customer journey experience map

How to Create a Customer Experience Map [Free Templates]

Updated: June 15, 2021

Published: November 20, 2020

The customer journey is a long, winding, complex process.

Between hearing about your business from a friend, engaging with your content online, considering a sale, and becoming a customer — not to mention finally using your product and everything that comes afterward — each step is a different experience in its own right.

When a customer interacts with your business, their emotions might range from curiosity to indifference to excitement or even frustration. Because the customer experience is filled with various needs, touchpoints, and states of mind, it's beneficial for your business to map out its customer experience for one or many of the most common interactions users would have with your product, brand, website, or customer support team.

Making a customer experience map can help your team understand these peaks of joy and sorrow, when and why they occur, and what can be done to ensure a consistently positive customer experience.

What Is Customer Experience Mapping?

Customer experience mapping is the process of visually outlining the steps a customer takes during an interaction with your business. This map usually includes a description of each step, the emotions that a customer is feeling during that step, as well as additional insights on the design, intent, and/or implementation of that step from the business's side.

Unlike a holistic customer journey map , a customer experience map tends to narrow in one specific interaction with your business. For example, you might have individual customer experience maps for each of the following scenarios:

• Reading your blog or exploring your website
• Interacting with a customer support agent
• Visiting your store or your ecommerce site
• Using your product at home or at work
• Interacting with sales during the process of becoming a customer

How to Create an Experience Map

1. use a customer experience map template [featured tool].

From there, use the following sections to identify what should be changed about your customer's experience and why.

2. Choose Your Experience.

Since a customer experience map usually focuses on one experience, your first step should be to choose an interaction of focus, which you will soon analyze for experience gaps and areas to improve.

While it's tempting to cover multiple experiences with your map, try to hone in on one specific experience which you'd like to improve for your customers. The rationale for choosing an experience can be anything from customer comments, to an employee observation, to a high traffic number, or even a part of your website that you want to make sure is fully optimized.

That said, we suggest prioritizing low-effort, high-impact opportunities with your customer experience mapping and improvement projects – those that can be addressed swiftly but will have a measurable positive impact on the customer experience.

3. List Your Touchpoints and Customer Actions.

After narrowing your scope, you should break the experience down into the actions that your customers will take, in addition to what the interaction with your business looks like during each action.

For example, let's say you're mapping out the process for a customer seeking support over the phone. The touchpoints might look something like this:

• Step 1: The customer experiences a pain point with your product or service and determines reaching out to support is the necessary next step.
• Step 2: Your customer visits your website, looking for (and eventually finding) your customer support phone number.
• Step 3: Your customer calls support and gets in touch with a support rep.
• Step 4: Your customer explains the pain point, and the support rep works to solve the problem.
• Step 5: The support rep solves the customer's issue over the phone, and the call is finished.

Like in the example above, touchpoints should be sequential and interconnected, but unique enough to be their own steps in the overall customer experience. This process makes it easier to identify what's going right or wrong in each individual step, in addition to what the customer might be feeling at each part of the process.

4. Determine Customer Thoughts or Feelings.

One of the key components of the customer experience map is to look beyond what customers are doing and attempt to understand their emotions during each step of their experience. For example, feelings of curiosity or excitement can easily be diminished by a broken link to your "About Us" page.

During your mapping process, tie your customers' mindset to the actions they're taking. There's no universal way to gauge these opinions, but below are a few common strategies.

User Testing

If your experience map is for a product or a website, you should consider conducting user tests regularly. These tests allow you to observe customers interacting with your product or website and help you make changes based on their actions.

During these tests, ask your customers to explain what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how they feel to add context to their actions as they're doing them.

Customer Feedback

If you're unable to observe customers in real-time, reach out to sales, support, and/or customer success employees to speak on any customer feedback pertaining to the experience in question. While the evidence might be more anecdotal, this path still provides you with the insights that you may otherwise have been unable to gather.

Educated Guess

If all else fails – or if you're building an experience for a new product, service, or business – employ your skills of empathy and critical thinking by making educated guesses on the feelings your experience may provoke. This extra step helps you take a second look at the work you're doing to help justify your actions.

5. Plan Out Improvements to the Customer Experience.

With all customer thoughts, actions, and touchpoints mapped out, the next step is to add potential improvements to your customer experience.

Based on your feedback, test results, and/or educated guesses, go through each step of the customer experience and ask yourself, "what can be done to improve the customer experience at this stage, and why?"

On top of your conversations with customers, consider doing some competitive analysis to see how the other players in your industry handle a similar customer experience.

It's understandable if you come into this step with attachment to the way things are, but remember that customer experience maps identify areas of improvement in your customer journey. If the data or feedback you've received are telling you something needs to change – then listen.

Customer Experience Map Templates

Mapping out your customer experiences is more organized, effective, and clear when using customer experience map templates .

Developed to capture seven different types of customer experiences and journeys, these templates will help you outline every part of the customer experience – and help you identify the biggest opportunities for improving it to delight and retain more customers.

