journey map with multiple personas

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

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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.

An Ultime Guide to User Journey Mapping

Craig Douglas

• March 28, 2024

TABLE OF CONTENT

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User journey mapping is a powerful tool that helps businesses understand and improve the customer experience. By visually representing the customer journey, companies can identify key interactions, or touchpoints, where customers engage with their brand. This process involves detailed user research to gather insights into customer behavior, preferences, and challenges. Customer journey mapping aims to pinpoint pain points—areas where customers may encounter frustration or obstacles. By recognizing these pain points, businesses can work to enhance customer journeys, making them smoother and more enjoyable. This, in turn, can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this guide, we will delve into the essentials of customer journey mapping. Let’s get started!

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience as they interact with a product, brand, or service. It’s like a roadmap that shows the path of a customer’s experience with a brand, highlighting key touchpoints where they engage with the company’s services or products. These maps are not just simple charts; they are detailed and customer-focused, often created using customer journey map templates to ensure all relevant aspects are included. The process of creating a customer journey map starts with user research and customer interviews. This helps to understand the different stages and journey phases that customers go through. By mapping out these stages, businesses can identify customer pain points and areas where customers might feel frustrated or have a negative experience. Service blueprint maps can also be integrated into the journey map to provide an even deeper understanding of the service teams’ roles in the customer journey. User personas, which represent the different types of customers, are used to tailor the map to specific customer needs and expectations. This ensures that the journey map is relevant to the actual users. UX journey mapping, a subset of customer journey mapping, focuses on digital interactions and user behavior online. Businesses can make informed decisions to improve customer retention, loyalty, and overall success by analyzing the customer’s journey. Whether it’s a physical store or an online platform, a well-crafted customer journey map is a strategic asset in enhancing the customer base’s experience.

Why Create User Journey Maps?

Now, let’s explore the reasons why creating user journey maps is a beneficial practice for businesses aiming to understand and serve their customers better. 

Understanding the Digital Customer Experience

In the digital world, a customer journey map provides a clear picture of how customers interact with a product or service online. It lays out the sequence of digital touchpoints and actions that customers take as they aim to fulfill a need or complete a task. Creating user journey maps allows businesses to step into their customers’ shoes and see their products from the user’s perspective, leading to a more empathetic approach to design and service.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities

One of the main reasons to create a customer journey map is to identify pain points within the digital experience. These are moments where a user might feel confused, frustrated, or dissatisfied. By pinpointing these areas, a business can focus on making improvements that will have the most significant impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, journey mapping can reveal opportunities to enhance the user experience or introduce new features that meet customer needs.

Improving Customer Success and Retention

A well-designed user journey map helps businesses understand and streamline the journey stages, leading to improved customer success. When users can navigate a digital product with ease and achieve their goals without unnecessary friction, they are more likely to continue using the product and recommend it to others. This can increase customer retention and turn users into advocates for the brand.

Tailoring Experiences with Customer Personas

Customer personas are characters that represent different segments of a business’s customer base. By using personas in journey mapping, companies can create multiple journey maps that cater to the unique needs and expectations of various user groups. This tailored approach ensures that the digital product resonates with a broader audience and meets the diverse requirements of prospective customers.

Planning for the Future with Service Blueprints

Service blueprints are detailed plans that outline the processes and systems needed to deliver a digital product or service. When combined with user journey maps, they provide a comprehensive view of both the customer’s experience and the internal operations that support it. This dual perspective is crucial for planning future enhancements and ensuring that the team has the resources and internal ownership necessary to implement changes effectively.

Collaborating and Communicating Across Teams

Journey mapping is a collaborative initiative that brings together team members from different departments. By visualizing the user’s journey, everyone from designers to service teams can understand their role in shaping the customer experience. This shared understanding fosters better communication and collaboration, leading to a more cohesive and customer-focused approach to product development. Creating user journey maps is a strategic step for any business with a digital product. It provides a deliberate and brief description of the user’s emotional state, actions, and interactions with the product. By using journey maps, businesses can ensure that their digital offerings are not only functional but also enjoyable, leading to a loyal customer base that continues to grow. 

What are the Elements of a User Journey Map?

To effectively create a user journey map for a digital product, it’s essential to understand the core elements that make up this strategic tool. Each element plays a crucial role in providing a comprehensive view of the customer’s interaction with the product. Let’s explore these elements in detail.

A persona represents a segment of your user base. It’s a detailed character sketch of an ideal user, based on real data and user research. Personas help you understand who you are designing for and what their specific needs, goals, and behaviors are. When crafting a user journey map, start by selecting a persona to focus on, whether they are current users or a target audience you wish to attract. This will guide the entire mapping process, ensuring that the insights are relevant and actionable.

The scenario outlines the specific interaction or experience you are mapping. It could be a real user interaction that has been observed or an anticipated one that you expect to occur in the future. Scenarios help to set the context for the journey map, defining what the user is trying to achieve and why. For a digital product, scenarios might include signing up for a service, making a purchase, or seeking customer support.

Stages of the Journey

The journey is broken down into high-level phases or stages, which represent the major steps the user goes through in the scenario. These stages might include discovery, consideration, decision, and post-purchase or retention. Each stage is a milestone in the user’s journey with your digital product, and understanding these can help you design a more intuitive and user-friendly experience.

User Actions

Within each stage, identify the specific actions that the user can take. This could be anything from clicking a button, filling out a form, or navigating through different pages of your website or app. By mapping out these actions, you can pinpoint where users might encounter difficulties or where the flow can be optimized for better efficiency.

User Emotions and Thoughts

As users interact with your digital product, they experience a range of emotions and thoughts. Mapping these out can provide valuable insights into the user’s emotional state at each stage of the journey. It helps to identify moments of frustration, confusion, or satisfaction, which can inform how you design the user interface and overall experience.

Opportunities

Opportunities are areas where you can improve the user experience (UX) of your product or create a more effective connection with your customer. By analyzing the journey map, you can uncover gaps in the user experience or features that could be added to meet user needs better. These opportunities are the key to innovating and staying ahead of the competition.

Internal Ownership

Finally, it’s important to assign internal ownership for each part of the journey. This means identifying which team or team member will be responsible for implementing changes and improvements based on the journey map. Having clear ownership ensures that insights from the journey mapping initiative are acted upon, leading to tangible improvements in the customer experience.

How to Create a User Journey Map with Visily

Creating a user journey map is a strategic step in understanding and improving the customer experience with your digital product. Visily is a tool that can help streamline this process. Here’s how you can use Visily to create your own user journey map:

•  Sign up for Visily and create your project.
•  Once you’re in your project, you can start designing from scratch using Visily’s blank canvas. This gives you the freedom to structure the user journey map exactly how you want it.
• If you prefer to work with a guide, Visily offers a library of templates. These templates are pre-designed maps that you can choose from, saving you time and providing inspiration for your map.
• Whether you’re starting with a blank canvas or a template, you can customize your map using Visily’s smart components and sticky notes. Visily allows you to add details, such as different stages of the journey, and user actions, in an organized and visually appealing way.

After your user journey map is complete, sharing it with team members or stakeholders is easy. Visily allows you to share your map directly from the platform, facilitating collaboration and feedback.

User journey mapping is a crucial step toward enhancing the digital customer experience. It allows businesses to visualize and understand the customer’s path, identify pain points, and uncover opportunities for improvement. By incorporating personas, scenarios, stages, actions, emotions, and internal ownership, journey maps become a blueprint for customer-focused innovation. Visily is an excellent tool for creating user journey maps, offering a user-friendly platform with templates and smart components. Beyond journey mapping, Visily also supports wireframing and prototyping, making it a versatile choice for designing digital products. By using Visily, teams can collaborate effectively, ensuring that every member contributes to a seamless user experience. For businesses looking to improve their digital offerings, Visily is the right place to start. Try Visily today, and take the first step in crafting a digital experience that delights your customers and sets your brand apart. 

Visily— AI-Powered Wireframing & Design

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

Back to guides

Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

Last updated

Reading time.

There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

What is a customer journey map?

Table of Contents

Definition of customer journey mapping.

