adobe xd user journey map template

25 inspiring customer journey maps to customize online

Customer journey maps are used to anticipate the needs and motivations of customers as they embark on various journeys in relation to your brand.

Not only does mapping out these processes step-by-step help you to understand and visualize the journey your customers make with your brand, but it also improves and streamlines this process over time so you can provide a memorable and positive customer experience in the future.

What is a customer journey map

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the different stages your customers go through when encountering your brand and provides a detailed picture as to the customer experience. While many use customer journey mapping to visualize the buying process, customer journey mapping can also be used for other journeys such as the sales process, or onboarding.

Some key features of a customer journey map is the division of the journey into specific stages, the use of a customer persona (a profile of your target customer), a consideration of all touchpoints where your customer interacts with your brand throughout their journey, as well as a really thoughtful approach to how your customer feels during the journey — what their actions, thoughts, and obstacles are.

The benefits of a customer journey map

A customer journey map can be a hugely beneficial thing for any business by helping them clearly see the journey that their customer experiences with their brand and enabling them to understand where they can improve for the future to provide a better customer experience. For those of you looking to create a customer journey for the buying process, assessing the journey, as well as your customer persona in detail, will make it easier to convert inbound leads into customers by reducing friction at each touchpoint, thereby allowing leads to more easily progress through the journey and turn into customers.

However, customer journey maps, when done right, also have the added benefit of showing you where your actual product or services are lacking. By putting yourself into your customer’s shoes, you can more easily identify desirable new features and solutions you can introduce to solve your customers’ problems.

Customer journey maps aren’t beneficial for simply external purposes; crafting a customer journey map can clarify internal roles and processes by pinpointing where each team is interacting with the customer and at which stages, as well as effectively keeping all teams within your business aligned on the same customer-focused goals.

Further reading: Strengthening customer loyalty

Building your customer journey map can be simpler with a template. Check out our range of customer journey map templates in Adobe Express:

How to build a customer journey map

1. set goals.

Before you begin to create your customer journey map, it’s crucial that you identify why you’re creating your map in the first place and what you’re looking to achieve. Setting goals before you begin will make sure that you are focusing on the right aspects during the crafting of your map, as well as ensure that you are creating the right kind of customer journey map to fit your purpose. Some examples of goals might include increasing sales and retention, or improving onboarding.

2. Customer persona research

A customer persona is a document that outlines exactly who your ideal customer is. While information such as age, gender, location, and industry are all important, your customer persona document should go deeper by including information such as motivations, frustrations, habits, lifestyle, income, job level, and professional skills. When researching your customer persona, you may choose to talk directly to your customers, use surveys to collect information, examine your social media analytics, practice social listening, or check in with your customer service reps.

Further reading: How to create a buyer persona in four steps

3. Begin mapping out the journey

Now it’s time to loosely begin mapping out the journey your customers go through. If you’re creating a customer journey map of the sales process, you might start by considering where your customers first encounter your brand, through to what interactions they have with your business, before finally making a purchase. Make a list that covers all the key steps involved, including whether your leads are inbound or outbound, how they discover your brand, if they visit a certain number of pages on your website before deciding to make a purchase, and if they have any contact with your customer service or sales team, among others. A customer journey map template can help you visualize and lay out the appropriate stages in your process, before adding in the details.

A customer buying journey will typically feature four distinct stages:

• Awareness: when customers first become aware of your brand
• Consideration: when customers are evaluating your brand and comparing you to competitors
• Decision: when customers are ready to make a purchase
• Post-sales: the customer experience after a purchase has been made, including repeat purchases, customer loyalty, and post-sale customer support

4. Pick out customer touchpoints

Following along with the journey you’ve begun mapping, it’s time to work out where your touchpoints are, a.k.a. all the ways in which your brand encounters a customer at any stage in the journey.

You can easily categorize your touchpoints into digital customer gateways, such as social media, online ads, emails, live chat, website content, influencers, video demos, and product reviews, or physical customer touchpoints like events, print marketing materials, product packaging, and business cards.