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]

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

Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference? [+ Examples]

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

Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

Back to guides

The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

In business, as in life, it's the customer's journey that makes the company's destination worth all the trouble. No customer wants to jump through several different hoops to get to your product: they want it fast and they want it now.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you improve your user's experience (UX) to create a product they love interacting with, ensures you stay ahead of key workflow tasks, and keeps stakeholders aligned. But a misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

Last updated

Reading time.

This article walks you through the eight key stages of great customer journey mapping, and shows you how to adapt each to your unique business and product to optimize the customer experience from start to finish. 

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

Hotjar's Observe and Ask tools let you go ‘behind the scenes’ to understand your users’ product experiences and improve their customer journey.

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Mapping out the customer journey gives you insights into your buyers’ behavior to help you make changes that improve your website and the user flow between touchpoints. This helps you increase online sales and turn users into loyal customers and brand advocates.

Follow these eight proven steps to understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

Note: every business is distinct, so be sure to adapt these steps to your particular user and business needs. 

1. Define your purpose

The first step to creating a successful customer journey map is to define your product's vision or purpose. Without a clear purpose, your actions will be misguided and you won’t know what you want users to achieve during their journey on your website, product page, or web app. 

To define your purpose, consider your company’s mission statement and incorporate your specific user pain points as much as possible. 

Make your purpose specific to your company’s needs and goals—for example, the purpose of an ecommerce brand looking to help users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

2. Make sure your team is aligned and roles are clear

Cross-functional collaboration is essential when mapping out your brand's or product’s user journey. Get insights from different teams within your organization to find out exactly how users engage with key touchpoints to derive a holistic sense of the user experience (UX), which will help you improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Lisa Schuck , marketing lead at Airship , emphasizes the importance of keeping “anybody that has a touchpoint with a customer” involved. She advises teams to “figure out how to align your external marketing and sales with your internal operations and service.”

Although sales, product, and marketing departments are often the key players in customer journey mapping, also involve your operations and design teams that are responsible for creating the user flow. 

If you have a SaaS company, for example, marketing creatives, sales teams, product owners and designers, and your customer experience department all need to participate in the process. Clearly define who’s responsible for different aspects of the map, and regularly check in to make sure your final map isn’t missing any important perspectives.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Highlights feature to collect and organize key product experience (PX) insights and data on user behavior from teams across your organization to help you build your customer journey map. Then use Hotjar’s Slack integration to quickly share learnings with your relevant stakeholders to get buy-in and ensure everyone is aligned.

Hotjar’s Slack integration Slack lets teams discuss insights in the moment, so they’re up to date with critical issues 

3. Create user personas

Once you’ve defined your purpose and involved all relevant stakeholders, it’s time to design your user personas . Use resources like UXPressia and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to help you design various product personas . 

Create a range of user personas to understand what each type of buyer needs to curate a journey that’s easy and enjoyable for every customer. This is an important early step in the customer journey mapping process—because if you don’t understand your users, you won’t be able to fully comprehend how they interact with your brand to better it.

Create user personas for all your product’s possible buyers—for example, to map out a B2B customer journey for a company in the hospitality business means developing personas for a range of different customers, from large chain hotel managers to small vacation rental owners. 

4. Understand your user goals

Once you’ve designed your user personas, it’s time to define their jobs to be done . What do your users hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

In a SaaS customer journey , perhaps users are looking for helpful comparisons of product features on your website, or want to easily sign up for a trial account in the hopes that your product will solve their problems. But you won’t know until you ask . 

Once you have users or test users, get direct insights from them with Hotjar's Feedback tools and Surveys to ask buyers exactly what their goals are as they browse different pages of your website or interact with product features.

Since user goals are at the center of your customer journey map, define them early on—but keep speaking to your users throughout the entire process to make sure you’re up to date with their needs.

5. Identify customer touchpoints

After you understand your users and what their goals are, it’s time to identify the ways they interact with your company and your product. 

"Touchpoints are the moments the customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or customer support. The quality of these experiences affects the overall customer experience, which is why it’s important to be aware of them. Consider what happens before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase or uses your product."

Key customer journey touchpoints for a website or product include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, CTA buttons, sign-up forms, social media accounts, and paid ads. 

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. Include insights from different teams and stakeholders —your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints. 

Post-purchase touchpoints can help turn users into loyal customers and even advocates for your brand. 

In the words of Lisa Schuck, "When you create a raving fan, or a brand advocate, who goes out and tells the world how wonderful you are, you get social credibility and validity. It’s becoming more and more important to have advocates."

Pro tip : speak with your users regularly to get direct voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights on what they love and what frustrates them on their journey. Place Hotjar Feedback widgets and Surveys at key website touchpoints like your homepage and landing pages to get valuable user insights on what you can improve. Use Hotjar’s survey templates to get inspiration for your survey questions. 

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

Once your user and product research are complete and all roles are distributed, it’s time to map out the full customer journey.

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts. 

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions. 

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip : it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention ?

7. Test the customer journey

Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to take it for a spin. You can’t understand how your users move through customer touchpoints unless you test out the user flow yourself. 