A customer journey map (or CJM) is a visual representation of the process your customers go through when interacting with your company. This diagram takes you through the exact steps that lead to a customer choosing your specific product and buying it from your business. Creating a customer journey map will provide you with a visual storyline of how a buyer or a customer persona engages with your business at every touchpoint. From seeing your brand on social media to going into the store to buy the product — the customer journey will document the entire story. Customer journey maps are especially useful when they chart the experience of a single persona. By taking one specific customer persona, such as a small business owner or a single mother, the journey map can be detailed and specific — providing you with data and information about how to target specific customers. If you include too many personas on one customer journey map, you risk your diagram becoming too generic, and you may overlook new opportunities. You’ll likely need multiple customer journey maps to accurately depict the many personas of your target audience. But of course, you’ll need to define those personas first. Miro has a user persona template that can help you represent your target audience and better understand how to satisfy their needs with your product.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Ever wondered what makes a customer buy a specific product from a certain company? The answer often lies in the journey the customer takes above all else. Here’s why mapping the customer journey is so important for every business, no matter how big or small.

Makes complex customer journeys easy to understand

Like other diagrams and concept maps, turning a complex process like a customer journey into a visual representation brings clarity and shared understanding. Instead of trying to describe a customer journey model exclusively with words, the diagram gives everyone on your team a visual overview of the entire customer experience.

Most customer journey touchpoints are mapped on a timeline, which creates a chronological understanding of the needs and wants of the customer at each stage of the process. Having a tool that makes it easier for your team to understand these complex journeys is crucial, as often, a customer journey doesn’t align with one specific department. For example, marketing, sales, customer service, and technical support may all need to be involved in creating an ideal user experience.

Everyone from each of these departments needs to be clear on how the journey works, where the handoffs are, and how to maximize the experience. By having one diagram act as a point of reference, different departments can ensure they are on the same page and can make informed, collaborative decisions.

Puts you in the customer’s shoes

An effective customer journey map helps you learn not only customer behavior but also how customers interact with your product. It also helps you understand your customers on an emotional level, acknowledging what causes them frustration, happiness, and excitement. By putting yourself in a customer’s shoes, you can follow their entire journey from brand awareness to advocacy. This allows you to gain deeper insights into the customer’s pain points and what compelled them to choose your company’s product. Based on this analysis, you can tailor your business processes to attract similar personas and increase conversions.

Creates a clearer understanding of your customer’s expectations

Customer journey mapping is a strategic approach that allows your company to understand customer expectations as well as what attracts certain personas to buy your product. By taking the time to understand the customer’s journey, you can understand what they expect from their experience with your business and product. This deeper understanding of what they need from your business allows you to proactively support them. It may also identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

Contributes to long-term customer retention

Striving to understand what the customer needs and following their journey will allow you to optimize their experience with your company. This will make your customer feel heard and appreciated, and, as a result, brand loyalty among your customer base will increase. In turn, this will lead to high customer retention and, hopefully, an increase in purchase frequency, which will benefit your company greatly in the long term.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Many great tools can help you understand the customer journey. Why should you care about this one? Here are a few reasons why CJMs should be an essential part of your business toolkit.

Build better experiences

Customer journey mapping gives you a big-picture experience of your customer’s interaction with your brand. Think of a CJM as a map of a physical location like a city or a town. Once you have a map spread out in front of you, it’s easier to understand where you might run into roadblocks. It helps you plan ahead, and make adjustments to help customers overcome those obstacles.

Once you can visualize all phases of your customer’s journey, you can see where you’re not meeting their expectations. Armed with that knowledge, you can build a customer experience that’s seamless and satisfying. That translates into improved products and processes, more sales, faster sales cycles, and greater customer retention.

Enable customer success

For your business to succeed, your customer must also succeed. Customer journey mapping helps you see what is and isn’t working for your customer so you can set them up for success. Even a stylized picture of your customer’s journey can empower you to create, monitor, adjust, and enhance touch points.

Work better as a team

Even if your objectives are different, everyone in your organization is working toward the same goal: satisfying your customers. But it’s easy to lose focus. Engineering teams are busy coding, marketing teams are writing ad copy, sales teams are trying to sell to their prospects.… How do you all stay aligned?

Customer journey mapping is powerful because it keeps everyone focused on the customer. By creating a CJM, you can gain deep insight into what your customers want and need. For the marketing team, that means building better campaigns. For the sales team, that means deeper engagement with customers and prospects. For engineering, that means a holistic understanding of what programs are meant to achieve. Customer journey mapping makes it easy to equip every team member with a sophisticated understanding of your customers.

Set yourself apart from the competition

A  recent report  shows that 90% of the organizations that use customer journey mapping saw a decrease in churn and customer complaints. Customers and prospects respond positively when they feel like a brand understands their desires and pain points. The data is clear: customer journey mapping can set you apart from your competition.

5 customer journey stages

The customer journey map can be split into five important stages, as seen in this customer journey mapping template pack . Each customer will go through these stages as they interact with your company during their journey.

1. Awareness

Awareness is the moment when a buyer first becomes aware of your company, product, or brand. This can happen through a variety of mediums, from social media advertising to a word-of-mouth referral from another customer. Your brand can increase awareness and attract more customers through marketing practices and brand advertising. Paying attention to how your target audience grows their awareness of your brand enables you to optimize your marketing approach, budget, and channel prioritization.

2. Consideration

After your customer has become aware of your brand, they move into the consideration stage. This is a stage of ideation in which the customer considers whether they need the product or service your business is offering. They may also consider other companies that offer the same product. This stage proves the importance of good advertising at the awareness stage. If your company markets itself well, the customer will likely consider your product even more closely at this stage.

3. Purchase/Decision

After the customer has considered all of their options, it’s time to decide on the product or service they are going to purchase — or whether they’re going to make a purchase at all. Should they decide against buying, that will be the end of their personal customer journey. If that is the case, your company should focus on improving the awareness and consideration stages by working on its customer service or trying out new advertising or personalized promotional techniques.

4. Retention

Remember: the customer journey doesn’t end once they’ve made a purchase. Every company wants a loyal base of customers who return time and time again, which is why your team should analyze what needs to be done to stop customers from leaving. Fostering brand loyalty is a great way to improve your business’s general income. You can aim to retain customers by providing things like incentives, better customer support, and reminders about new products through digital marketing.

5. Advocacy

The last stage in the customer journey is advocacy — letting other people know about your brand or the service that you offer. Customers are more likely to advocate for your company if they are completely satisfied throughout each stage of the customer journey. This shows the interconnectedness of every step and how the journey is a circular pattern, even if it focuses on different personas.

What are customer journey touchpoints?

Throughout the five customer journey stages, there are different customer touchpoints . These are the moments in the customer journey when the customer interacts or engages with the business. Let’s take a closer look at the three types of touchpoints.

1. Pre-purchase touchpoints

A pre-purchase touchpoint includes any time when the customer interacts with your business before making a purchase decision. Pre-purchase touchpoints can occur in the awareness and consideration stages. They can also happen when another customer that has already gone through the entire customer journey refers your business. Pre-purchase touchpoints can happen if a buyer comes into contact with your business by visiting your website, seeing a post about you on social media, or hearing about your product from a friend. This point of the customer journey is all about persuasion and explanation. You need to make sure that when the customer discovers your business for the first time, you demonstrate that you can fulfill their buying needs.

2. Purchase touchpoints

Purchase touchpoints take place during the decision/purchasing stage of the buyer’s journey. This can happen in-store or online. You should optimize this stage to be as efficient and streamlined as possible so that the customer doesn’t change their mind during the purchase. For example, having a slow website that isn’t mobile optimized or forcing the customer to jump through hoops with a sales assistant to make a purchase will affect the buying process. Optimizing this touchpoint is essential to retaining customers, as a quick and easy purchase process could compel them to return in the future.

3. Post-purchase touchpoints

Post-purchase touchpoints include the journey’s advocacy and retention phases. The success of these touchpoints depends on how well-optimized the previous stages in the journey were. If the entire journey up until this point was enjoyable for the customer, they are more likely to refer your product or service to their friends and family. You should try to stay in regular contact with the customer to remind them about the journey and your company, as this will encourage them to return in the future.

What’s the difference between a customer journey map and a user story map?

Although customer journey maps and user story maps resemble each other, their functions are slightly different.

User stories are used to plan out features or functionalities, typically in an Agile model. In a user story, you describe a feature or functionality from user perspectives. That way, you can understand what the user wants to do and how that feature can help them accomplish it. Use a customer problem statement template to help you craft these perspectives.

Typically, a user story takes this form: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a UX designer, I want to sketch on an online whiteboard, so I don’t have to be in the same location as my collaborators.”

You can then visualize that user story with a user story map. For example, if you wanted to visualize the user story above, you would start by detailing the various steps the user will take when using that functionality. In this case:

Sketch on the whiteboard

Share with teammates

See teammates sketch in real time

Then, you would document the features required to take each step. Once you’ve done that, you would write these features on sticky notes and rearrange them based on their corresponding functionalities.

In short, user story maps allow you to plan and implement changes to the customer journey. Customer journey maps allow you to discover and understand what those changes might look like.