Listing every touchpoint will provide an even clearer picture of when and where your brand makes contact with your customers throughout their journey.

5. Putting it all together

Now it’s time to take your list of stages that your customer experiences with your brand, and start combining it with your touchpoints. Begin by defining your customer journey map stages and then go into detail for each stage on what exactly your customer is experiencing and at what stages your touchpoints are occurring. After you’ve completed this, it’s time to think a little deeper by adding actions, emotions, and pain points.

Using the research you carried out on your customer persona, try to predict how your customers feel at each stage, where they might have questions, what actions they may take, any pain points they could encounter, and what their motivations are at any particular moment.

Keep things flexible — not all these elements will be easy to associate with specific stages or touchpoints, so feel free to make the connections where you see them. If you’re working with a customer journey map template in Adobe Express, it’s simple to adapt your design to your liking by adding or removing sections as you see fit.

6. Collect feedback

Now it’s time to begin sharing your map with your team for feedback and additional thoughts that you might have not considered. You may also want to run a test of your customer journey map to ensure that you haven’t neglected to include any touchpoints or learnings along the way. Once your customer map is complete, you can then share it with your wider team as well as use it to look for opportunities for improvement.

A customer journey map will provide the ultimate clarity on where you can do better by shining a light on any obvious gaps in your process or areas in which an additional touchpoint may be necessary to improve your customer experience. While the hard work might be out of the way once your customer journey map is complete, the real benefit of this exercise is to understand the customer’s point of view and where you can continue to improve in the future.

Ready to get started? Check out our range of customer journey map templates in Adobe Express:

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Visualize Like a Pro. Top Customer Journey Mapping Tools

min to read

Masha Panchenko

Writer at Eleken

Whether you are building a new product, developing extra features, or finding ways to improve your retention rates, a customer journey map is a great tool. As a design agency , we know well how valuable can be an insight from a customer journey map that is based on good research.

Creating a customer journey map requires previous research, analysis, interviews. After that you are left with loads of information that is hard to present to the team. Here you can see the best tools that can help you visualize the map and make it a pretty picture that you would really enjoy analyzing.

Customer Journey Map (CJM). Why Does It Matter?

Through the customer journey map , you can truly empathize with your users. It shows not only how people interact with the product, but also what they feel and desire. The graph shows clearly the moments of truth that make you lose or acquire clients.

Before you start working on a customer journey map, think of a concrete problem that you want to address. Make sure to include real customers in the process, do not rely on your team to provide all the information about clients’ feelings, desires, and actions.

Once you’ve gathered the information, you start thinking of a way to visualize it. The tools are various: we’ll start with the most basic ones and go on with the software created exclusively for customer journey maps visualization.

Building Customer Journey Map Using Tools That Are at Hand

Craft tools.

Let’s say that you plan a workshop with your team and customers to create a customer journey map. You expect to end up with a beautiful color scheme, where everything is crystal clear. There are plenty of tools for that, as you will see below. However, when you are working live with a group of people who are probably unfamiliar with those tools, a good old whiteboard and stickers can be your best choice.

Start building the stages of the journey during live sessions using hand-made materials. You can use this template to structure your ideas. Later, when the content is ready, you can make a pretty digital version to work with in the future.

Computer Programs

The customer journey map does not always have to be that huge graph with illustrations and icons. You can build a cjm using just Excel : if you are more of a text person than an illustration person, that would work just fine. Here is a simple customer journey map by Nielsen Norman Group, made in spreadsheets.

You can create a customer journey map in (almost) any visual editor that you know: Adobe Illustrator, XD, Figma, Sketch, etc. There are some free customer journey templates that give you a prepared set of elements to fill in with your data. Check out this template for Adobe XD .

You can also try free customer journey map templates for Sketch . And if you want to go really fancy, use this interactive template for Figma . The clickable elements allow you to fit in lots of data and metrics, including numerous personas and integrating user flows. 