Start with an informational Google search, then visit your website, check out your social media pages, and simulate the purchase process. This will help you get a better sense of how users interact with each touchpoint and how easy it is to move between them. 

Be sure to try out the journey from the standpoint of every relevant user persona. For an enterprise software company, this could mean looking at how decision-makers move through the user flow vs. the employees who’ll use your software day to day. 

By walking through the customer journey yourself, you can identify issues and difficulties that users may have to address them proactively. 

Try out the user flow with test users to get a realistic perspective of the user experience. Be sure to use focus groups that represent every one of your user personas. 

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

Continuously map out, analyze, and evaluate the customer journey by observing users and getting their feedback. Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you understand how your users are experiencing the customer journey on your website: create heatmaps to see whether users are clicking on CTAs or key buttons, and watch recordings to find out how they navigate once they reach your homepage.

Then, use Google Analytics to get an overview of your website traffic and understand how customers from different channels move through the user journey. 

Finally, once you have these combined user insights, use them to make changes on your website and create a user journey that is more intuitive and enjoyable.

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels , and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

Take a data-informed approach: don’t assume you already know your users —test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data. 

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

Take the time to understand your business goals and users, involve the right teams, and test frequently to consistently improve your customer journey and make the decisions that will help you map out an experience that will get you happy and loyal customers.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping helps you visualize how users interact with your business and product, from the moment they find it until long after they make their first purchase. 

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the buyer's journey to create a more enjoyable, streamlined, and intuitive experience for your customers.

What are the benefits of following a customer journey mapping process?

The main benefits of a customer journey mapping process are: : 

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

What happens if you don’t follow key steps in customer journey mapping?

If you don’t follow key steps when mapping out the customer journey, your map likely won’t give you the insights you need to enhance the experience users have with your most important touchpoints —like your homepage, landing pages, CTAs, and product pages. 

This can result in high bounce rates, low conversion, and unsatisfied users who fail to become loyal customers.

CJM benefits

Previous chapter

CJM touchpoints

Next chapter

What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

Turn customer conversations and inquiries into sales with Heyday, our dedicated conversational AI chatbot for social commerce retailers. Deliver 5-star customer experiences — at scale.

Turn customer service conversations into sales with Heyday . Improve response times and sell more products. See it in action.

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

Related Articles

FAQ Chatbot: The Best Way to Save Time on Customer Service

FAQ chatbots are bots designed to answer common questions people have about a product or service. They are used on websites or in customer service applications.

Customer Service Metrics: 2024 Guide + Free Template

Customers expect to get support wherever they look for and they expect it fast. To keep up, track the customer service metrics that matter.

Create a Customer Experience Strategy [FREE TEMPLATE]

This step-by-step template makes it easy to deliver a well-laid-out customer experience strategy that can give you planned, targeted growth.

Customer Experience Management Explained [11 Top Tips]

Turn that frown upside down! Keep your customers smiling with a strong customer experience management strategy.

How to create a customer journey map

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

• Conduct persona research
• Define customer touchpoints
• Map current states
• Map future states

Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple’s one-of-a-kind customer experience, said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

Nowadays, a clear vision and strategy for customer interactions is no longer an optional “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. As you refine your customer experience, a customer journey map is one of the most powerful ways to understand your current state and future state.

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the process your customers go through in interacting with your business, such as an experience on the website, a brick and mortar experience, a service, a product, or a mix of those things.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. These visuals tell a story about how a customer moves through each phase of interaction and experiences each phase. Your customer journey map should include touchpoints and moments of truth, but also potential customer feelings, such as frustration or confusion, and any actions you want the customer to take.

Customer journey maps are often based on a timeline of events, such as a customer’s first visit on your website and the way they progress towards their first in-product experience, then purchase, onboarding emails, cancellation, etc. 

Your customer journey maps may need to be tailored to your business or product, but the best way to identify and refine these phases is to actually talk to your customers. Research your target audiences to understand how they make decisions, decide to purchase, etc. Without an essential understanding of your customers and their needs, a customer map will not lead you to success. But, a well-constructed and researched customer journey map can give you the insights to drastically improve your business’s customer experience.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for uncovering insights into your customer experience, driving business goals, and building resilience in a changing market. In a 2022 report, Hanover Research found that 94% of businesses said their customer journey maps help them develop new products and services to match customer needs. Another 91% said their maps drove sales. 

But understanding a customer’s journey across your entire organization does so much more than increase your revenue. It enables you to discover how to be consistent when it comes to providing a positive customer experience and retaining customer loyalty. 

This was especially evident in recent years as top of improving marketing, customer journey maps emerged as a valuable way to understand evolving buyer behavior. In fact, 1 in 3 businesses used customer journey maps to help them navigate the changing landscape during the pandemic.

When done correctly, customer journey mapping helps to:

• Increase customer engagement through channel optimization.
• Identify and optimize moments of truth in the CX.
• Eliminate ineffective touchpoints.
• Shift from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
• Break down silos between departments and close interdepartmental gaps.
• Target specific customer personas with marketing campaigns relevant to their identity.
• Understand the circumstances that may have produced irregularities in existing quantitative data.
• Assign ownership of various customer touchpoints to increase employee accountability.
• Make it possible to assess the ROI of future UX/CX investments.