How to create a customer journey map

Creating a great customer journey map can be challenging. You need to get into the mind of a specific customer persona and understand not only their needs but also the different ways in which they interact with your company. With Miro’s customer journey mapping tool , you can streamline the process of creating one of these maps for your specific needs. Or, if you'd rather not start from scratch, follow these steps when filling out Miro’s customer journey map template :

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Before diving into the creation of your customer journey map, ask yourself why you need to know this information. Are you looking to optimize certain touchpoints? Are you looking to see why customer retention is low? Do you want to determine why customers decide against your product? Figuring out why you’re building the map is essential to the success of the exercise.

2. Identify profiles and personas

As previously mentioned, you need to focus on a specific persona when examining the customer journey. It’s important to remember that the customer journey map should focus on one specific audience at a time. This will help you figure out exactly who your target customer base is and gain an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s needs that your company is attempting to fulfill.

3. List the customer journey touchpoints

Next, you need to understand what happens each time the customer comes into contact with your company. These points in the process will tell you which areas of the journey you need to streamline and optimize to improve the customer experience.

4. Take the customer journey yourself

For the customer journey map exercise to be productive, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and be honest with the experience that you have. This is the best way to see if your customer journey mapping is accurate and identify areas for improvement in the customer journey.

Customer journey mapping example

Here are some customer journey mapping examples for you to draw inspiration from and better understand what goes into a customer journey model.

Alex Gilev’s Practical Customer Journey Map

Alex Gilev is a certified UX expert and product leader experienced in creating highly usable and intuitive web applications. His practical customer journey map example created in Miro is based on the idea that you want to create an irreplaceable product for your customers. This customer journey map is divided into four phases: Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, and Endgame.

This take on a customer journey map allows you to figure out practical fixes that will increase your competitive advantage over other businesses in the same industry. It helps you identify the value metrics that make your product desirable to the specified persona so that they’ll want to use your product frequently and repeatedly.

Build a customer journey map suited to your needs 

As we’ve shown, creating a customer journey map with your team has many benefits. This exercise can help you create the ideal experience for anyone who may come into contact with your company. It could be invaluable to the future of your business and help you build a loyal customer base.

Are you ready to get started with customer journey mapping? Try the Customer Journey Map Template , the ideal foundation on which to begin. This template is tailored to help your company identify touchpoints so that you can meet your customers’ needs.

How to make a customer journey map?

Benefits of a customer journey map

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

Service blueprint vs. journey map

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

The 7 steps of the customer journey

What is service blueprint?

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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.

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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. 

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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

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

• 2 years ago

The Power of Mapping

User Story Mapping in Design

Enhance UX: Top Insights from an IxDF Design Course

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The Ultimate Guide to Customer Journey Mapping [Updated 2022]

In a world full of choice, how are brands standing out?

By creating exceptional customer experiences.

Emotions play a large role in purchasing decisions. Brands that can create positive experiences are more likely to attract and retain customers, drive revenue, and experience growth.

For many businesses, customer journey mapping (CJM) is the first step towards creating these exceptional customer experiences.

We’ll talk about what customer journey mapping is, why customer journey mapping is especially important for offline-first businesses, and how to create your own customer journey map..

Customer journey mapping process, source: Unsplash

Customer journey definition

Your customer journey is the series of touchpoints your customer experiences as they interact with your brand on their way to making a purchase or after purchasing.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. It highlights the various touchpoints, actions, and goals a user has in the process of becoming your customer.

Since 56% of customer interactions happen across channels , there are many opportunities for cost savings, growth, and customer retention for your brand when you deepen your understanding of your customer’s journey. It’s best practice to map out your customer journey so you can identify pain points and opportunities for growth.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of your customer journey from the moment they first interact with your brand all the way through to when they become loyal advocates.

Customer journey mapping will help you step into your customers’ shoes and gain valuable insights into their real-world interactions with your brand – from clicking on your Google ad to stepping into your museum or store.

A strong customer journey map will provide insights into the aspects of the customer journey that are working well, not-so-well, and any aspects that may be missing altogether. These insights are an incredible resource as they help you to better understand your customers and pinpoint where you should be focusing your time and efforts.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

An exceptional customer experience is essential if you want to build brand equity, attract customers, and grow your business. Your customers interact with your organisation in a variety of ways. With the increasing complexity of interactions online and offline you’d think customer journey mapping features in most organisations’ customer experience (CX) plans.

How would you best describe your understanding of the customer journey? Source: econsultancy.com

Yet, even though 81% of companies believe customer experience is a competitive advantage , only 8% report having a joined up omnichannel strategy. A full 33% admit they’re unable to track customer journeys at all.

It makes sense to spend some time creating your customer journey map – 71% of brands say that customer journey mapping has reduced their customer service costs by up to 20%. A further 77% of consumers say they view brands more favourably when they ask for feedback.

With 84% of consumers saying being treated like an individual is very important to winning their business, it’s critical that you understand your buyers’ desires and pain points at every interaction with your brand.

Source: salesforce.com

To create an exceptional customer experience , you need to have the proper data. Customer journey mapping is a strategic tool that helps you create personalised experiences along every step of the customer journey. It helps you meet short-term customer needs and expectations but also gives you a long-term view of their expectations so you can anticipate future needs. A customer journey map provides you with the insights you need to better understand your customers. This allows you to then create a customer experience that satisfies all their expectations.

The last mile of the customer journey is an important topic and customer journey mapping can help you identify opportunities for advanced forecasting, optimised delivery, intelligent insights, and real-time tracking.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

With information comes empowerment. By gaining a deeper understanding of your customer experiences through customer journey mapping, you will be empowered to make decisions that elevate your business.

By thoroughly mapping customer journeys, you can develop a customer-focused mentality, improve your customer retention rate, and gain a deeper understanding of your customers.

Customer journey mapping has several benefits , including:

• Uncovering the differences in behaviour between buyer personas
• Creating a logical buying process
• Optimising the onboarding process
• Benchmarking your customers’ experience against predictions

You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company

Although every department in your company is working towards the same goal, the objectives of each department may be slightly different. Everyone in the business wants to achieve growth. But while the marketing department focuses on building brand awareness, the accounting department focuses on profits and losses. Whatever the department’s objectives may be, the customer must always be at the heart of every action and goal.

By creating a customer journey map that illustrates the entire customer journey and the role each department plays in shaping the experience, you can unite departments over a shared customer-focused mentality. This shared mentality can help departments unite their objectives, improve the customer experience, and reach the same goals.

You can improve your customer retention rate

Customers are largely driven by emotion. If your business delivers a consistently positive experience, your customers are unlikely to take their business elsewhere.

By improving customer engagement and your customer retention rate through exceptional customer experiences, your business will likely also benefit from:

• Increased revenue. You are more likely to up-sell and cross-sell to existing customers. These revenue sources are often more profitable for your business.
• Improved external touchpoints. Your loyal customers will share positive referrals and reviews of your business to new potential customers.
• Cost efficiencies. It is generally more affordable to retain current customers than to attract new ones.

You can gain a deeper understanding of your customer

The best way to help your customer and create an exceptional customer experience is by understanding who they are and what they want. Diving into the actions and touchpoints your customers have along their journey will reveal the different goals they have and the outcomes they expect. This understanding will allow you to implement solutions and strategies that appeal directly to your customer’s wants and needs so you can continue creating those positive experiences and build brand loyalty.

A case against customer journey mapping

While there are many benefits to creating a customer journey map, it is not without its limitations. Some of these limitations include:

Little opportunity for flexibility. If you are a newer business without a pre-established customer journey in place, creating a customer journey map can limit your ability to test and experiment with different customer experience models or initiatives.

Excludes external factors. Inputs such as cost, implementation difficulty, and competition are not included in a customer journey map. However, these inputs have the potential to hold a notable influence on your overall customer experience and customer satisfaction.

Does not consider related journeys. Purchases don’t often happen in isolation, and your customer is likely engaging in a variety of related journeys with multiple businesses at the same time. CJM’s are not able to evaluate how these related journeys impact one another and influence the overall customer experience.

Despite its limitations, a customer journey map is still a great tool. Supplement CJM’s shortcomings by implementing additional tools that can work alongside your map.

The basic concepts of a customer journey map

A customer journey map combines a series of touchpoints, actions, emotions, and barriers that your customer experiences throughout their journey. Together, these inputs create one cohesive experience.

Example Customer Journey Map, source: Columbia Road

A strong journey map will include all these different inputs in detail so that you can make customer experience decisions based on complete and accurate information.