Customer Journey Map Software. Web Apps

There is a bunch of software made specifically for creating customer journey maps. They allow you to use pre-made templates, visual elements to get a result that looks put-together without thinking too much of design. We’ll give you a brief overview of the most popular and useful customer journey map tools, both paid and free.

With UXPressia you can build customer journey maps, personas, and impact maps. You can choose one of many templates for any type of product – from coffee stores to online banking apps . Also, a separate template for employee journey maps is worth notice: remember that employee experience directly influences the customer experience. The app has a high rank on review websites and got the Best Value award from Capterra among Customer Journey Mapping Tools Software (2020).

UXPressia offers a free version with limited functionality and a paid one for $24 a month. The paid version allows many team members to work on the project at a time.

With Smaply, you can create a customer journey map from scratch or use one of the templates based on different types of cjms: service blueprint, communication journey, empathy journey map, and comparison between different personas. The interface is clean and minimalist. The template is black and white and basic, so adding the right colors and visual effects is up to you.

Smaply is another cloud-based tool. Other than visualizing customer journey maps, you can create personas, and stakeholders maps. The price is $25/month, and a free trial is available.

Custellence

The distinct feature of Custellence is that it emphasizes the use of the customer journey map as a change plan. You can mark right away what needs to be removed or created: great feature to remind you that cjm is about finding weak points and improving, not just visualization of data.

The templates are very detailed and each is tailored for a specific kind of business. Take a look at this template for customer journey map of retail: numerous lines, and each of them has a few sub-lanes to make your map as detailed as possible.

This is a web app and the price is higher than the competitors’. The free version allows you to make only one map without exporting it. Paid plans start at $30/month.

Miro is a very versatile tool, suitable not only for customer journey maps, but also for agile, retrospectives, mood boards, and many more. Miro is a digital whiteboard.

The website offers various templates for different uses. They are rather basic (like an actual whiteboard), but the service gives lots of possibilities for customizing. In our agency , we use Miro often for visualizing customer journey maps, as it has a perfect balance of the default instruments and the flexibility of their use.

The software is cloud-based. If you would use it only for customer journey maps, the free version with 3 boards would probably be enough. If you decide to use it for other projects, it is only $10/month and has many integration options.

Take a look at this template to see what your cjm may look like in Miro.

Visio is a diagram-building tool by Microsoft. Paid options start at $5 per month (only web app) and go up to $15 per month (web and desktop app). The service is built on Microsoft cloud, and the desktop version is not available for Mac.

Apart from customer journey maps, Visio is great for flowcharts, Gantt charts, and all sorts of diagrams. See this template for Visio .

Like Visio, Gliffy is suitable for workflows and diagrams as well as customer journey maps. The templates are rather basic and to make a detailed cjm, you have to add parameters and metrics on your own.

The paid version is $7.99 per month (cheaper if you purchase it for a team). The free version allows only a limited amount of graphs. Also note that the documents created in the free version are public, so if you need privacy, opt for another version.

Comparison Table

Collecting Feedback Software

A simple customer journey map is built based on research and interviews with users. However, if you want to go further with collecting data, test the insights of your cjm, and see how the changes work, you may need special software that helps collecting and analyzing feedback.

In this article, we focus on the tools for visualization, but if you are serious about improving customer experience, check out Clarabridge and CXsuite.

There are a bunch of tools for visualization of customer journey maps, apart from the few ones listed in this article. Some of those you already have at hand. Some you’ve used numerous times before with different objectives. We have collected some good examples of customer journey maps so you can see which one works best for your type of business.

Experts in customer journey mapping claim that the pretty picture is not the main focus, rather it is the process that drives changes. However, a nice visualization is always a plus.

Now that you know more about your customers, learn how to make them happier with these 6 strategies for customer success .

Experienced editor, project manager, and content writer. In collaboration with Eleken's UI/UX designers, created articles on data-driven design and marketing to help SaaS companies grow.

In this article, you will learn what UX flow is, why you need them in your design process, what the main types of user flows are, and how to create them.

