hear from us again soon, get started designing better. faster. together. and free forever., give it a try. nothing’s holding you back..

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

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2021? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map right at the last second?

The thing is -- understanding your customer base can be extremely challenging. And 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.

Download Now

While it isn't possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a very handy tool for keeping track of important 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?

Customer journey stages.

• What is a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

What's included in a customer journey map, steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps
• Customer Journey Map Best Practices

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

• 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 to consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase 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.

Free Customer Journey Map Template

Fill out this form to access the free templates..

For example, at HubSpot, our customer's journey is divided into 3 stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

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 the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better 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 would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing 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 at the ready.

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

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and 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 would recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so 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.

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 UX 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 also need to 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.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

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 a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

How AI Image Misuse Made a World of Miscommunication [Willy's Chocolate Experience]

7 Ways to Delight Your Customers This Holiday Season

14 Customer Experience Fails that Companies Can Learn From

How Customer Experience Has Evolved Over the Last Decade [+ 2024 Trends]

Memorable Examples of AR in Customer Experience [+Tips for Implementing the Technology]

How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map [Examples + Template]

Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

How to Implement a Hybrid Customer Service Strategy That Works [Expert Tips]

User Flows: 8 Tips For Creating A Super Smooth User Experience

11 Best Practices for B2B Customer Experience

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

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable. —Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a customer-centric development process that creates desirable products that are profitable and sustainable over their lifecycle.

It goes beyond the traditional focus on the features and functions of a proposed product. Instead, it emphasizes understanding the problem to be solved, the context in which the solution will be used, and the evolution of that solution.

Traditional waterfall approaches to product development are sequential: requirements are defined, and solutions are designed, built, and delivered to the market. The focus tends to be on the most apparent problems. Often, success is determined by implementing a solution that meets the requirements instead of the user’s needs. This results in products and services with unusable or ignored features that frustrate users and fail to meet the enterprise’s business goals .

Design thinking (Figure 1) represents a profoundly different approach to product and Solution development, in which divergent and convergent techniques are applied to understand a problem, design a solution, and deliver that solution to the market.

Design thinking also inspires new ways to measure the success of our efforts:

• Desirable – Do customers and end-users want the solution?
• Feasible – Can we deliver the right solution through a combination of build, buy, partner, or acquire activities?
• Viable – Is the way we build and offer the solution creating more value than cost? For example, in a for-profit enterprise, are we profitable?
• Sustainable – Are we proactively managing our solution to account for its expected product-market lifecycle?

Successive applications of design thinking advance the solution over its natural market lifecycle, as shown in Figure 2.

Understanding the Problem and Solution Space

In Figure 1, the core design thinking processes appear as a ‘double diamond.’ This represents the focus on thoroughly exploring the problem space before creating solutions. Each diamond focuses on divergent thinking (understanding and exploring options) followed by convergent thinking (evaluating options and making choices).

The activities associated with exploring the problem are elaborated as follows:

• Discover – The discover phase seeks to understand the problem by engaging in market and user research to identify unmet needs. This research creates fresh perspectives that drive innovation. Unlike research that confirms or refutes a hypothesis, the inquiries associated with the discovery phase occur without preconceived notions about how users should work. Instead, it focuses on how users work . An essential research technique is Gemba, also known as ‘going to the place where the work is done.’
• Define – The define phase focuses on the information gathered during the discover phase to generate insights into specific problems and unmet needs. These create opportunities for the business and new product development. Results of this phase typically include personas and empathy maps (described below) that focus the product team on the solutions the Customer would view as desirable. Epics and Features capture the perceived changes needed for existing products and solutions.

With a clear understanding of the target market and its problems, the focus can move toward designing a solution, the second diamond of design thinking. These are:

• Develop – The develop phase uses journey mapping, story mapping, and prototyping to design potential solutions to problems quickly and cost-effectively. Each of these techniques is discussed more thoroughly later in this article. The develop phase also embraces SAFe Principle #3 – Assume variability; preserve options. Design thinking techniques preserve options responsibly.
• Deliver – The deliver phase produces artifacts suitable for creating the solution and varies based on context. These artifacts often start as prototypes expressed as validated features in the ART Backlog for continuous delivery.

Using Personas to Focus Design

Creating solutions for a direct customer—bespoke solutions—offer designers the advantage of speaking directly and frequently with a few target users, permitting them to participate in the design, PI Planning , System Demos , and other SAFe events. In some organizations, Customers are considered part of the team, so creating a Persona to represent them isn’t typically needed but may be helpful when the organization is highly distributed.