Touchpoints

A touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with your brand. This can include everything from in-store experiences and web searches to paid advertising and word-of-mouth referral. Essentially, a touchpoint is any interaction that allows your customer to form an opinion on your business.

Touchpoints are critical because their combined influence determines whether a user will become a customer. The challenge with touchpoints, however, is that many of them are outside of your control. Peer recommendations and user-generated content cannot be managed by your marketing department and depend upon the experiences of other customers with your brand.

Actions are any behaviour your customer engages in. This includes following your social media page, visiting your website, or coming to your store. While not all actions are equally important, they all play a role in determining whether a customer makes a purchase at the end of their journey.

Emotions & Motivations

Every customer has a different reason for purchasing from you. It may be because your product or service fulfils a functional need or because the customer aligns with your brand promise. Either way, the aspect uniting all purchasing motivations is emotion.

Customers’ decisions are largely based on how your business makes them feel. Ensuring you can fulfil customer’s functional needs while delivering a positive emotional experience is essential in creating a great customer journey.

Barriers & Pain Points

No customer journey is perfect, and at some point, your customer is likely to come across a barrier or pain point. Maybe your website load time is slow, or your return policy does not meet expectations. Whatever it is, most customer encounters a touchpoint or action that takes away from their overall experience.

Customers experience roadblocks, dead ends and frustration in their journey. The more friction we put in front of potential customers, the less likely they are to complete the journey Forbes

To create an outstanding customer experience, the first step is knowing where your barriers are. You need to identify these pain points and understand why they deter customers. With this information you can respond quickly and build effective solutions.

Current State

The most common type of customer journey map, is one that represents your customer journey as it currently exists. These customer journey maps outline the touchpoints, actions, emotions, and barriers that your users currently go through before and after becoming a customer. These types of CJM’s are great to help you acknowledge aspects of the customer journey that are working and identify growth opportunities.

Future State

A future state customer journey map, visualises your customer journey as you would like it to be. Future state CJM’s are aspirational by nature. They are great for creating a visual representation of your customer experience goals.

How do I create a customer journey map?

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/w00FkE6e8zE

Your customer journey mapping should seek to address questions such as:

• Which customer segments am I targeting?
• What kinds of behaviours am I looking at – linear or cyclical?
• How can I start from the customer’s perspective?
• How can I recreate experiences across multiple channels and touch points?
• How can I represent important metrics and indicators such as NPS or CSAT scores?

There are many ways you can go about creating and designing your CJM, but for best results, we recommend following the following customer journey mapping methodology:

Conduct persona research

Many businesses believe they have an in-depth understanding of your customers and the customer experience. Yet, nothing beats speaking to your customers directly. For a strong customer journey map, conduct thorough research. Interview your customers via feedback surveys and questionnaires to get more complete and honest feedback on your current customer experience. Avoid making mistakes when surveying customers .

It is important to note when building your customer journey map, it is often best practice to focus on one customer persona at a time. Your customer base is diverse and so are their experiences with your brand. One CJM will not be enough to cover the variability in different customer journeys. Begin by focusing on one persona and slowly build out more maps from there to cover multiple personas.

Understand your customer’s goals

At every step along the customer journey, there is a goal your customer is trying to achieve. Whether that be trying to find your store hours when visiting your website, or wanting to learn more about your brand personality through social media. Every action is motivated by an end goal. By figuring out what these goals are at each stage of the customer journey, you will be able to determine if these goals are being satisfied effectively. You will also understand how these goals are evolving throughout the customer journey.

List all the touchpoints

The strongest CJM’s have lots of detail and are specific. Spend time identifying all the different touchpoints in your customer journey, to get a complete view of the experience.

Map the current state

To understand how you can improve your customer experience, you must first understand how the current journey is doing. Start by mapping the current state to create a baseline and identify opportunities for growth and improvement.

Take the customer journey yourself

Your real customers will be able to tell you a lot about your current customer experience. But most customers are not taking note of each and every touchpoint. They are likely to forget minor pain points or small moments of delight when questioned later on.

Going through your customer journey yourself is a great exercise. Approach with an unbiased perspective so you can experience first-hand the strengths and limitations of the journey. You’ll find deeper insight when you put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Chart a sentiment line

Representing the emotional state of your customer throughout each stage of the journey is one of the most important aspects of your customer journey map. Each action taken by your customer is driven by emotion, so understanding how these emotions evolve throughout the journey and how they influence different actions is imperative. Include a sentiment line in your CJM that represents how emotions are evolving throughout the journey, and use this as a baseline when creating changes and improvements to your map.

Step-by-step: Customer journey mapping process

While it can be helpful to find other customer journey mapping examples, your customer journey map will be unique to your organisation’s goals and customers.

Source: davechaffey.com

We suggest the following 5 step process to build your customer journey map:

1. Gather the support of stakeholders

In the modern connected enterprise every department has a stake in the customer experience, not just customer support. Getting everyone involved early in the customer mapping process will help you define requirements and gather feedback further down the line.

2. Conduct customer research

Find out everything you can about your customers and their pain points through surveys , customer effort scores , and interviews. You can also use the data you have concerning your interactions with your customers, including your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool , social media conversations, customer support calls, and complaint logs.

Build a complete picture of your customers using words and phrases you’ve heard them use, adding motivations, expectations, pain points and other emotional elements you’ve been able to gather.

When you’re building a customer journey map, don’t forget to include customers that didn’t purchase to uncover differences in their experiences. This can provide useful insights on their decision-making process, helping you to plug gaps in your product and service offerings you may be unaware of.

3. Create your customer personas

Armed with the results of your customer research, build a comprehensive profile of your customers. You may have one or several buyer personas. A buyer persona is an idealised profile of a customer but it will help you formulate an understanding of each customer type.

Your customer persona will also help you understand your customers’ motivations.

These can be:

• Price – At the research stage
• Information and guidance – At the purchasing stage
• Recognition from peers – Post purchase, such as when recommending your product or service to their friends and family

4. Draw your customer journey map

There are many ways (customer touchpoints) your customer comes into contact with your brand before, during and after purchasing.

Your map should capture these touch points adequately, highlighting those that have the highest impact. The point of sale is especially important for many businesses because this is the last interaction your would-be customer has with the brand before committing to a purchase.

For long customer journeys, break up your map into phases , taking care to document your customers’ mindset throughout each phase as they try to accomplish different goals.

Start with a customer journey map template if you’re unsure where to start. You may want to ask a graphic designer to give your map a professional finish to maximise its impact on stakeholders.

5. Refine your journey maps

Use qualitative and quantitative data to identify roadblocks and pain points in your customer journey. Also, mark areas where you’re excelling so you can build on them. Where there are roadblocks in your customer journey, drill further into the data and try to figure out where adjustments might have the biggest impact.

How can I improve my customer journey?

Once you understand your current customer journey, you will face the challenge of figuring out ways to make improvements. While each business will have different areas of focus, here are some guiding steps to follow when creating and implementing changes.

Your journey maps will be extensive, and there are likely many different areas you could focus your time on. To avoid getting overwhelmed or, feeling unsure of where to start, begin by setting specific goals of what you want to achieve. Maybe you want to focus on your social media presence or improve your customer service wait times, whatever it is, start small and set specific and tangible goals to guide your efforts.

Decide what to measure

When making improvements to your customer journey, it’s important to measure their impact. By defining metrics and measuring the success of different initiatives, you can track your progress and create a benchmark for future changes and opportunities.

Include KPIs

Changes to your customer journey won’t happen overnight. Set key performance indicators to help keep your team focused and on track as they work towards implementing outlined improvements. Align your KPI’s with your goals to help keep the improvement process organised and succinct.

Prioritise and fix issues

Once you’ve built your current state customer journey map, there will likely be quite a few customer pain points and improvement opportunities. To decide where to start, prioritise improvements based upon their significance in the customer journey, how frequently a customer interacts with that touchpoint, and the return on investment (ROI) they can deliver. Begin by fixing the highest priority items and work your way down the list.

Review and update each journey map after every major change

As your business evolves, so will your customer journey. Every time you launch a new product, service, or location be sure to update your CJM to reflect the changes. Customers expect a lot and being able to constantly improve your offerings while delivering consistently exceptional experiences will go a long way in building customer loyalty .

Set monthly, quarterly, or annual meetings to review the CJM as a team to help get you in the practice of making updates frequently.

Example customer journey maps

No two customer journey maps are alike. Depending on your industry and who your customers are, your customer journey map will hold different details and nuances to create a comprehensive and specific visual of your customer journey.

Although each CJM is unique, here are a few examples to help get you started.