Did you know that friction in UX design is not always bad? Read this article to find out how you can use friction to make your product better.

What is a customer journey and how it differs from a sales funnel? How can it benefit SaaS companies in their marketing and product design?

Explore the notions of customer journey map and experience map, compare them, and decide which tool is better to use for your business needs in this article.

Take a look at customer journey map examples to get ideas and inspiration for your project.

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User Journey Map Guide with Examples & FREE Templates

18 April, 2024

Senior UX Researcher

Customer journey mapping is also a popular workshop task to align user understanding within teams. If backed up by user data and research, they can be a high-level inventory that helps discover strategic oversights, knowledge gaps, and future opportunities.

Yet, if you ask two different people, you will likely get at least three different opinions as to what a user journey looks like and whether it is worth the hassle. Read on if you want to understand whether a UX journey map is what you currently need and how to create one.

You can get the templates here:

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of this template.

What is user journey mapping?

Imagine your product is a supermarket and your user is the person wanting to refill their fridge. They need to: 

Decide what to buy, and in what supermarket will they be able to find and afford it

Remember to bring their coupons

Park there 

Find everything

Save the new coupons for the next shopping trip

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3 ways to understand user journey maps

Now, there are at least three ways to look at the customer journey.

1. Workflow maps for usability optimization 

Some imagine a user journey map as a wireframe or detailed analysis of  specific flows in their app . This could be, for example, a sign-up flow or the flow for inviting others to a document. In our supermarket example, it’s a closer look at what they do inside your supermarket, maybe even only in the frozen section. Or you could define what you want them to do in the frozen aisle.

.css-61w915{margin-right:8px;margin-top:8px;max-height:30px;}@media screen and (min-width: 768px){.css-61w915{margin-right:38px;max-height:unset;}} The focus here is on getting the details of the execution right, not how it fits into the bigger picture of what the user needs.

It is more or less a wireframe from a user perspective. Such a product-focused understanding is not what we want to discuss in this article, though many examples for the best user journey maps you might come across are exactly this. There are good reasons to do such an analysis as well, since it helps you smooth out usability for the people who have already found their way into your supermarket because of your excellent ice cream selection. Workflow maps won’t help you notice that your lack of parking spots is one of the reasons why you are missing out on potential customers in the first place. By only looking at what they do inside the supermarket, you might also miss out on an opportunity for user retention: You could help them get their ice cream home before it melts.

2. Holistic user journey maps for strategic insights

With a more holistic view of what people experience when trying to achieve a goal, product makers gain strategic insights on how their product fits into the big picture and what could be in the future. Because this journey document covers so much ground, it is usually a linear simplification of what all the steps would look like if they were completed. Going back to our supermarket example, it would start from the moment the person starts planning to fill the fridge and ends when the fridge is full again — even if the supermarket building is only relevant in a few phases of this journey. Creating this version of a user journey map requires quite some time and research effort. But it can be an invaluable tool for product and business strategy. It is an inventory of user needs that can help you discover knowledge gaps and future opportunities.  Service blueprints   are the most comprehensive version of a user journey map  since they also lay out the behind-the-scenes of a service, usually called backstage. In our supermarket example, that could be:

the advertising efforts

logistics required to keep all shelves stocked

protocols the staffers follow when communicating with customers

3. Journey mapping workshops as an alignment method

In a user journey mapping workshop, stakeholders and team members share their knowledge and assumptions about the users. Some of these assumptions might need to be challenged — which is part of the process. The goal is not the perfect output, but rather to get everyone into one room and work out a common understanding of the users they are building products for. It forces everyone to organize their thoughts, spell out what they know and assumed was common knowledge — and ideally meet real users as part of the workshop. If done right, this establishes a more comprehensive understanding of what users go through and helps overcome the very superficial ideas one might have about the lives and needs of people outside their own social bubble.

Hence, such a workshop helps create aha moments and gives the consequences of great and poor product decisions a face. So at the end of the day, it is one of many methods to evangelize user-centricity in an organization.