Following the process outlined above, customer mapping can put your organization on a new trajectory of success. Yet, according to Hanover Research, only 47% of companies currently have a process in place for mapping customer journeys. Making the investment to map your customer journey and solidify that process as part of your company’s DNA can result in significant advantages in your competitive landscape, making your solution the go-to option that customers love.

Customer journey maps can become complicated unless you keep them focused. Although you may target multiple personas, choose just one persona and one customer scenario to research and visualize at a time. If you aren’t sure what your personas or scenarios might be, gather some colleagues and try an  affinity diagram in Lucidchart to generate ideas.

1. Set goals

Without a goal, it will be difficult to determine whether your customer journey map will translate to a tangible impact on your customers and your business. You will likely need to identify existing—and future—buyers so you can set goals specifically for those audiences at each stage of their experience.

Consider gathering the key stakeholders within your company—many of whom likely touch different points of the customer experience. To set a logical and attainable goal, cross-functional teamwork is essential. Gather unique perspectives and insights about each part of the existing customer journey and where improvements are needed, and how those improvements will be measured.

Pro Tip : If you don’t already have them in place, create buyer personas to help you focus your customer journey map on the specific types of buyers you’re optimizing for.

2. Conduct persona research

Flesh out as much information as possible about the persona your customer journey map is based on. Depending on the maturity of your business, you may only have a handful of records, reports, or other pre-existing data about the target persona. You can compile your preliminary findings to draft what you think the customer journey may look like. However, the most insightful data you can collect is from real customers or prospective customers—those who have actually interacted with your brand. Gather meaningful customer data in any of the following ways:

• Conduct interviews.
• Talk to employees who regularly interact with customers.
• Email a survey to existing users.
• Scour customer support and complaint logs.
• Pull clips from recorded call center conversations.
• Monitor discussions about your company that occur on social media.
• Leverage web analytics.
• Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.

Look for information that references:

• How customers initially found your brand
• When/if customers purchase or cancel
• How easy or difficult they found your website to use
• What problems your brand did or didn’t solve

Collecting both qualitative and quantitative information throughout your research process ensures your business makes data-driven decisions based on the voice of real customers. To assist when conducting persona research, use one of our user persona templates .

Discover more ways to understand the Voice of the Customer

3. Define customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints make up the majority of your customer journey map. They are how and where customers interact with and experience your brand. As you research and plot your touchpoints, be sure to include information addressing elements of action, emotion, and potential challenges. 

The number and type of touchpoints on your customer journey map will depend on the type of business. For example, a customer’s journey with a SaaS company will be inherently different than that of a coffee shop experience. Simply choose the touchpoints which accurately reflect a customer’s journey with your brand.

After you define your touchpoints, you can then start arranging them on your customer journey map.

4. Map the current state

Create what you believe is your as-is state of the customer journey, the current customer experience. Use a visual workspace like Lucidchart, and start organizing your data and touchpoints. Prioritize the right content over aesthetics. Invite input from the stakeholders and build your customer journey map collaboratively to ensure accuracy. 

Again, there is no “correct” way to format your customer journey map, but for each phase along the journey timeline, include the touchpoints, actions, channels, and assigned ownership of a touchpoint (sales, customer service, marketing, etc.). Then, customize your diagram design with images, color, and shape variation to better visualize the different actions, emotions, transitions, etc. at a glance.

Mapping your current state will also help you start to identify gaps or red flags in the experience. Collaborators can comment directly on different parts of your diagram in Lucidchart, so it’s clear exactly where there’s room for improvement.

5. Map future states

Now that you’ve visualized the current state of the customer journey, your map will probably show some gaps in your CX, information overlap, poor transitions between stages, and significant pain points or obstacles for customers.

Use hotspots and layers in Lucidchart to easily map out potential solutions and quickly compare the current state of the customer journey with the ideal future state. Present your findings company-wide to bring everyone up to speed on the areas that need to be improved, with a clear roadmap for expected change and how their roles will play a part in improving the customer journey.

Customer journey map templates

You have all the right information for a customer journey map, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to start arranging the information in a digestible, visually appealing way. These customer journey mapping examples can help you get started and gain some inspiration about what—and how much—to include and where.

Don’t let the possibility of a bad customer journey keep you up at night. Know the current state of the customer journey with you business, and make the changes you need to attract and keep customers happy.

Customer journey mapping is easy with Lucidchart.

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

Bring your bright ideas to life.

or continue with

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map can help you gain a deeper understanding of the steps, interactions, and emotions that a customer experiences as they move through their journey.

In this blog post, we’ll cover what we mean by a journey map, the benefits and challenges, and provide a step-by-step guide to building your own, including free (and editable) templates you can share with your team.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps and experiences a customer has as they interact with a business, product, or service. It can be used to identify areas of friction, understand customer preferences, and create a personalized experience for each customer.

By creating a customer journey map, businesses can gain insight into how customers move from awareness to purchase, and build meaningful relationships with them.