Retail customer journey map example

Source: IKEA

Customer journey mapping for big corporations can be tough. Ikea did a great job of developing a CJM that outlines the thoughts, behaviours, and emotions of a customer throughout their journey at the store. Visually appealing and easily digested, this map clearly describes the entire journey with all its complexities and nuances.

Bonus example: Omnichannel consumer journey map example

Source: Medium

It’s not a simple customer journey map, but this amazing graphic beautifully demonstrates how offline and online consumer journeys are connected as a buyer interacts with different touchpoints at IKEA.

B2B customer journey map example

Source: FedEx Business Insights

This customer journey map by FedEx is customer-focused and addresses the goal of the customer – global expansion. Through b2b international customer journey mapping, and by highlighting the customer journey from start to finish - and how FedEx plays a role in goal attainment - FedEx can position itself as an essential aspect of the B2B customer journey.

Circular customer journey map example

Customer Journey Map created by LEGO

A fun example of a circular customer journey map is the one from Lego, showing the customer experience of a Lego customer flying from Heathrow to New York City. In this example, Lego pays close attention to each step of the journey to create a detailed, unique, and exceptional LEGO customer journey.

Automotive customer journey map example

Car Rental Customer Journey Map created by Delightability

The image shows an automotive customer journey map using car rental. It’s taken from Gregory Olson’s book, The Experience Design Blueprint.

As you might notice, the relevance of each touchpoint on the journey depends largely on the audience. The company may have an interest in improving the overall experience when you’re trying to find a car to rent and using their app, but for someone renting a car for business travel, that might be less important than how easy it is to return the car at their destination.

So context matters. How you use the service as a business traveler will likely be very different from how you use it as a tourist.

The one thing we can all relate to is that most people have rented a car, so we can look at this map and think about all of our experiences in this context—and then consider how they could improve those parts that are more relevant to us based on what we do with them.

Use of customer journeys to improve customer satisfaction

Depending on what type of business you are in, the ideal customer experience will be different. By understanding who your customers are, what they need, and the experience they want to have, you can prioritise and implement the improvements that best align with your customer’s ideal experience.

In our world of change, competing on exceptional experiences is key to success. Make sure to use your journey map frequently and across departments to maintain your competitive advantage.

Tools to help you with your journey mapping

There are a variety of tools you can use to support the development of a strong customer journey map. Some of the tools that we recommend include:

Get everything done at once with Smaply.

A great tool to help you along the journey, Smaply helps you create customer personas, stakeholder maps, and customer journey maps. Includes various visualisation features and icons to help you add detail.

Create custom templates with Lucidchart

A great option for those looking to create a customised map. Lucidchart is a free online tool that allows you to develop a customer journey map using its suite of features.

Keep yourself on track with Asana.

After building your map, you will need a strong organisational system to keep you on track to implement journey improvements. Using a CRM journey map or work management platform like Asana helps you build out implementation projects, assign roles, and collaborate with your team to make customer journey changes quickly and efficiently.

15 free customer journey map templates

A customer journey map that looks great and is easily interpreted is more likely to be used by your team. Here are some great (free!) customer journey templates and customer journey canvas you can use to help develop your journey map:

• Practical Service Template
• Customer Journey Canvas
• Visual Paradigm Customer Journey Maps
• Invision App CJM Template
• Shopping & Purchases CJM Template
• Bundled Journey Map
• Graphic Customer Journey Maps
• Retail Customer Journey Template
• Miro Customer Journey Map
• Customize CJM
• Comprehensive CJM Template
• Simple Customer Journey Template
• Leisure & Entertainment CJM Template
• Restaurant Customer Journey Map
• Service Blueprint Template

Download your free customer journey map template using any of the links above.

Final Thoughts

To compete in our world of choice, you need to stand out from the crowd.

By delivering exceptional customer experiences you can stay competitive, build strong customer relationships, and drive profits.

Use the above steps, recommendations, and tools to build a strong customer journey map that will help you better understand your customers and grow your business.

Co-founder, TRACX

Tom is the co-founder of TRACX, a no-code marketing platform that allows local business owners to collect customer feedback and create engaging marketing campaigns. With over 17 years of experience in entrepreneurship, product development, and marketing for businesses large and small, Tom is currently responsible for developing product and marketing strategies for TRACX.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Journey mapping 101.

December 9, 2018 2018-12-09

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Journey maps are a common UX tool. They come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. Depending on the context, they can be used in a variety of ways. This article covers the basics: what a journey map is (and is not), related terminology, common variations, and how we can use journey maps.

In This Article:

Definition of a journey map, key components of a journey map, journey-map variations, why use journey maps.

Definition: A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.

The terms ‘user journey map’ and ‘customer journey map’ can be used interchangeably. Both reference a visualization of a person using your product or service.

While the argument can be made that the term ‘customer’ does a disservice to the method (because, especially for certain business-to-business products, not all of end users are technically customers, i.e., product buyers), alignment on what you call the map is far less important than alignment on the content within the map.

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

Scenario + Expectations

Journey phases, actions, mindsets, and emotions, opportunities.

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

Provide one point of view per map in order to build a strong, clear narrative. For example, a university might choose either a student or a faculty member as actor — each would result in different journeys. (To capture both viewpoints, the university will need to build two separate maps, one for each of the two user types.)

The scenario describes the situation that the journey map addresses and is associated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations. For example, one scenario could be switching mobile plans to save money, and expectations for it include to easily find all the information needed to make a decision.

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

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events (such as shopping or taking a trip), describe a process (thus involve a set of transitions over time), or might involve multiple channels .

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario.

Here are some examples:

• For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be discover, try, buy, use, seek support.
• For big (or luxury) purchases (like buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
• For a business-to-business scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.

These are behaviors, thoughts, and feelings the actor has throughout the journey and that are mapped within each of the journey phases.

Actions are the actual behaviors and steps taken by users. This component is not meant to be a granular step-by-step log of every discrete interaction. Rather, it is a narrative of the steps the actor takes during that phase.

Mindsets correspond to users’ thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey. Ideally, these are customer verbatims from research.

Emotions are plotted as single line across the journey phases, literally signaling the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience. Think of this line as a contextual layer of emotion that tells us where the user is delighted versus frustrated.

Opportunities (along with additional context such as ownership and metrics) are insights gained from mapping; they speak to how the user experience can be optimized. Insights and opportunities help the team draw knowledge from the map:

• What needs to be done with this knowledge?
• Who owns what change?
• Where are the biggest opportunities?
• How are we going to measure improvements we implement?

There are several concepts closely related and thus easily confused with journey maps.

It is important to note that this section is only meant to help your personal understanding and clarification of these terms. It is not advised to debate or attempt to shift a whole organization’s language to abide by the definitions stated here. Instead, use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of another method that your team has not previously considered.

Journey Map vs. Experience Map

Think of an experience map as a parent to a journey map. A journey map has a specific actor (a singular customer or user of a product) and specific scenario (of a product or service), while an experience map is broader on both accounts — a generic human undergoing a general human experience.

The experience map is agnostic of a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding a general human behavior; in contrast, a customer journey map is specific and focused on a particular business or product.

For example, imagine the world before the ridesharing market existed (Uber, Lyft, Bird, or Limebike, to name a few). If we were to create an experience map of how a person gets from one place to another, the map would likely include walking, biking, driving, riding with a friend, public transportation, or calling a taxi. Using that experience map we could then isolate pain points: unknown fares, bad weather, unpredictable timing, paying in cash, and so on. Using these pain points, we would then create a future journey map for specific product: how does a particular type of user call a car using the Lyft app?

Journey Map vs. Service Blueprint

If journey maps are the children to experience maps, then service blueprints are the grandchildren. They visualize the relationships between different service components (such as people or processes) at various touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. They are extensions of journey maps, but instead of being focused on the user (and taking the user’s viewpoint), they are focused on the business (and take its perspective).

For the Lyft scenario above, we would take the journey map and expand it with what Lyft does internally to support that customer journey. The blueprint could include matching the user to a driver, contacting the driver, calculating fares, and so on.

Journey Map vs. User Story Map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities. Each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view; the description focuses on what the user wants to do, and how that feature will help. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”

A user story map is a visual version of a user story. For example, take the user story above (“As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”) and imagine writing out the different steps that the team plans for the user to take when using that functionality. These steps could be: logging in, beginning deposit, taking picture of check, and entering transaction details. For each step, we can document required features: enabling camera access, scanning check and auto filling numbers, and authorizing signature. In a user story map, these features are written on sticky notes, then arranged based on the product release that each functionality will be added to.