What are the benefits of user experience (UX) mapping?

We already discussed the benefits and shortcomings of workflow maps, but what are the reasons you should consider a UX journey map and/or a journey mapping workshop ?

1. Switching perspectives

Empathy:  Like any other UX method and user research output, user journey maps are supposed to foster empathy and help product makers put themselves into the shoes of a user. Awareness:  It creates awareness of why users do all the things they do. And it challenges product makers to resist the temptation of building something because it’s feasible, not because it’s needed that way.

2. Aligned understanding

Given the team is involved in creating the user experience map (either as a workshop, in expert interviews, observing the user research, or at least as a results presentation), it forces a conversation and offers a shared mental model and terminology — the foundation for a shared vision. 

3. Seeing the big picture

Imagine the vastly different perceptions Sales reps, Customer Support teams, C-level, and backend engineers might have since they all meet very different segments at very different stages of their journey. Day-to-day, it makes sense to be an expert in the stages of a user journey you are responsible for. A journey map helps to step back from this and see the bigger picture, where your work fits in, and where assumptions about the majority of users were wrong. It might even help define KPIs across teams that don’t cancel each other out.

4. Uncovering blind spots and opportunities

A user journey map gives you a structured and comprehensive overview of which user needs are already tackled by your product and which ones are either underserved or solved with other tools and touchpoints. Which moments of truth do not get enough attention yet? These are the opportunities and blind spots you can work on in the future.

When is customer journey mapping just a waste of time?

In all honesty, there are also moments when creating a user journey map or running a journey mapping workshop is destined to fail and should better be put on hold. It’s a lot of work, so don’t let this energy go to waste.  User journey maps only make sense when there is an intention to collaboratively work on and with them.  Here are some of the scenarios and indicators that it’s the wrong moment for a journey map:

No buy-in for the workshop: The requirements of a successful journey workshop are not met, e.g., there is not enough time (60 minutes over lunch won’t do the trick), only a few team members are willing to attend, and/or key stakeholders refuse to have their assumptions challenged.

Isolated creation: The whole creation process of the user journey map happens isolated from the team, e.g., it is outsourced to an agency or an intern. Nobody from the team observes or runs the user research, or is consulted for input or feedback on the first drafts. There is no event or presentation planned that walks the team through the output. Finally, a very detailed, 10-foot-long poster appears in a hallway, and none of the team members ever find time to read, process, or discuss it with each other.

UX theater: For one reason or another, there is no time/resources allocated to user research or reviewing existing insights whilst creating the map (usability tests with non-users do not count in this case, though). Such an approach, also known as, can do more harm than good since the resulting user journey may only reinforce wrong assumptions and wishful thinking about your users.

Unclear objectives: The user journey map is only created because it is on your UX design checklist, but the purpose is unclear. If you are unsure what you or your stakeholders want to achieve with this journey map, clarify expectations and desired output before investing more energy into this. E.g., there is a chance you were only meant to do a usability review of a bumpy app workflow.

Lack of follow-through: Creating a user journey map is just the start. Without a plan to implement changes based on insights gathered, the map is merely a paper exercise. This lack of action can result from limited resources, lack of authority, or inertia. It's vital to establish a process for turning insights from the map into design improvements or strategy adjustments. This includes assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and defining success metrics to ensure the map drives real change and doesn't end up forgotten.

Overcomplication: Sometimes, to capture every nuance and detail of the user experience, teams can create an overly complex user journey map. This can make the map difficult to understand and use, particularly for team members who weren't involved in its creation. A good user journey map should balance detail and clarity, providing insightful and actionable information without overwhelming its users.

Failure to update: User expectations, behaviors, and the digital landscape constantly evolve. A user journey map that remains static will quickly become outdated. Regular reviews and updates are necessary to ensure that the map reflects the current state of user experiences. This requires a commitment to ongoing user research and a willingness to adjust your understanding of the user's path as new information becomes available.

