As Mark Jenkins said, ‘ Maps are essential. Planning a journey without a map is like building a house without drawings’. In this article, we will be walking through the Basic Introduction for Journey Mapping or in other words, Journey Mapping 101.

Without wasting time, let's get into what you can expect to learn in this article.

• Introduction to Journey Mapping
• Power of Journey Mapping
• Journey Mapping Process
• Key components of Journey Mapping
• Journey map Variations

ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN 😎 ?

Firstly: Let’s begin with Introduction To Journey Map💣

Before moving forward let us first understand what is meant by Journey Map?

A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. In other words, it is a visual artefact that is an important tool in any journey mapping process. It helps you tell the story of your customer's experiences with your brand across all touchpoints.

Follow mention attributes are the ones that usually included in Journey Map

• Time/Process
• Actions of the customer and the organization over time
• Influences or the forces that shape actions over time
• Customer perspective of the forces that affect decisions
• Company perspective of the forces that affect the decision
• Encounters where customers and the business come into contact
• Outcomes of encounters

What is meant by Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping is any of a family of methods that are used to create a simplified representation of a complex process or experience. 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.

Journey mapping processes include following

• A journey map that is created and updated during the process
• A workshop where stakeholders form a shared understanding and align their efforts to create value
• Data gathering and analysis which might include problem space research or solution space research
• A shared understanding of the current situation and the people using or creating a product or service
• Internal alignment between internal stakeholders who create a product or service
• External alignment between the internal stakeholders, the product or service and the external stakeholders in a market
• Plans and Action for creating value

Why Journey Mapping is Important?

Mapping the customer journey ensures that you are not missing out on the chance to interact with your customer at any stage.

This process creates an overview of the customer experience and maps how customers move through the sales funnel. It is especially useful across both the iteration and refinement process as new elements are designed and older processes are refined or eliminated.As well as this process also helps business leaders gain insights into common customer pain points. With these insights allows you to identify opportunitieswhich would cause to deliver more optimised and personalised customer experiences.

On this journey, customers might see ads, speak to a customer service representative, or attempt to check out.However, simply understanding the customer journey isn’t enough. It’s best to visualize this complicated journey into a diagram that you and other employees can refer to as a resource. This is where designing a customer journey map comes into play.

With this knowledge of What is Journey mapping let’s move to our next main topic.👇

Next, we move to: Power of Journey Mapping💣

Users and touchpoints are all components of a system. A journey map’s sole purpose is not only understanding and identifying these components, but also revealing the dependencies and interactions between them. On a journey map, companies can also see the consequences of these interactions in the form of moments of truth, user pain points, or high points. One of the most significant values regarding those pain points is being able to pinpoint the root cause of those pain points.

Let me brief explain what exactly meant from that according to the impact in organizational and business

Lets start off with how journey map impact in organization

• Zoom Out:-

Which means, the the journey mapping helps you get outside of your organization’s perspective and look at your organization or product from multiple points of view.

• Understand Why:-

Journey maps help you understand why when organizations know when something is going on through metrics. That being said, using a journey map can help you identify and understand the pain points within the customers’ experience journey.

• Identify Opportunities:-

it’s not just about identifying the problem, but identifying moments of opportunity and intervention

• Create New Solutions:-

With a future state journey map you can illustrate new ideas and concepts and then communicate them or test them with others, which causes to co-create new solutions.

• Bring together teams:-

Journey maps help bring teams and organizations together around a problem and create a common understanding. A journey map can refine your corporate communication by aligning different departments or perspectives within a company.

Journey maps can even be used across organizations as they help to give a common focus to a challenge or problem. It might help to create a universal goal for all departments, so every employee can grasp the overall aim and work towards it.

With that being said let us move to how the journey map will be useful in business perspective

• Gives the competitve advantage:-

The process of journey mapping offers a competitive advantage: by dicussing customers’ experiences, empathize with their needs and therefore improve the service.

• Increase Revenue:-

A consistently positive customer experience will increase revenues for your company because of customer loyalty and word-of-mouth.

• Higher willingness to pay:-

Not only do people expect good customer service, they are willing to pay for it.

Likewise, journey maps help stakeholders gain the empathy of end-users while facilitating the ideation within a problem space bounded per user insights. In order to see the real value, companies need to take actions based on the output, so they can tackle the right problems. That’s where the journey map comes to the picture.

NOW IT’S TIME TO MOVE TO THE PREDOMINANT PART OF THE ARTICLE🔥

Let’s Dig Into Journey Mapping Process💣

In some situations, a team will involve stakeholders early and often. In others, they might wait until the very end to reveal the outcome to stakeholders. Some processes directly include many stakeholders. Others keep it small. The key of the journey mapping process is to find a process that works for your situation and adapt it as needed

Moreover, to get a clear understanding of the Journey mapping process, let us divide it into main three types as follows. These will be differ according to the steps that are involved, order of the steps, stakeholders and the scope.

• Map It Last
• Map In the Middle
• Rapid Mapping

Note:- These terms are not industrial terms these are used as for your better understanding.

🔴Type No 01:- Map It Last

This process begins with gathering data. This might include user interviews, identification of customer pain points, surveys or process identification.

The next step is a workshop that brings together the stakeholders who will make sense of the research data.

In the last step, the insights from the workshop are used to create the journey map (experience map, customer journey map or service blueprint artifact) that is then shared with the appropriate people and used to determine the team’s next steps.