While, at a glance, a user story map may look like a journey map, journey maps are meant for discovery and understanding (think big picture), while user story maps are for planning and implementation (think little picture).

Although a journey map and user story map may contain some of the same pieces, they are used at different points of the process. For example, imagine our journey map for Lyft indicated that a pain point appeared when the user was in a large group. To address it, the team may introduce a multicar-call option. We could create a user story map to break this feature (multicar call) into smaller pieces, so a product-development team could plan release cycles and corresponding tasks.

The benefits of journey maps (and most other UX mappings ) are two-fold. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model for the whole team. Fragmented understanding is a widespread problem in organizations because success metrics are siloed; it is no one’s responsibility to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical goal of journey mapping, because, without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used to communicate an understanding of your user or service to all involved. Journey maps are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise, and that creates a shared vision. The maps can also become the basis for decision making as the team moves forward.

Journey mapping is a process that provides a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to address customers’ pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, create a better experience for your users.

Additional articles are available, discussing: 

• When to create customer journey maps
• The 5-step process
• Journey mapping in real life

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Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels.
• Email marketing.
• Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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Creating User Journey Maps: A Guide

User journey maps help you harness empathy to gain valuable insights about your customers and your product.

One of the biggest skills you’ll leverage as a UI/UX designer is your ability to empathize with the people using the products you design. Creating user journey maps can help you harness that empathy and transform it into valuable insights about your customers and product. Let’s take a closer look at what a user journey map is and why it’s an important tool in the UX designer’s toolbox.

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map gives a visual representation of a customer’s experience. This visualization might cover a customer’s entire relationship with a brand or focus on a select experience they might have while interacting with an app or website. No matter the type, user journey maps serve as a useful tool for understanding user needs and pain points and ultimately optimizing user experience (UX). 

Get started in UX: Google UX Design Professional Certificate

Why create user journey maps?

The main job of a UX designer is to make products intuitive, functional, and enjoyable to use. By creating a user journey map, you’re thinking about a product from a potential customer’s point of view. This can help in several ways.

User journey maps foster a user-centric mentality . You’ll focus on how a user might think and feel while using your product, as well as what goals they’re trying to achieve and what obstacles they might face along the way.

User journey maps create a shared vision for your company . This visualization can serve as a point of reference for different team members and stakeholders throughout the product development process. 

User journey maps can uncover blind spots . Taking the time to map out how a user interacts with your product (and how they feel doing so) may reveal design flaws or new opportunities you hadn’t considered. 

Still not convinced? Listen to Michael, an interaction designer at Google, explain the importance of user-centric design.

Types of journey maps

Journey maps can be as unique and creative as the products you’re designing. While there’s not one boilerplate template for a user journey, you will find a few main types of these maps. 

A UX journey map focuses on the user experience of a specific product, typically an app or website. With these types of maps, you can gain insight into how a customer interacts with your software and what they might find helpful or frustrating. This in turn helps you design software that’s simpler and easier to use.

A sales journey map follows the buyer’s journey through its typical stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Marketing teams can use these maps to evaluate how customers interact with a brand across multiple communication channels to maximize sales.

A customer experience journey map offers a high-level view of a customer-brand relationship across time. A current-state customer journey map focuses on current customer interactions (and how they can be improved). Future-state customer journey maps can drive innovation by imagining new customer experiences. 

Elements of a user journey map

As you begin to map out user journeys, you’ll likely find ways to customize your maps to your particular company, product, and customer base. Search for user maps on the web, and you’ll find a range of creative examples. But take a closer look and you’ll find that many of these maps have a few elements in common.

Persona: What segment of users are you trying to understand (current or target)?

Scenario: What interaction are you trying to map out (real or anticipated)? 

Stages of the journey: What are the high-level phases of the scenario? 

User actions: What actions can the user take in each stage of the journey?

User emotions and thoughts: What is the user’s emotional state as they move through the stages? What are they thinking in each stage?

Opportunities: Where can you improve the UX of your product or connect with your customer in a more effective way?

Internal ownership: Which team or team member will be responsible for enacting these changes?

Read more: 9 Essential Skills for UX Designers

How to create a user journey map

We’ve outlined what a user journey map is, why you might want to create one, and what elements you should include. Now let’s go through the basic steps to create your own user journey map.

1. Define the scope.

Creating a helpful user journey map starts with defining your goals. Are you mapping the journey of a new target user across the entire buyer’s journey? Or are you seeking to make a transaction on an app—transferring money for example—more intuitive? Being clear on your goals now can help give you more relevant insights once your map is complete.  

Read more: What Is Scope Creep? Keeping Your Project Focused

2. Build user personas.

Typically, you’ll want a different map for each unique user type. Not all your customers will have the same needs (or the same ways of going about meeting those needs). Think about who your users are, and create a customer persona for each segment. This often starts with user research. Customer interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, and even prior customer feedback can help you develop these personas and better understand the customer perspective. User personas are sometimes referred to as buyer personas.

3. Define user goals, expectations, and pain points.

Once you have a better idea of who your target user is, spend some time thinking about what they want. What problem do prospective customers have that your product or service can solve? What expectations might they have as they begin their journey? What problems might they face, or what about your product might cause them frustration? How can your product or service meet customer expectations?

4. List out touchpoints and channels.

The term “customer touchpoint” refers to a point of interaction between a user and a product or business. Typical customer touchpoints occur across many different business channels, including websites, social media platforms, apps, ads, or face-to-face communications. Create an inventory of all the customer touchpoints and channels involved in the scenario you’ve previously defined.

5. Map the journey stages.

You’ve gathered the data you need to populate your map, so now it’s time to visualize this information with a customer journey map template. This is where you can get creative. Your map could be as simple as a timeline or as complex as a storyboard that shows visually what happens in each of the journey phases. You could take a low-tech approach with sticky notes on a whiteboard, or go digital with Google Sheets or customer journey mapping tools.

Many common UX tools, including Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD, offer journey mapping capabilities. You’ll also find a range of dedicated journey mapping tools, such as UXPressia, Smaply, Custellence, or Visual Paradigm. UX research and consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group offers a free template that could also help you get started. 

6. Validate and refine the map.

User journey mapping is only as strong as it is truthful. Validate the map by moving through the user journey yourself. Usability testing, analytics, and reviews from real customers can also help validate that your map reflects the average customer reality. Continue to refine the map as you discover discrepancies.

Other types of UX mapping

The user journey map is among many types of mapping tools UX designers might use throughout the design process. Let’s take a brief look at some of the others that can be used on their own or alongside your journey map.

Service blueprint

A journey map illustrates the customer experience. A service blueprint maps out what goes on behind the scenes to deliver that experience. The former is customer focused, the latter organization focused.

A user flow maps out the path taken by a generic user through a website or app to a successful outcome. These often take the form of a flow chart and are not focused on specific personas. 

Empathy map

This tool helps you gain a deeper understanding of customer actions by mapping out what these users say, think, feel, and do. You may find it helpful to create an empathy map as part of Steps Two and Three above. 

Experience map

This visualization tracks the entire experience of a generic user as they seek to achieve a goal or satisfy a need. These maps typically look at a larger context to evaluate how potential customers solve their problems with or without your product.

Create your user journey map

User journey mapping is an essential part of the UX design process. Enhance your skills with these popular courses on Coursera:

Create a user journey map with a two-hour guided project. Create a User Journey Map in Miro is a hands-on course where you'll build a user journey map for a UX design project that documents the user's actions, emotions, and thoughts while using a product so you can identify opportunities for improvement.

Learn where and how user journey mapping is used in the design process with Google's course Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate . You'll craft user stories, develop user journey maps, and more, in 21 hours or less.

Build your UX design knowledge with Google's UX Design Professional Certificate. The popular series includes the class mentioned above, and is aimed at developing the skills you'll need for an entry-level UX design role. Learn how to empathize with users and design a delightful experience. Once completed, you'll earn a shareable certificate and gain access to exclusive career resources such as resume review and interview prep.

Keep reading

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This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.

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Multiple personas / journeys on one journey map print.

Modified on: Thu, 4 Nov, 2021 at 10:24 PM

Illustrate multiple journeys on one journey map to compare the experiences of two or more personas.

About journey maps with multiple personas

How to add multiple personas to one journey map, how to duplicate one lane to use it for a second persona, example journey map.

A journey map can be used to illustrate the experiences of more than one persona. Where do they show similarities or differences in their steps or emotions?

Each persona in a map has certain lanes that are dedicated to that persona (e.g. text lane, storyboard), however some lanes allow you compare personas within that one lane. The channel lane, emotional journey, and dramatic arc clearly allow you to illustrate both personas at the same time. This way you can, for example, compare satisfaction on the emotional journey and add both persona's satisfaction scores to the same lane.