Why is it important to map the customer journey?

• Customer journey maps provide businesses with an in-depth understanding of the steps and experiences of their customers.
• They can help identify pain points in the customer experience and identify areas for improvement.
• Customer journey maps can be used to personalize the customer experience, creating a more meaningful relationship with customers.
• They can help businesses identify new opportunities and growth areas.
• Customer journey maps can help teams create and manage customer-centric strategies.

Benefits and challenges of customer journey mapping

Creating a customer journey map can provide businesses with invaluable insights into their customers' experiences, while also presenting some challenges in terms of gathering customer data and creating a strategy to address customer pain points.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Creating a customer journey map can provide businesses with invaluable insights into their customers' experiences. It can help identify pain points in the customer experience, understand customer preferences, create a personalized experience for each customer across different touch points, and identify new opportunities and growth areas. It also helps teams create and manage customer-centric strategies, which can help businesses stay ahead of the competition.

Challenges of customer journey mapping

Creating an accurate customer journey map can be challenging, as it requires gathering customer data from multiple sources and understanding customer needs and preferences. It can also be difficult to create an actionable strategy to address customer pain points, as different customers may have different needs and preferences. Additionally, customer journey maps can quickly become outdated, making it important for businesses to stay up-to-date on customer trends and preferences.

How to create a customer journey map

To build your customer journey map, you’ll need to follow the seven steps below. Each of these steps has multiple components that require cross-functional teamwork, making having a shared, digital space key to your success.

Duration: 2 hours

Participants: 2-10 people

1. Gather customer data from multiple sources, such as surveys, interviews, online reviews, and analytics.

The first step in creating an actionable customer journey map is to ensure that you have a very solid understanding of your customers. Without a deep appreciation for their experience and a holistic view of your interactions, it’s impossible to capture accurate insights or make informed decisions.

2. Analyze the data to understand customer needs and preferences.

It is essential to thoroughly analyze customer needs and preferences in order to create an effective customer journey map that accurately reflects the customer experience. This is where you’ll be challenging any assumptions you may have had and beginning to look for patterns or insights that can be drawn from the data impact the overall experience.

3. Identify key customer touchpoints and create a timeline of the customer journey.

Once you’ve done your analysis, it’s time to start mapping your customer journey. To map the experience, you should:

• Narrow your focus to a facet of your customer experience (for example, when building solutions for Agile teams, you may want to focus on a particular ritual, like a retrospective )
• Decide on a single user, customer, or persona whose experience your diagram will represent
• Using sticky notes, have your team collect all the places, people, and items your persona will interact with (be as comprehensive as possible)
• Make sure you include instances where you have less control (e.g., the timing of a meeting vs. the structure)
• Consider the aspects of the experience that may be connected, even — especially — where those connections may not be immediately obvious

For this, a visual, collaborative platform like Mural can be a huge help, allowing you to connect what may seem like disparate elements of an overall experience, painting an accurate picture of your customers’ experience as a whole.

4. Identify areas of friction and opportunities for improvement.

After documenting the existing state of a person’s experience, it’s time to focus on key moments to deepen your understanding. Visualize the journey as pain points, bright spots, and opportunities to create a clear picture of how to improve the product or service experience, overall.

Things to do:

• Bring together the team that created the Experience Diagram(s) or people who are familiar with the experience
• Review your notes and any other artifacts collected during diagramming or early research (notes, photos, audio or video files, etc.)
• Select three colors of sticky notes (physical or digital) to capture Roses, Thorns, and Buds — we recommend Pink (Roses), Blue (Thorns), and Green (Buds) — to capture what is going well, what needs improvement, and any opportunities to expand upon in the future

5. Create an actionable strategy to address customer pain points.

Now that you’ve conducted your analysis and brainstormed ways to improve, it’s time to turn all that good information into actionable next steps.

Once you’ve organized all the information into categories, you can assign teammates to specific tasks all within the same visual platform, so everyone knows who is working on what, and expectations are transparent for every team member.

6. Test and refine the customer journey map.

Once you have a prototype of your customer journey map, you can begin to test it. You might start by applying your changes to a segment of your audience’s experience, and seeing what the preliminary results tell you. If it works, do more of it. If it’s not working so well, gather your team again to analyze performance and see what might be negatively affecting the experience.

7. Monitor customer trends and preferences to ensure the customer journey map stays up-to-date.

Iterate, iterate, iterate. Just because you’ve successfully created a customer journey map doesn’t mean the work is finished. As you begin to implement your changes, you’ll also be collecting new feedback — use that data loop to continuously improve your customer experience by returning to check in and reflect on progress with your team at regular intervals.

Customer journey mapping templates

Mural offers free, customizable customer journey mapping templates that you can share with unlimited members, so your whole team can get engaged.

Customer journey map template

The Mural customer journey map template, built by the Product School, has five components: entice , enter , engage , exit , and extend. Each of these steps includes a breakdown of interactions, goals and motivations, positive and negative moments, and opportunities for improvement.

Experience diagramming template

With the Mural experience diagramming template, you can pull back and come to grips with an individual experience for a customer, allowing you to consider each interaction in a more open, but also more granular way.