In contrast, in an indirect customer market, which is common in B2C solutions, product teams need a way to maintain a connection with their target customers. So, they develop ‘personas,’ fictional consumers and users derived from user research. [2] They depict the people who might similarly use a product or solution, providing insights into how real users would engage with a solution. User personas also support market segmentation strategy by offering a concrete design tool to reinforce that products and solutions are created for people. Personas drive product development and several SAFe practices, as shown in Figure 3.

In addition to user personas, buyer personas extend design thinking to include the individuals and organizations that authorize purchasing decisions. They help ensure that the design encompasses the whole product purchase experience, including after-sales service, support, and operations.

Establishing Empathy to Foster Customer-Centric Design

Customer-centric enterprises use empathy throughout the design process. Empathetic design dismisses preconceived ideas and uses the Customer’s perspective to inform solution development.

Empathy maps [1] are a design thinking tool that promotes customer identification by helping teams develop a deep, shared understanding of others (Figure 4). They enable teams to imagine what a specific persona is thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing as they use the product. The greater the degree of empathy a team has for its customers, the more likely it will be able to design desirable solutions.

Designing the User Experience through Journey Maps

A customer journey map illustrates the user experience in an Operational Value Stream that provides products and services. Figure 5 shows how these journey maps are powerful design thinking tools. They allow teams to identify ways the specific deliverables for one or more Development Value Streams can be improved to create a better end-to-end user experience.

Delivering Benefits Through Features

While a journey map captures the high-level experience of the Customer in the operational value stream, product features manage the specific deliverables that fulfill a stakeholder’s need. Features are commonly described through a features and benefits (FAB) matrix , using short phrases that provide context and a benefit hypothesis. Design thinking, however, promotes switching the order of the FAB to a benefit-feature matrix . In this case, the intended customer benefits are identified first, and then the teams determine what features might satisfy their needs. This approach helps Agile Teams explore better and faster ways to deliver the desired benefits (Figure 6).

Designing User Workflows or Journeys through Story Maps

Features that capture a workflow or user journey present a unique challenge to Agile teams. Because the backlog is a flat, one-dimensional list, it does not show the relationship between the user’s goals, workflow activities, and the stories in the backlog. Story mapping is a brainstorming technique that can enable teams to design a solution focused on the Customer. Not all features will require story mapping. However, they are particularly useful for developing new end-user functionality for a workflow or customer journey.

Why Story Maps?

Story maps help teams ideate, plan, and group activities in a workflow or user journey . They allow teams to address the most critical steps before improving existing steps or adding new functionality. Story maps are an important design thinking tool that enables Customer Centricity because they focus on delighting a user instead of merely implementing stories ordered by their value. Another benefit is avoiding releasing a feature (or solution) that is not usable because its functionality depends on stories that are lower in priority and further down the backlog.

Figure 7 illustrates how a feature with a workflow is captured in a story map [3], organizing the sequence of stories according to the activities (or steps) a user needs to accomplish their goal. The first set of stories is essential for the initial release, while the next set represents improvements for future releases.

How to Create a Story Map

The following steps describe the process of creating a story map (Figure 7) for a new potential Feature that requires a workflow.

• Frame the purpose : Identify the goal or customer problems the solution will solve and the intended users of the solution.
• Map the whole story : Define the starting conditions for the user to accomplish their goals. Focus on describing the whole story and user activities and tasks, creating the backbone of the story map.
• Brainstorm : Fill in the body of the story map by breaking down the larger user tasks into smaller subtasks and user interface details. Consider many possibilities without concern if the stories are in or out of scope. Affinity group the stories needed to complete the task under each activity.
• Identify the stories essential for the initial release : The team identifies which stories can be released (in the next iteration or two) that will achieve a meaningful user outcome.
• Identify stories considered as improvements in future releases : Stories that are not selected for the initial release will be added to the backlog as potential candidates for future releases.

Increasing Design Feedback Through Prototypes

A prototype is a basic functional model of a feature or product, usually built for demonstration purposes or as part of the development process. It helps the team clarify their understanding of the problem and reduces risk in designing and developing the solution before making further investments. Prototypes provide many benefits:

• Fast feedback. By definition, a prototype is cheaper and faster to produce than a complete solution. This enables faster feedback from users and customers, increased understanding of solution requirements, and greater confidence in the final designs.
• Risk reduction. Prototypes can reduce technical risk by enabling Agile teams to focus initial efforts on the aspects of the solution associated with the highest risk.
• Intellectual property/patent filing. Prototypes can be used to satisfy strategic requirements for managing intellectual property as early as possible in the development process.
• Models for requirements. Prototypes can provide more clarity in the requirements of the desired feature or solution than pages of documentation.