Check out this webinar where we talked about how to use multiple personas on one journey map to compare their experience.

To include multiple personas in one journey map:

• Open/create a journey map 
• Click on the button "Add persona" on the journey map outline  
• Either pick a persona from the existing ones or create a new persona from there

Afterwards add lanes to your journey map and decide what persona each lane should focus on (Choose a persona for this lane). Please choose this carefully, you can't change it at a later point of time.

You can add personas to your journey maps anytime – either at the very beginning on a blank map, or later when the journey map is filled.

Currently, there is no direct way to copy single lanes, however, there is a workaround for that: you can duplicate the journey to the second persona and delete the lanes that you don't need anymore.

To do this, (1) click the add persona button and click the "duplicate existing journey" icon. This will allow you to (2)choose the Persona's journey that you wish to duplicate, and who you want to assign it to. 

Please find an example journey map illustrating two customer journeys on one map here .

In this webinar , we talked about how to use multiple personas on one journey map to compare their experience. Also we included stakeholder groups into the discussion and learn how backstage activities and service blueprints are connected to personas.

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Related Articles

Customer Journey Maps and User Personas

In this article, the main focus is on:

• highlighting the importance of the use of personas in helping craft good customer journey maps (CJM).
• how the Automatic Persona Generation (APG) system can help make CJM’s in a quick and effective way! 

Disclaimer: This article does not cover the topic of CJM in-depth but rather focuses on the marriage between CJM’s and personas! For a detailed breakdown on the what, why and how of CJM’s, refer to this customer journey mapping guide by the folks at UXPressia .

Let’s get to the exciting stuff now!

What is a Customer Journey Map? 

It can be challenging for an organization or a product team to get into the minds of its users. Often times, you might be left wondering why a user is spending so much time performing a particular action (an example could be on an e-commerce website where the customer is spending a lot of time adding products to their cart) or why does it take him/her several steps to get from Point A to Point B when it should only take a few! 

Whatever your issue might be, the root cause of this is that you don’t have a clear grasp of the customer journey. This is where a CJM comes into picture. 

CJM is a visualization technique which allows you to see how your users/customers are interacting with your business over time and across channels (e.g. mobile, website, laptop, social media etc.). 

A CJM allows you to:

• Understand the entire journey which a user takes to accomplish their goal when using your product or service. 
• Get a better understanding of (and subsequently improve) their experience when using your product/service. 
• Retain users! 

Let’s take a look at the following example of CJM. In this CJM, there is a person named Eric who is impulsive, wants to buy a car and wants to do his research online. He has certain expectations of an “ideal” website which he can use to both search for new cars and also the dealership which will sell him the car. Specifically, Eric wishes that the website should have:

• Ability to compare cars and their breakdowns. 
• Good photography with closeups, inside and out
• Video overview of car with demonstrations

He comes across a website and starts searching for cars and also dealerships. The following CJM describes his entire journey when he is doing all of this! 

It describes his frustrations, his expectations of when he is frustrated about how the website “should have been designed” and also some moments where the design of the website made him happy!  Now to flesh out this CJM is a cumbersome process.

Using Personas in making a customer journey map

While there are several steps involved in making a CJM, the most important step is making a user persona . 

A user persona forms the backbone on the basis of which a good CJM is made.

If you take a look at the CJM template which I have shared below, you can see that a user persona is presented in the same CJM, and the pain points, expectations and frustrations of the persona would be represented in the CJM.

It would be safe to say that personas are a tool that helps you take a user-centric approach to customer journey mapping: they help you to really define the tasks that your users want to complete and their needs and pain points in doing so across the customer journey. 

By understanding these needs and pain points, you can start to define the ‘moments of truth’ that really matter to your users, where your business has a role to play and what you need to do to make this possible.

If there is one persona which you need to make, then this is a relatively straightforward process. Say for instance, you need to make persona for Eric (on whom the above CJM is based), then the process would look like: 

• Contact Eric and users similar to Eric and agree for a suitable time for interviewing.
• While interviewing, understand more about him, his needs and wants from an online car shopping portal. 
• Make a persona which describes Eric the best. 
• You observe Eric when he is searching for a car online and makes a purchasing decision. 
• Based on your observations, you draft a CJM. 

There is no right/wrong, linear or prescriptive way to make a CJM. For the sake of brevity, I am simplifying the steps involved. 

Now imagine, if there is an organization which wants to understand the journey of most of their users when they are interacting with their product or services. Let’s take the example of the fictitious website which was used to draft Eric’s CJM “YourCarNext.Net”.

Assuming “YourCarNext.Net” is a popular company and has thousands of people who use it. If one day, the company decides that they want to understand how users in a particular city, say New York think of their website, what are their needs, pain points, frustrations and how do they actually use their website, then this would be a hugely cumbersome task. 

The organization might need to take help of many UX Researchers who would interview/survey all of these people, construct many many personas and then flesh out CJM’s. And this is not the end! Once they have all user personas and CJM’s in hand, they need to compare and analyse the common problems/frustrations/pain points/journeys of most users to be able to improve their service offering! 

Needless to say that this is a bummer!

Not just this but CJM’s also vary in their complexity! If your boss wishes to see many details in a CJM to understand different facets of a user interaction with your product or service,  then you might need to go the extra mile to get that extra information about your user! Take a look at the following two CJM’s – I hope you are able to appreciate the complexity of these CJM’s. 

So, we have established following things so far: 

• CJM involves (lots!) user research.
• Most important step in making a CJM is a persona.
• Personas can take a lot of time if you have many users! 

However, an easy way to simplify all of the above is to have a good starting point to make CJM’s- an automatically generated persona which is representative of your user base by using the Automatic Persona Generation system developed by the APG team at the Qatar Computing Research Institute . 

Automatic Persona Generation System (APG)

APG is a tool for turning your data into personas. It works currently with YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Facebook Insights (if you have enough video content). The system pulls data from these sources and automatically generates user personas that represent your most engaged audience segments.

The benefits of APG are:

• Data-driven personas are created within minutes.
• Data-driven personas are updated automatically every month, thus saving a lot of time for your product team in manually updating these. 

APG is both a methodology and a system for automatically creating data-driven personas from online analytics data!  

Say, for instance, your organization has a large and diverse customer base (like in the YourCarNext.net example above)  and collects digital information on them. Using APG would enable you to better understand all of them! 

Take a look at the following persona which is automatically generated using APG, without the need for manual user research! 

As you can see from the above figure, the persona which is generated using the APG contains anonymized names of all users of a particular organization. If I go back to the example of YourCarNext.net, a persona generated using the APG would look similar to the above and would list user needs, goals, wants, frustrations etc. 

Not only this, using the APG, one can also search for different users (all of whom will have unique problems, needs, pain points, goals etc.) using the APG system as shown below: 

Needless to say that combining customer journey mapping with data-driven personas generated using APG is an exciting research endeavor, one that is not time consuming and sustainable for you as a business! 

The customer journey concept relies on the notion that users or customers engage with an organization’s products and messages on various channels at various times. Data-driven personas can help isolate, conceptualize, and communicate information on customer segments that are specifically salient at each step of the customer journey.

Think of the countless hours you would save on interviewing users, manually drawing CJM’s and user personas! 

Would you like to learn more?

If this article got you intrigued, read our persona analytics research for more in-depth knowledge on persona development.

If you are interested in learning more about how APG can help identify user pain-points and inform design decisions for your team, contact us !  

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Guan, K. (2021).  Data-Driven Personas . Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics,1 Carroll, J. (Ed). Morgan-Claypool: San Rafael, CA., 4:1, i-317.

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020)  Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics .  Data and Information Management . 4(1), 1-17.  https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml

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Compare multiple persona journeys on the same map

Sometimes personas go on the same journey, but their experiences within the same stages differ. For example, “last-time shopper”, “money spender” and “discount chaser” personas are likely to go through the same journey when interacting with an online store. But as they have different goals and needs at each stage, their experiences with the store will be also different.

Bringing such personas to the same map will help you compare their experiences and come up with valuable insights for your product or service. You can spot the patterns and identify the pain points that are common for different personas and specific ones. Eventually, the ideas you come up with might be tailored to the needs of each persona.

Adding personas to journey map sections

When you have more than one persona on the same journey map,  you can additionally specify what sections relate to each of your personas. 

Tip: Take advantage of the “All personas” option when working with Problems and Pain points sections to write down the issues which are common to each persona and should be addressed first.

If you don't have anything generic, which is applicable to all personas in the same way, replace "All personas" by a single persona to describe its specifics.