Rose, thorn, bud and affinity clusters template

The Mural rose, thorn, bud & affinity clusters template, built by the experts at the LUMA Institute (part of Mural’s Collaboration Design Institute), is a great brainstorming tool that allows your team to identify as many positive and negative aspects of a customer journey, while also providing space to investigate opportunities and organize feedback.

Use this template after the experience diagramming template to effectively map the interactions and emotions in a customer’s journey.

Customer journey maps are a stepping-stone to a better experience

Creating an actionable customer journey map is essential for businesses to stay ahead of the competition and provide a meaningful customer experience. By turning the customer journey map into actionable next steps, businesses can identify areas of friction in the customer experience, understand customer needs and preferences, create a personalized experience for each customer, and identify new opportunities for growth.

Mural makes extraordinary teamwork simple . Get started building your customer journey map today with a Mural Free Forever plan , and invite unlimited team members, so that you can ensure broad engagement and valuable insights that can be easily lost in traditional meetings, or with traditional brainstorming methods.

{{mural-luma-system="/cta-components"}}

About the authors

Bryan Kitch

Tagged Topics

Related blog posts

4 steps to creating digital customer & employee journey maps

Mural cited as a strong performer in Forrester’s Q2 2022 Forrester Wave™: journey mapping platforms

Win, wow, and retain customers: Mural features and templates for sales and success teams

Related blog posts.

How to conduct a strategic analysis

20 top strategic planning tools and frameworks [templates & examples]

How to make a digital vision board: A complete guide

Get the free 2023 collaboration trends report.

Extraordinary teamwork isn't an accident

Jira Software

Project and issue tracking

Content collaboration

Jira Service Management

High-velocity ITSM

Visual project management

• View all products

Marketplace

Connect thousands of apps and integrations for all your Atlassian products

Developer Experience Platform

Jira Product Discovery

Prioritization and roadmapping

You might find helpful

Cloud Product Roadmap

Atlassian Migration Program

Work Management

Manage projects and align goals across all teams to achieve deliverables

IT Service Management

Enable dev, IT ops, and business teams to deliver great service at high velocity

Agile & DevOps

Run a world-class agile software organization from discovery to delivery and operations

BY TEAM SIZE

Small Business

BY TEAM FUNCTION

Software Development

BY INDUSTRY

Telecommunications

Professional Services

What's new

Atlassian together.

Get Atlassian work management products in one convenient package for enterprise teams.

Atlassian Trust & Security

Customer Case Studies

Atlassian University

Atlassian Playbook

Product Documentation

Developer Resources

Atlassian Community

Atlassian Support

Enterprise Services

Partner Support

Purchasing & Licensing

Work Life Blog

Atlassian Presents: Unleash

Product updates, hands-on training, and technical demos – catch all that and more at our biggest agile & DevOps event.

• Atlassian.com

Customer Journey Mapping

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

USE THIS PLAY TO...

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

Running the play

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

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

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

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

Set the stage (5 min)

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

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

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

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

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

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

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

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

• E.g., "Provide structure"

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

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

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

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

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

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

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

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

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

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

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

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

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

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

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

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

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAP A FUTURE STATE

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

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

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

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

KEEP IT REAL

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

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

Want even more Playbook?

Drop your email below to be notified when we add new Health Monitors and plays.

Thanks! Now get back to work.

Got feedback?

Drop a question or comment on the Atlassian Community site.

Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

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

• 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

• 11 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 Map Template

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

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Customer Journey Map Template

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

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

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

How to use Miro’s customer journey map template

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

1. Set clear objectives for the map

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

Ask yourself some of these questions:

Why are you making a customer journey map?

Who is it specifically about?

What experience is it based upon?

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

2. Identify your user personas and define their goals

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

Answer these three questions:

What are their key goals and needs?

What do they struggle with most?

What tasks do they have?

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

3. Highlight target customer personas

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

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

4. Identify all possible customer touchpoints

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

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

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

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

Social media channels

Email marketing

3rd party reviews or mentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Adjust as needed

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

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

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

Share your expertise on Miroverse 🚀

Publish your own template and help over 60M+ Miro users jump-start their work. 

Get started →

What should be included in a customer journey map template?

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

1. Significant milestones

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

2. User engagement

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

3. Emotions

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

4. Pain Points

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

5. Solutions

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

How do I use a customer journey map template?

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

How often should you update your customer journey map?

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

Do all businesses need a customer journey map?

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

Get started with this template right now.

Customer Touchpoint Map Template

Works best for:.

Desk Research, Product Management, Mapping

To attract and keep loyal customers, you have to truly start to understand them—their pain point, wants, and needs. A customer touchpoint map helps you gain that understanding by visualizing the path your customers follow, from signing up for a service, to using your site, to buying your product. And because no two customers are exactly alike, a CJM lets you plot out multiple pathways through your product. Soon you’ll be able to anticipate those pathways and satisfy your customers at every step.