The good news is: UX maturity in an organization can change rapidly, so even if you run into one of the obstacles above, it is worth revisiting the idea in the future. Once you’re good to go, you can get started with the user journey map examples and templates below.

User journey mapping: examples, templates & tools

There is more than one way to do it right and design a great user journey map. Every organization and industry has its own templates, tools and approaches to what elements are most important to them. The following examples and template will give you an idea of what a user journey map can look like if you decide to create one yourself. Make it your own, and change up the sections and design so they make sense for your product and use cases.

User journey map template and checklist

To give you a first orientation, you can use this user journey template and check the two fictional examples below to see how you could adapt it for two very different industries: instant meal delivery and healthcare.

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of the user journey map template. 

While there is no official standard, most other user journey maps contain the following elements or variations of them:

Key phases (or ‘stages’) start when users become aware of a problem they need to solve or a goal they want to achieve and may end when they evaluate whether they achieved their goal or enter a maintenance phase. E.g., user journeys for e-commerce could be structured along the classic funnel of:

Consideration

Delivery & use

Loyalty & advocacy

2. Jobs to be done

Whilst some other user journey templates might call this section ‘steps’ or ‘tasks’, it can be very beneficial to structure the stages into ‘jobs to be done’ (JTBD) instead. This framework helps you distinguish better between the actual goal of a user vs. the tasks required to get there . For example, safe online payments are never a goal of a user, this is just one of many jobs on the long way to get new sneakers on their feet. Ideally, users ‘hire’ your product/service to assist them with some of the JTBD on their journey. Phrase your JTBD as verb + object + context . Examples:

Install app on phone

Tip delivery driver

Buy new shoes

Naturally, the stages closest to your current (and future) solution require a more detailed understanding, so you might want to investigate and document deeper what JTBDs happen there.

3. Needs and pains

Users have needs and pains every step along the journey. Use this section to collect the most important needs and potential pains, even if not all apply in all cases. Ask:

What are the repeating themes, even the ones you are (currently) not able to solve with your product?

Phrase pains and needs as I- or me-statements from the user perspective, e.g., ‘I forgot my login details, ‘I am afraid to embarrass myself’ or ‘My day is too busy to wait for a delivery.’ 

Which are the pains and needs that are so severe that, if not solved, they can become real deal-breakers for your product or service?

On the last point, such deal-breaker and dealmaker situations, or ‘ moments of truth ’, require particular attention in your product decisions and could be visually highlighted in your journey. In a meal delivery, the taste and temperature of the food are such a moment of truth that can spoil the whole experience with your otherwise fantastic service.

4. Emotional curve

An emotional curve visualizes how happy or frustrated users are at certain stages of their journey. Emojis are commonly used to make it easy to understand and empathize with the emotional state of the user across the whole journey. It can be a surprising realization that users are not delighted with your witty microcopy, but you already did a great job by not annoying them. It is also a good reminder that what might personally excite you is perceived as stressful or overwhelming by most other users. Strong user quotes can be used for illustration.

5. Brand and product touchpoints

Here, you can list current and planned touchpoints with your brand and product, as well as. Whilst the touchpoints when using your product might be obvious, others early and late in the journey are probably less obvious to you but critical for the user experience and decision to use or return to your product. This is why it is worthwhile to include them in your map. Make sure your journey does not get outdated too soon, and don’t list one-off marketing campaigns or very detailed aspects of current workflows — just what you got in general so there is no major revision needed for a couple of years.

6. Opportunities for improvement

As you map out your user journey, it is important to not only identify the current touchpoints and experiences but also opportunities for improvement. This could include potential areas where users may become frustrated or confused, as well as areas where they may be delighted or pleasantly surprised.

By identifying these opportunities, you can prioritize making meaningful improvements to the user experience and ultimately creating a more positive, long-lasting relationship with your users.

7. Other tools and touchpoints

This may seem the least interesting aspect of your journey or a user interview, but it can tell you a lot about blind spots in your service or potential partnerships or APIs to extend your service. E.g., Google Maps or WhatsApp are common workaround tools for missing or poor in-app solutions.