Filtering personas

Filtering persona-specific information from the map will help you focus on one experience at a time. Hide the personas you don’t need, work on the journeys of specific personas, and then bring them back to the map to compare the journeys of all your personas.

Ready to bring multiple journeys to one map? 

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Point of convergence: Tracking the Tallahassee tornadoes' havoc in maps, words and photos

Two tornadoes that tore through the urban core of Tallahassee on May 10 converged at the Capital City Country Club to continue their miles long march of destruction .

That was among the discoveries after National Weather Service surveyors confirmed that a trio of twisters were behind what many are saying is the worst damage to the capital city since Hurricane Kate.

The storms packed estimated peak wind gusts of 115 mph and the trail of uprooted trees and damaged homes and businesses enabled surveyors to map out the three tornadoes' rare, 20-minute tour of terror through Florida's capital county.

Here are the paths of the windstorms as told through the accounts of National Weather Service surveyors , as well as links, photos and video from our readers and journalists.

Tornado #1: From TCC to FSU before ravaging Railroad Square, crashing into Cascades and messing up Myers Park

• Rating: EF-2 (Significant tornado with 111-135 mph winds)
• Estimated Peak Wind: 115 mph
• Path Length: 19.58 miles
• Path Width: 900 yards
• Start: 6:38 a.m. in Greensboro in Gadsden Country
• End: 7:03 a.m. in west Indian Head Acres

"The tornado touched down at approximated 6:38 a.m. near Spooner Road in eastern Gadsden County, initially damaging an old barn or farm building. The tornado track southeastward, snapping and uprooting trees through the remainder of Gadsden County before crossing the Ocholochnee River and entering western Leon County just southwest of U.S. 90."

"Extensive tree damage was noted at a mobile home park on Emily Loop where several homes were damaged by falling trees. The tornado caused roof and siding damage to a hotel and shopping center near the intersection of Capital Circle Northwest and U.S. 90."

"The tornado appears to have intensified as it moved southeast after crossing Capital Circle and approaching Blountstown Highway. EF-2 damage was noted to an automotive repair building along Blountstown Highway, along with intense tree damage, with a swath of nearly every pine tree snapped at approximately 75 feet above the ground."

"This level of damage continued across Pat Thomas Boulevard. Significant tree damage was noted on the campuses of Lively Technical College and Tallahassee Community College before the tornado crossed Appleyard Drive. Another area of intense tree damage was noted along Cactus Street, consistent with an EF-2 rating. Numerous homes were damaged by falling trees."

"The tornado then moved through a densely populated area of single family and multi-family homes, causing widespread EF-1 tree damage. Numerous homes and businesses were damaged by falling trees as the tornado crossed Pensacola Street and approached the Florida State University Campus ."

"Numerous trees were downed on the southwestern part of the campus. In addition, the tent housing the Florida State University Flying High Circus was destroyed and the outfield fence at Dick Howser Stadium was severely damaged."

"The tornado moved along Gaines Street, causing damage to a few businesses, and causing a construction crane to collapse."

" At Railroad Square , several warehouse buildings were severely damaged, along with the roof of the railroad depot. Snapped and uprooted trees were also noted in the downtown area, just south of the State Capital Building near the state Department of Education Building."

"At this point, the tornado began to turn more southeastward as it began to interact with the nearby tornado to its south. The tornado caused damage at Cascades Park, and significant tree damage in Myers Park."

"The tornado then moved through Country Club Estates and onto the Capital City Country Club."

At this time, the track converged with that of the tornado to the south, with the tornado to the south appearing to become the dominant feature moving forward. The peak intensity EF-2 intensity of 115mph is estimated to have occurred in a couple of spots between Blountstown Highway and Cactus Street. The maximum width was approximately 900 yards."

Tornado #2: Born in Lake Talquin State Park, twister rakes FAMU before 'converging' at Capital City Country Club and battering Indianhead

• Path Length: 27.22 miles
• Path Width: 1,400 yards
• Start Time: 6:50 a.m. near Fort Braden
• End Location: 7:14 a.m. near Chaires Crossroads in Jefferson County

"The tornado touched down at approximately 6:50 a.m. in Lake Talquin State Park at Williams Landing, promptly producing EF-1 damage snapping numerous softwood and hardwood trees. The tornado would then continue trekking east-southeast before making a hard right and traveling due east as it passed the intersection of Blountstown Highway and Ft. Braden Trail Road, producing damage consistent with an EF-1 rating by snapping numerous hardwood and softwood trees along the way."

"The tornado would then continue east, paralleling Blountstown Highway as it then impacted Lake Talquin State Recreational Area where it would continue producing EF-1 damage by snapping trees. The tornado would then shift its trajectory to east-southeast once again, impacting many subdivisions in the Norfleet neighborhood south of Blountstown Highway snapping numerous trees across the area."

"It would then continue on its east-southeast path before traveling east once again as it reached just north of the intersection of Capital Circle SW and Orange Ave W in Tallahassee. It would then go on to impact the neighborhoods of Seminole Manor and Mabry Manor snapping many trees along the way and causing damage to Sabal Palm Elementary School."

"The tornado would then continue its eastern track impacting Florida A&M University (FAMU) producing EF-1 damage by snapping numerous trees along the way. This included roof damage to at least two university buildings. EF- 0 damage was observed a handful of times to eve's on homes and businesses as well as occasional shingle damage."

"The tornado would continue moving east toward Capital City Country Club Golf Course producing EF-1 damage by snapping numerous trees along the way and across the golf course. The tracks of both tornadoes moving through Tallahassee at this time converged at Capital City Country Club, with this tornado seemingly becoming the dominant circulation moving forward."

"As the tornado exited the golf course, very intense tree damage consistent with an EF-2 rating was observed as numerous trees were snapped at a height of around 75 feet. This most intense tree damage occurred from Country Club Dr. through the Indian Head Acres subdivisions."

"This is where the maximum estimated winds of 115mph most likely occurred. EF-1 damage would be observed through the remainder of its eastern trajectory as the tornado impacted Old St. Augustine Rd. It would go on producing EF-1 tree damage within the subdivision of Paradise Village East, Old Friends Rd, and areas along Southwood Plantation Rd before moving on to mostly forested areas north of Old St. Augustine Rd."

"The last concentrated area of EF-1 damage would be observed in neighborhoods along Louvinia Drive and WW Lee Road. The tornado would then continue east before uprooting a few trees along U.S. 27 as it crossed into Jefferson County, before dissipating around 7:14 a.m.

"The tornado reached its maximum width of 1,400 yard as it crossed Monroe St. in downtown Tallahassee and entered into the Capital City Country Club Golf Course."

Tornado #3: It crossed Lake Talquin before snapping trees and whipping through Woodville

• Rating: EF-1 (Moderate tornado with 86-110 mph winds)
• Estimated Peak Wind: 110 mph
• Path Length: 31.69 miles
• Path Width: 1,100 yards
• Start: 6:50 a.m. at Bloxham in Gadsden County
• End: 7:13 a.m. near Natural Bridge in Leon County

"The tornado touched down near Lake Talquin Highway, just west of Lake Talquin, at approximately 6:50 a.m., promptly producing EF-0 tree damage. It then crossed Lake Talquin a few minutes later before moving ashore on the eastern shore of Lake Talquin where it produced EF-1 damage with several snapped and uprooted trees, some of which fell on two cars and a couple of houses."

"The tornado would then continue heading generally east-southeast with EF-1 damage across Blountstown Hwy and along and just south of Bloxham Cutoff Road before heading more east across Apalachicola National Forest, where downed and snapped trees were noted along some of the National Forest Roads."

"The tornado then crossed Springhill Road near the Trout Pond GF&A Trailhead, producing high-end EF-1 damage as it did so."

"The tornado then continued generally east-southeast towards US-319 near Oak Ridge Road W, continuing to produce high-end EF-1 damage. The tornado continued along Oak Ridge Road, producing EF-1 damage with several downed and snapped trees noted along the road."

"Another cluster of high- end EF-1 damage was noted on the west side of Woodville Hwy near Oak Ridge Road E. The tornado passed just north of Woodville Middle School, with numerous downed and snapped trees noted between Oak Ridge Rd E and Natural Bridge Road."

"The tornado crossed over Taff Road, where it continued to produce high-end EF-1 damage before moving over forest and farmland that was inaccessible to the survey team. Another cluster of snapped trees were noted along Old Plank Road, where the tornado was likely ongoing before lifting just east of Old Plank Road at approximately 7:13 a.m. The maximum width was around 1,100 yards along Celia Road, west of Woodville."