🔴Type No 02:- Map It In The Middle

the map in the middle process also begins when you gathering data.

Instead of following data gathering with a workshop where stakeholders make sense of the data, the team jumps directly to the creation of journey map ( experience map, customer journey map or service blueprint) which they then review with stakeholders in a workshop.

🔴Type No 03:- Rapid Mapping

The first step in rapid mapping is to notice when a discussion takes a turn that would benefit from creating a journey map.

The second step is to find a whiteboard or piece of paper and a writing implement, and then start mapping what people are talking about in real time.

Then as for the third step ask clarifying questions to cover the gaps in the map.

A final step is to save and share the result. The easiest way to do this is to snap a photo and email it to those who participated in the discussion

Key Components of a Journey Map 💣

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

01) Actor

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

02) Scenario + Expectation

The scenario describes the situation that the journey map addresses and is associated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations.

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

03) Journey Phases

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).

04) Actions, Mindsets and Emotions

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.
• Mindsets correspond to users’ thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey.
• Emotions are plotted as single line across the journey phases, literally signaling the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience.

05) Opportunities

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.

Last but not Least: Let Us Talk About the Journey Mapping Variations💣

Once you have decided to use journey mapping in a project, you must then decide which type of journey map to create, and which type of journey mapping process to use. There will never be a right or wrong choice, but there almost always is a better or worse one, depending on your situation.

Just as hikers use different maps to navigate the same piece of landscape, designers use different types of journey maps to navigate different parts of a design situation. This section will introduce you to four common types of journey maps

1. Experience Maps
2. Customer Journey Maps
3. Service Blueprint
4. Empathy Map

How To Read The journey Map

Before going deep on the types of journey maps, first and foremost, you should know how to read a journey map right? Let me briefly explain to you how.

You will probably notice that you will begin to read journey maps in three different ways. At first, you will read and understand what a journey map says. Another name for this is structural reading. Then you will begin to understand what a journey map says about the world, which is also called interpretive reading. Finally,you will begin to read journey maps and think of how they can be changed and improved, which is called critical reading.

Types Of Journey Map

🟠Type 01:- Experience Map

Of the three types of journey map, experience maps are the most general. 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 a specific scenario (of a product or service), while an experience map is broader on both accounts.

Experience map includes the journey of a person before, after and outside of the context of a particular product, it can be a useful way to explore humans beyond their consumer roles.

Moreover, when you focus your journey mapping efforts on customers who already use your product or service, it can be more difficult to imagine a new product or service. Experience maps help by encouraging you to look beyond the customer relationship.

🔸How to read the Experience Map

• Most experience maps are intended to be read by a general audience, so they are usually easy to read.
• The vertical columns represent a progression. Earlier steps or columns are placed toward the left and later ones toward the right.
• The horizontal rows are not in a particular order. Within each horizontal row, however, a higher vertical position usually represents a higher value (e.g., quality of experience, happiness).
• Eventually, a good experience map should read something like “A person who is trying to accomplish goal a usually goes through phases x, y, z and in each of those phases will do, experience and feel b, c, d’’.

🟠Type 02:- Customer Journey Map

Customer journey maps are very similar to experience maps, but they focus on a specific group of people as customers who use your product or service.

If you need to identify good, bad or missing interactions between a customer and the business, then a customer journey map is a good choice, because it focuses on a person as a customer of a product or service.

Lastly, we use customer journey maps to fix or feed current products or service combinations. Which means, the value of the product or a service is the combination of interaction. Therefore, by placing all customer interactions into one customer journey map, it can become easier to identify important combinations — either good or bad.

🔸How to read the Custome Journey Map

• A customer journey map usually represents a specific type of customer as they seek to achieve a goal with a specific product or service.
• Like an experience map, the vertical columns represent a progression with earlier steps or phases to the left and later ones to the right.
• The order of horizontal rows does matter
• Typically, the customer’s actions are toward the top of the map, while anything having to do with the business is located closer to the bottom.
• Eventually, a good customer journey map should read something like “A person with characteristics a, b, c who is trying to accomplish goal a usually goes through phases x, y, z and experiences product d through the customer touchpoints j, k, l”.

🟠Type 03:- Service Blueprints

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. Service Blueprint maily focus on the employees, products and processes that support those touchpoints.

Since the Service Blueprints intentionally includes multiple supporting levels of the organization, it proactively uses to plan the organizational activities, technologies and functions.

Last but not least, Service Blueprint uses to retroactively identify missing or misaligned upstream organizational functions. Which means, When the cause of or solution to a customer journey problem is not obvious, sometimes a service blueprint can help to identify upstream factors that might be causing it, like low employee morale, a slow supply chain or lack of accurate account data and so on.

🔸How to read the Service Blueprint

• The top part of a service blueprint is like a simplified customer journey map. The bottom part adds several horizontal layers of business functions that support the customer journey.
• Vertical columns represent a progression with earlier steps or phases to the left and later ones to the right.
• The order of horizontal rows does matter.

🟠Type 04:- Empathy Map

Empathy map helps the team members to understand the user’s mindset, by taking it as a tool to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It helps to create a shared understanding and aid in decision making.
It use to build empathy for the users and force alignment and understanding about the user type.
This willbe done at the beginning of any design process and when categorizing research notes from a user interview.

Phew, now you have come to the top of the mountain🤓…With the hope that now you have gained relevant knowledge in Journey Mapping let me end this article. Thank you for reading this far

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