User journey map example 1: health industry

The following example is for a fictional platform listing therapists for people in need of mental health support, helping them find, contact, schedule, and pay for therapy sessions. As you can see, the very long journey with recurring steps (repeated therapy sessions) is cut short to avoid repetition. 

At the same time, it generalizes very individual mental health experiences into a tangible summary. While it is fair to assume that the key phases happen in this chronological order, JTBD, timing, and the number of sessions are kept open so that it works for different types of patients.

You can also see how the journey covers several phases when the platform is not in active use. Yet, these phases are milestones in the patient’s road to recovery. Looking at a journey like this, you could, for example, realize that a ‘graduation’ feature could be beneficial for your users, even if it means they will stop using your platform because they are feeling better.

This user journey map is fictional but oriented on Johanne Miller’s UX case study  Designing a mental healthcare platform . 

User journey map example 2: delivery services

What the example above does not cover is the role of the therapist on the platform — most likely they are a second user type that has very different needs for the way they use the platform. This is why the second example shows the two parallel journeys of two different user roles and how they interact with each other. 

Nowadays, internal staff such as delivery drivers have dedicated apps and ideally have a designated UX team looking out for their needs, too. Creating a frictionless and respectful user experience for ‘internal users’ is just as critical for the success of a business as it is to please customers.

User journey map example: meal delivery. Please note that this fictional journey map is just an example for illustrative purposes and has not been backed up with user research.

For more inspiration, you can find collections with more real-life user journey examples and customer journey maps on  UXeria ,  eleken.co  &  userinterviews.com , or check out free templates provided by the design tools listed below.

Free UX journey mapping tools with templates

No matter whether you’re a design buff or feel more comfortable in spreadsheets, there are many templates available for free(mium) tools you might be already using. 

For example, there are good templates and tutorials available for  Canva ,  Miro  and even  Google Sheets . If you are more comfortable with regular design software, you can use the templates available for  Sketch  or one of these two from the  Figma (template 1 ,  template 2 ) community. There are also several dedicated journey map tools with free licenses or free trials, e.g.,  FlowMapp ,  Lucidchart  and  UXPressia , just to name a few.

Be aware that the first draft will require a lot of rearrangement and fiddling until you get to the final version. So it might help to pick where this feels easy for you. 

How do I collect data for my app user journey?

User journey maps need to be rooted in reality and based on what users really need and do (not what we wish they did) to add value to the product and business strategy. Hence, user insights are an inevitable step in the creation process.

However, it’s a huge pile of information that needs to be puzzled together and usually, one source of information is not enough to cover the whole experience — every research method has its own blind spots. But if you combine at least two or three of the approaches below, you can create a solid app user journey .

1. In-house expertise

The people working for and with your users are an incredible source of knowledge to start and finalize the journey. Whilst there might be a few overly optimistic or biased assumptions you need to set straight with your additional research, a user journey mapping workshop and/or  expert interviews  involving colleagues from very different (user-facing) teams such as:

customer service

business intelligence

customer insights

will help you collect a lot of insights and feedback. You can use these methods to build a preliminary skeleton for your journey but also to finalize the journey with their input and feedback.

2. Desk research

Next to this, it is fair to assume there is already a ton of preexisting documented knowledge about the users simply floating around in your company. Your  UX research repository  and even  industry reports  you can buy or find with a bit of googling will help. Go through them and pick the cherries that are relevant for your user journey. Almost anything can be interesting:

Old research reports and not-yet-analyzed context interviews from earlier user interviews

NPS scores & user satisfaction surveys

App store feedback

Customer support tickets

Product reviews written by journalists

Competitor user journeys in publicly available UX case studies

Ask your in-house experts if they know of additional resources you could check. And find out if there’s already a  long-forgotten old journey map  from a few years ago that you can use as a starting point (most organizations have those somewhere).