There are many kinds of prototypes, each optimized to provide different types of insights:

• Paper prototypes are typically hand-drawn sketches of the intended solution. They can be automated to illustrate workflows or validate user story maps.
• Mid-Fi prototypes are visually-complete representations of software-centric solutions but are not typically functionally integrated.
• Hi-Fi prototypes are visually-complete and interactive models which users and customers can directly explore.
• Hardware prototypes provide critical feedback on form factors, sizes, and operational requirements. For example, when exploring form factors to see how a new tablet might fit into existing backpacks, briefcases, and cars, one Silicon Valley company cut many plastic models from a single sheet of plastic. Later in this design process, this same team found they needed to redesign the power supply so that it would not unduly interfere with the WIFI signal.

Last updated: 13 February 2023

Privacy Overview

Collaborative customer journey mapping tools

Easily plan and create customer journey maps in Miro. Exercise empathy, understand your user’s wants and needs, and build exceptional customer experiences.

Over 60M users love Miro.

Ready-made customer journey map templates

Design transformative customer journeys with templates for persona building, touchpoint maps, service blueprints, and more. Help your team quickly visualize, collaborate, and iterate on your customer experience, bringing in data and research to make the best-informed decisions.

Create a shared understanding, faster

Build highly visual and accurate maps that bring a customer’s humanity and experience to life with dynamically populated input, feedback, and data from various sources, like Amplitude, Looker, Blossom, Loom, and UserTesting. Record interactive walkthroughs with Talktrack so everyone can engage on their own time, with all the context on the board.

Easy to share and change

Give your team easy access to customer journey maps so they can leave feedback, ask questions, and make immediate changes as needed. Keep customer-centricity top of mind by embedding it everywhere your teams work (like Confluence) and it’ll always be synced to the latest version, or export your customer journey map as an image or PDF file for presentations.

Why people love Miro for customer journey mapping

Uncover possibilities.

Miro’s infinite canvas gives you the ability to collaborate across product teams and cross-functional stakeholders on customer journeys. It serves as a team hub for mapping and research, where you can plot your customer’s paths, visualize their journey, and gather insights all in one tool.

Empathy made easy

Make sure all voices are heard and tap into your team’s collective imagination to identify customer pain points, cultivate empathy, wireframe solutions, and ship innovative products  — all with Miro’s customer journey map tools.

Be the voice of the customer

Map your user journey step-by-step and truly understand the people using your product. Bring your team with you in this process and share your customer journey map across your organization. Become the customer advocate and ensure you add value to your product.

Quickly get started

Miro’s customer journey map tool helps accelerate your team’s processes by clearly visualizing journeys, touchpoints, personas, and more. Save time by crafting your customer journey map using one of our pre-made frameworks, or build one from scratch with our many editing tools.

Deliver better results

Make better-informed decisions by getting instant feedback and craft experiences that people will remember. Tag team members, receive comments, and gain more insights with Miro’s collaborative customer journey mapping tool.

Share it with everyone

Share your insights and be proactive by running customer workshops inside your organization. Use Miro’s collaborative features, such as the timer and voting, to help lead interactive sessions and engage your team. Offer the space and tools needed for blue-sky thinking.

Related templates

Customer Journey Map Template

Design the best product experience and meet your customer's needs.

Customer Touchpoint Map Template

Identify opportunities and gain a competitive advantage.

Customer Problem Statement Template

Create a problem statement to understand your customer's point of view.

Voice of the Customer Template

Create standards to understand and improve your customer experience.

Customer Journey Mapping Template Pack

Easily create customer journey maps for projects of all kinds.

Experience Mapping Template

Bring a customer-centric approach to product development and branding.

More than just a customer journey map

Customer journey mapping in Miro is the perfect blend of structure and flexibility, so your team can seamlessly visualize, collaborate, and iterate on your user journeys. From workshops with product teams to client presentations, focus on what matters and build great customer experiences.

UX & Design

From brainstorming with your cross-functional squad to gathering feedback for iteration and reiteration, create product experiences that people love.

Research and Design

Embrace design thinking and collaborate on design sprints, customer journey maps, wireframes, and more. Transform the way your team builds products.

Strategic planning

Propel your plans from strategy through execution. Run engaging remote planning sessions, build visual presentations, and manage and track progress collaboratively.

Bring teams together and create everything you need to develop campaigns that delight customers and drive business forward — all in one place.

Wireframing

Create quick app and website wireframes, ideate on sticky notes, map user flows, and collect references. Do it all in real time with your team on one board.

Bring teams closer together and execute faster in a hybrid, collaborative Obeya room.

