Journey Mapping 101

How to make sure your user experience is complete

Among other tens of methods you can use to build a user experience, there is Journey Mapping. In this article, you will understand what Journey Mapping is and why we use it.

As the name suggests, Journey Mapping is a UX tool that lets us visualize [almost] the entire process a user goes through to accomplish a goal. Journey maps can come in different forms, but all have 5 main components:

1. Actor

The actor is the persona or the user who experiences the journey. You have to choose a character that will be your point of view. For example, for a pet adoption application, your actor could be someone who is looking to adopt a rare breed of cat.

2. Scenario and expectations

The scenario should describe the flow that the user wants to follow to accomplish a goal. Here we also set the expectations for these actions. For example, if the scenario would be to search for and adopt a pet, the expectations should be to provide an easy way to search for the information they need to complete the process.

3. [Journey] Phases

For any process, we can group certain actions into phases. For example, when we want to buy a product we can have the following phases: discover, try, buy, use, and seek support.

4. Actions, mindsets, and emotions

Each process is defined by a series of actions, mindsets, and emotions.

Actions — the steps the user takes to describe a phase. For example, for the discover phase [in buying a product] the user might do the following actions: search on Google about the product, read reviews about it, etc.

Mindsets — these are represented by the motivations and thoughts of the user from each phase.

Emotions — there are the indicators that tell us whether the user is feeling frustrated or delighted. For example, if the user couldn’t find any reviews about the product, they will feel confused.

5. Opportunities

This is the part where we can make the experience better. This section represents the insights that will tell us what to improve. For example, we can ask the following questions after journey mapping:

1. What can we improve in the discovery phase?
2. How to make our users recommend our product to others?
3. Why do our users stop using the product?

Journey mapping forces them to contour a shared vision of the product. As the team will sit down to complete the journey, they will discuss all problems that may occur and how they can improve the overall experience.

Also, the deliverable can be used to communicate the results furthermore in the company to analyze what needs to be done.