SDLC Template

Diagramming

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) template is a well-designed visual tool that helps software development teams follow a structured approach from the initial concept to the final deployment of the software. One of the most significant benefits of using this template is that it promotes clear, streamlined communication among team members. By breaking the development cycle into distinct phases, all stakeholders can stay informed about the progress of the project and understand their responsibilities within the larger context. This enhanced communication reduces the chances of misunderstandings and ensures that everyone works together towards the common goal of delivering high-quality software. The template acts not only as a roadmap but also as a shared language for the team, improving collaboration and the efficient progression of the project through each critical stage.

Value Stream Mapping Template

Project Management, Strategic Planning, Mapping

A value stream map can help you refocus your business on steps that actually provide value to your customers, cutting out wasteful and inefficient processes. With this template, you and your process team can collaborate on a value stream map today.

Mix-and-Match Template

While unrestricted brainstorming may initially seem ideal, it has been discovered that creativity flourishes when there are limitations. The Mix-and-Match Template is an excellent tool for quickly generating diverse insights. Its structured framework facilitates the generation of new ideas at the intersection of different topics.

Rose Thorn Bud Template

The Rose Thorn Bud Template offers a color-coded approach to examining data and structuring problems. The team is instructed to approach each situation thoroughly, methodically, and analytically. They are motivated to identify a positive experience (pink), a negative experience (purple), and a promising goal or insight (green). Identifying Roses, Thorns, and Buds helps in gaining a better understanding of one's challenges.

Spider Chart Template

Spider Charts (or star plots) prioritize thoughts and ideas by importance. They help visualize complex information with significant items in the center and less important items progressively farther from it. Radar spider charts help understand relationships between information for better decision-making.

Root out friction in every digital experience, super-charge conversion rates, and optimize digital self-service

Uncover insights from any interaction, deliver AI-powered agent coaching, and reduce cost to serve

Increase revenue and loyalty with real-time insights and recommendations delivered to teams on the ground

Know how your people feel and empower managers to improve employee engagement, productivity, and retention

Take action in the moments that matter most along the employee journey and drive bottom line growth

Whatever they’re are saying, wherever they’re saying it, know exactly what’s going on with your people

Get faster, richer insights with qual and quant tools that make powerful market research available to everyone

Run concept tests, pricing studies, prototyping + more with fast, powerful studies designed by UX research experts

Track your brand performance 24/7 and act quickly to respond to opportunities and challenges in your market

Explore the platform powering Experience Management

• Free Account
• For Digital
• For Customer Care
• For Human Resources
• For Researchers
• Financial Services
• All Industries

Popular Use Cases

• Customer Experience
• Employee Experience
• Employee Exit Interviews
• Net Promoter Score
• Voice of Customer
• Customer Success Hub
• Product Documentation
• Training & Certification
• XM Institute
• Popular Resources
• Customer Stories
• Market Research
• Artificial Intelligence
• Partnerships
• Marketplace

The annual gathering of the experience leaders at the world’s iconic brands building breakthrough business results, live in Salt Lake City.

• English/AU & NZ
• Español/Europa
• Español/América Latina
• Português Brasileiro
• REQUEST DEMO
• Experience Management
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Customer Journey Stages

See how XM for Customer Frontlines works

The complete guide to customer journey stages.

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

What is the customer journey?

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

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

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

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

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

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

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

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

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

• Consideration

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

• Sale/Purchase

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

Customer journey: Pre-sale

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

Awareness stage

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

Consideration stage

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

Customer journey: Sale

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

Decision stage

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

Customer journey: Post-sale

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

Retention stage

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

Advocacy stage

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

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

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

Why are the customer journey stages important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

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

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

1. Perform customer journey mapping

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

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

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

2. Listen like you mean it

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

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

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

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

3. Get personal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Course: Customer Journey Management Improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

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

Ready to learn more about Qualtrics?

Skip navigation

• Log in to UX Certification

World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Ux mapping methods compared: a cheat sheet.

November 5, 2017 2017-11-05

• Email article
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Twitter

Designing and developing a product often involves a large team of people with different backgrounds and experiences who must be on the same page about the project goals, the user needs and behaviors, and even the component processes involved. This common understanding is often built with visualizations (commonly referred to as mappings). Mappings make sense of and describe various aspects and processes associated with a product.

In This Article:

Four types of mapping, empathy mapping, customer journey mapping, experience mapping, service blueprinting, three-step decision framework, use all four ux mapping methods.

This article gives an overview of four commonly used mappings, their defining characteristics, and when to use which:

• Empathy mapping
• Customer journey mapping
• Experience mapping
• Service blueprinting

Additionally, this article will outline the decisions that must be made before creating any of these mappings in a simple three-step approach framework.

Empathy maps help team members understand the user’s mindset.

Empathy map :  A tool used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes user knowledge in order to 1) create a shared understanding, and 2) aid in decision making.

Characteristics:

• The map is split into 4 quadrants: Says, Thinks, Feels, Does.
• It shows user’s perspective regarding the tasks related to the product.
• It is not chronological or sequential.
• There is one empathy map for each persona or user type (1:1 mapping).