How to create a customer journey map with Miro

Define personas

Determine which specific customer segments or personas you want to focus on. Collect data and insights about their needs, behaviors, and preferences.

Identify touchpoints

Identify key stages of the customer journey listing the touchpoints. Detail the specific actions, emotions, and pain points customers experience at each stage.

Add context and insights

Integrate data from customer surveys, interviews, analytics, and other sources to enrich your understanding of customer behaviors and preferences.

Share and find opportunities

Identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. When ready, share with stakeholders for feedback and collaboratively draft an action plan to implement the findings.

Iterate and update

Embed the map where teams and stakeholders can easily find it. Regularly review and evolve the customer journey map as you gain more data, insights, and feedback.

Customer journey mapping tools FAQs

What makes a good customer journey.

To create a good customer journey map, make sure you add all the stages your user goes through by mapping every customer touchpoint and the phases they belong to. After you map out your customer journey, to know more about who they are, you can create a storyboard or dig deeper with an empathy map. Miro’s customer journey mapping software makes it easy to add other artifacts and maps to your board, so you can have a great overview of your customer journey and what influences your customer's experiences. It can get messy, and it’s ok! Once you have all the information you need in one shared space, it’s easier to craft your customer journey or create a new user journey map.

What are the components of a customer journey map?

In Miro’s customer journey mapping tool, you have the flexibility to add as many components as you’d like. In our template, we use the following: actions, touchpoints, customer thoughts, customer feelings, process ownership, and opportunities. Each component belongs to a customer journey stage and is added to the board. Some folks also add user research data and other tools, such as empathy maps or timelines.

Can I download or share my customer journey map?

Yes, you can download your customer journey map as an image or PDF file or share your board link with others. Embed the map everywhere your teams work, like Confluence or Notion and it'll always be synced to the latest version. The customer journey map can be treated as a living document, evolving according to your product evolution and need.

Discover more

The ultimate list of templates for understanding your customers

A field guide to customer journey mapping

3 steps to go from customer interviews to a customer journey map

Service blueprint vs. journey maps

Get on board in seconds

Join thousands of teams using Miro to do their best work yet.

How we work

Innovate & grow.

• Innovation by Design
• Value Proposition Design

Accelerate & Transform

• Accelerated Design Shop
• Design Sprint

Discover & Learn

• Customer Journey Mapping
• Design Thinking Starter
• Design Thinking Blitz
• Design Thinking Community

UX & Digital Experiences

• User Experience Research & Design

Case Studies

Société Générale TimeGivers: a “fitbit”-like gamified experience for in-company time tracking

Otp bank co-designing otp bank’s strategic plan for growth.

Mapping Your Customer's Journey

Understanding a customer's step-by-step journey is vital to the success of your business. focusing your team's attention to every touchpoint on the future experience of your service is essential..

If you’ve taken the time to get to know your customers’ personas and understand how they interact with your brand, then you can come up with a pretty good idea of how they will behave in the future.

You can take this insight through research and build a roadmap of how they move through your service. This is journey mapping, and if you haven’t taken the time to do it, you might be missing crucial details.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map (aka. Experience Map) visually represents your customers’ steps to achieve a specific goal. Every touchpoint, every intention, every emotion, every action your customers make is important.

Understanding a customer’s journey is vital to the success of your business because it not only tells you who’s interacting with your brand and how at every touchpoint, but it helps you understand the best path to take to achieve your goals.

There are a few different ways you can use a customer journey map. You can use it to:

What Do You Get from Mapping Your Customer's Journey?

Here at Design Thinking Society, we understand just how valuable a customer journey map can be. A good experience map helps you understand the customer needs that drive your business and allows you to create the best experience possible.

We’ve seen countless customers use this tool to:

We can help your team map your customer journeys that will help your business grow and succeed. You can then put these maps to good use in creating improved employee experiences as well.

By understanding your audience and their needs, you can create processes for your employees to make them more effective and efficient.

Mapping Your Customer's Journey with Design Thinking Society

Our team of expert researchers and facilitators understand that mapping your customer’s journey is a complex process, and we can help you through every step.

We’ll help you understand your customers and create an experience that fits their needs and desires. We’ll then help guide you through the entire process of creating a map and help you make sense of the data you’ll collect and ensure it’s being put to good use to help drive your business success.

Need help mapping your customer's journey?

Learn what we can do for you!

• How We Work
• Case studies

Connect with us

Stay in touch.

11-13 George Enescu Str, Bucharest, Romania

+40 744 675 605

[email protected]

© 2021 by OnlineHub. Fast forwardly created with the makers at Design Thinking Society

Privacy Overview