What is a customer journey map?
At the most basic level, a Customer Journey Map is a visual depiction of how a user might complete a process connected to your products and services.
Typically, Customer Journey Maps will take one or more key user journeys and divide them into phases. Each phase may then include:
- Descriptions of various main events as they might typically occur
- Insight into users’ thoughts, feelings, and motivations
- A user experience timeline describing any high and low points related to main events
- Opportunities to resolve issues and improve the user experience
Once completed, maps can offer valuable insight into the user experience as a complete timeline of interactions with your products and services instead of isolated moments. You may even include information before and after the experience with your organisation, where it may be relevant.
Customer Journey Maps are not in and of themselves a research activity, but they visualise outputs from research activities. Contextual Inquiry or Diary Studies often generate journey maps as an output. Journey maps can also represent findings from any research method focusing on the journeys in question (e.g. depth interviews, usability testing).
Customer journeys and user experience patterns may also differ between different groups of users. Customer Journey Maps used in conjunction with Personas can depict differing experience timelines for each persona experiencing the same product or service.
When are they used?
Customer Journey Maps are primarily produced in the discovery phase of a project when exploring opportunities to improve the user experience, whether that be the user experience of your products or services or those of your competitors.
Understanding the end-to-end user experience is vital when generating requirements for new services, and Customer Journey Mapping presents an idea resource from which to work to build those requirements.
Customer Journey Maps are also effective as a collaborative resource for logging research findings from different sources, merging them into a single asset that can contextualise research findings.
Because Customer Journey Maps can act as a simple and visually engaging way to present information from various sources, they are also beneficial for establishing a single narrative within project teams and creating a shared vision of the experiences of your user groups.
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