Why use it:

• To build empathy for your users
• To force alignment and understanding about a user type

When to use it:

• Beginning of any design process
• When categorizing research notes from a user interview

Customer journey maps focus on a specific customer’s interaction with a product or service.

Customer journey map : A visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal tied to a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points.

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

• The map is tied to a specific product or service.
• It is split into 4 swim lanes: phases, actions, thoughts, mindsets/emotions.
• 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).
• To pinpoint specific customer journey touchpoints that cause pain or delight
• To break down silos to create one shared, organization-wide understanding of the customer journey
• To assign ownership of key touchpoints in the journey to internal departments

At any point in the design process, as a reference point amongst a team throughout a product design cycle

Experience maps generalize the concept of customer-journey maps across user types and products.

Experience map:  A visualization of an entire end-to-end experience that a “generic” person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. This experience is agnostic of a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding a general human behavior (as opposed to a customer journey map, which is more specific and focused on related to a specific business).

• It is not tied to a specific product or service.
• It offers a general human perspective; it is not a specific to a particular user type or product/service.
• It depicts events in chronological order.
• To understand a general human behavior
• To create a baseline understanding of an experience that is product/service agnostic
• Before a customer journey map in order to gain understanding for a general human behavior
• When converging multiple experiences (tool and specific user agnostic) into one visualization

Service blueprints are counterparts to customer journey maps, focused on the employees.

Service blueprint : A visualization of the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. Similar to customer journey maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or require a crossfunctional effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).

• It is tied to a specific service.
• It is split into 4 swim lanes: customer actions, frontstage actions, backstage actions, and support processes.
• Focusing on the service provider and employees
• Leaving out most customer details
• It is chronological and hierarchical.
• To discover weaknesses in the organization
• To identify opportunities for optimization
• To bridge crossdepartment efforts
• To break down silos and create one shared, organization-wide understanding of how the service is provided
• After customer journey mapping
• Before making organizational or process changes
• When pinpointing a funnel or breakpoint internally

Before beginning any mapping effort (regardless of the type), 3 decisions must be made:

1. Current (as-is) vs. future (to-be)

This decision involves the actions and states depicted in the visualization: do they reflect the current state of the world or a desired state of the world?

• Current mappings are based on an actual “today” state of what you are mapping. This approach is ideal when the mapping goal is to identify and document existing problems and pain points. Use current state maps to help analyze research or align a team around a data-validated problem.
• Future mappings are based on an “ideal” state for a user type, experience, or a to-be service structure. Future state maps help reinvent and conceive how a user or experience would feel in the future. Use future state maps to set a benchmark or goal for the ideal form of your product or service.

2. Hypothesis vs. research

This decision depends on the type of input that you will use to build your mapping.

• Hypothesis mappings are based on an accumulation of existing understanding within a team or organization. This approach is a great way to merge multiple existing team views, create a research plan (based on the gaps that emerge from your hypothesis map), and make a first step towards a higher-fidelity, research-based map.
• Research mapping is based on data gathered specifically for building the map. This approach is best when there are time and resources dedicated to creating a research plan. While this method creates the best maps, it takes time and significant buy-in. Regardless of where you start, your maps should be iterative and constantly updated with new findings.

3. Low-fidelity vs. high-fidelity

This decision pertains to the quality of the final map visualization.

• Low-fidelity maps are unpolished and often created with sticky notes in a flexible, unrefined manner. These maps are best in an early part of the process. Low fidelity means little commitment or creation effort and empowers people to collaborate, revise, and update as needed. Use sticky notes (physically on the wall or digitally with tools like Mural.co) or collaborative excel sheets.
• High-fidelity maps are polished, created digitally, and look final. High fidelity maps are the best for creating an artifact that is going to be shared amongst many. High fidelity can be easier to read but less flexible because of the “finished” nature of the product. These maps are often created digitally and then dispersed.

All UX maps have two-fold benefits. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model. Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used amongst your team, organization, or partners to communicate an understanding of your user or service. This artifact can also become the basis for decision making as the team moves forward.

Using one mapping method over another will not make or break a project. Ideally, a combination of all four will be used as needed at different points in your process to create an in-depth understanding of your users and organization.  

Kyle, Beth. Pregnancy Experience Map. http://www.bethkyle.com/portfolio-item/pregnancy-experience-map/

Related Courses

Generating big ideas with design thinking.

Unearthing user pain points to drive breakthrough design concepts

Interaction

Use service design to create processes that are core to your digital experience and everything that supports it

Journey Mapping to Understand Customer Needs

Capture and communicate UX insights across complex interactions

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=2YpC3R1zNdA

UX Mapping Methods: When to Use Which

The Role of Design

Don Norman · 5 min

Design Thinking Activities

Sarah Gibbons · 5 min

Design Thinking: Top 3 Challenges and Solutions

Related Articles:

Building Interactive UX Maps

Megan Brown · 6 min

User Journeys vs. User Flows

Kate Kaplan · 4 min

The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting

Sarah Gibbons · 4 min

Service Design 101

Design Thinking Builds Strong Teams

Design Thinking: Study Guide

Kate Moran and Megan Brown · 4 min