"User experience" (UX) encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

Defined by Don Norman & Jakob Nielsen

The goal of Enterprise Research is to create alignment between:

This is achieved by using research methods designed to understand:

User & Business

Needs
Behaviors
Expectations
Preferences
Challenges

We will discuss

What is Journey Mapping?
Key Components of Journey Mapping
Steps to creating a Journey Map
Real World Examples

What is Journey Mapping?

A Journey Map is a visualization of the series of interactions a person or user has with a product or system while attempting to accomplish a goal over time. Journey Maps are used for understanding user needs and pain points

Journey mapping creates a holistic view of user experience, and it’s this process of bringing together and visualizing data points. They can help engage stakeholders from across groups and spur collaborative conversation and change.

You might be wondering when journey maps are created in the product dev lifecycle. This can vary, but most often a Journey Map is created in the discovery phase of a product lifecycle.
Journey maps often help us understand current state processes so we can best understand the problems as they are now before we dive into creating the solution.

They can also be more forward—thinking and show a future-state idea of what a future process or journey could look like to help provide strategic guidance to a future state experience. Journey Maps are so valuable because they help highlight the entire scoped user journey – not just a few touch points.

Why Journey Mapping Matters

Enables a User-Centric Focus: Journey Maps help create empathy for the users. They ground us in what users actually experience, think, feel, enjoy, and struggle with. When we understand these things through research, rather than through our often bias assumptions, we can better understand the best problems to solve and can also find the best solutions to those problems.

Facilitates Collaboration – Journey Mapping isn’t a solo adventure: Journey maps help align cross-functional stakeholders and simply communicate user needs.

Uncovers Gaps: When creating a journey map, user pain points and opportunities become more clear. While we all may hear various users talk about what works well for them and what they want in a product, a Journey Map is the analysis of research that shows researched user trends.

Creates Alignment: between business, stakeholders, and on the current state experience of an end to end journey. This helps us ground ourselves in what is currently happening so we can better reimagine the future state experience and better identify future solutions aligned with current problems and opportunities.

Key Components of a Journey Map

Scenario & Goal: The scenario and goal component helps stakeholders understand what journey is being mapped out. It helps them understand what journey is being mapped in the journey map.

Phases: The phases or stages of a journey map break out the end to end journey into different parts. For this journey map, it has the journey broken up into higher-level stages including ”identify needs” and “capture photos” as well as more granular steps such as “needs triggered” and “needs collected”. This helps stakeholders understand the journey at a high level.

Time: This is a helpful metric to allow stakeholders to understand how much time each phase of the journey lasts.

User Group: User group is pretty self explanatory. It shows the people, aka, users, that are active in each phase of the journey. This journey map shows four different user groups. Some Journey maps may have more, while others may just focus on one user group.

Touchpoints: shows what is happening in each phase of the journey.

Tools: shows which tools are being used in which stage of the journey. Some other journey maps may be focused entirely on one tool while others have multiple.

Pain Points: something I find the most insightful – shows which pain points are present in which stage of the journey. This is something many stakeholders find very insightful and can be a strategic starting point when identifying what problem or problems to address moving forwards.

Opportunities: And finally, many journey maps also highlight opportunities. I mentioned before that

It is important to note that not all journey maps have the same components

Steps to Creating a Journey Map

Define Purpose - Of creating the Journey Map – often capturing current state process
Identify users and goals - To help understand what user groups are in scope for this journey
Conduct Research- to identify how users are currently using the product(s)

This can be through interviews, observational research, usability testing, and other research methods

Analyze Research - To determine trends in user behavior
Map out the Journey – Often, a researcher Will be collaborating with a designer on this task as visual design can be challenging. Luckily we have a team of amazing designers to support us in this task!
1. Deepen our understanding of the current state, from multiple perspectives
Review Journey with Users - To assure journey was accurately captured
Socialize Journey with Stakeholders - And cross-functional team
Update the Journey Map - Optional but encouraged. A journey map will become out of date as processes evolve

When going through these steps, a number of different tools are used. During the planning, research, analysis, and creation of a journey map miro and figjam or figma are often used. And during research and analysis we also still sometimes use analog processes such as a whiteboard and marker, or sticky note and sharpie