3. Qualitative user research

Qualitative research methods are your best shot to learn about all the things users experience, think, and desire before and after they touch your product.  In-depth interviews  and  focus groups  explore who they are and what drives them. You could show them a skeleton user journey for feedback or  co-creation . 

This could also be embedded into your user journey mapping workshop with the team. Alternatively, you can follow their actual journey in  diary studies ,  in-home visits  or  shadowing . However, in all these cases it is important that you talk to real users of your product or competitors to learn more about the real scenarios. This is why usability testing with non-users or fictional scenarios won’t help much for the user journey map.

4. Quantitative research

Once you know the rough cornerstones of your user journey map,  surveys  could be used to let users rate what needs and pains really matter to them. And what their mood is at certain phases of the journey. You can learn how they became aware of your product and ask them which of the motives you identified are common or exotic edge cases. Implementing micro-surveys such as  NPS surveys , CES , and  CSAT  embedded into your product experience can give additional insights.

5. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey

Customer satisfaction surveys (or CSATs for short) are important tools that measure your customers' satisfaction with your product or service. It is usually measured through surveys or feedback forms, asking customers to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 5. This metric can give valuable insights into the overall satisfaction of your customers and can help identify areas of improvement for your product.

CSAT surveys can be conducted at different customer journey stages, such as after purchase or using a specific feature. This allows you to gather feedback on different aspects of your product and make necessary changes to improve overall satisfaction.

The benefit of CSAT lies in understanding how satisfied customers are with your product and why. By including open-ended questions in the surveys, you can gather qualitative insights into what aspects of your product work well and what needs improvement.

5. User analytics

User analytics is a beautiful source of information, even if it has its limits. Depending on what tools you are using (e.g., Google Analytics, Firebase, Hubspot, UXCam), you can follow the digital footprints of your users before and when they were using the product. This may include  acquisition channels  (input for brand touchpoints and early journey phases),  search terms  that brought them to your product (input for needs and pains), and how they navigate your product. 

Unlike a usability test, you can use  screen flows  and  heatmaps  to understand how your users behave naturally when they follow their own agenda at their own pace — and how often they are so frustrated that they just quit. Knowing this gives you pointers to negative user emotions at certain journey steps and even helps identify your product’s moments of truth. Whilst you cannot ask the users if your interpretations are correct, checking analytics already helps you prepare good questions and talking points for user interviews or surveys.

Curious to know how heatmaps will look in your app?  Try UXCam for free — with 100,000 monthly sessions and unlimited features.

How can I utilize UXCam to collect App User Journey data?

If you have UXCam set up in your mobile app, you can use it to support your user journey research. You can find many of the previously mentioned  user analytics  features ( screen flows  and  heatmaps , including  rage taps ) here as well. 

UXCam can also be an  invaluable asset for your qualitative research . Especially for niche products and B2B apps that normally have a lot of trouble  recruiting real users  via the usual user testing platforms. 

UXCam’s detailed segmentation options allow you to  identify exactly the users you want to interview  about their journey — and  reach out to them via either email or UXCam push notifications , which can include invitation links for your study, a survey or an additional screener.

Additionally, UXCam's session replay feature allows you to watch recordings of user sessions, providing valuable insights into how users interact with your app and where they may face challenges.

Where can I learn more about user journey map?

Don’t feel ready to get started? Here are a few additional resources that can help you dive deeper into user journey mapping and create the version that is best for your project.

Creating user journey maps & service blueprints:

Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach

Journey Mapping 101

How to create customer journey maps

Customer Journey Stages for Product Managers

The Perfect Customer Journey Map

Planning and running user journey mapping workshops:

Journey mapping workshop

Jobs to be done:

The Theory of Jobs To Be Done

Moments of truth in customer journeys:

Journey mapping MoTs

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a visual representation of the process that a user goes through to accomplish a goal with your product, service, or app.

What is a user journey?

A user journey refers to the series of steps a user takes to accomplish a specific goal within a product, service, or website. It represents the user's experience from their point of view as they interact with the product or service, starting from the initial contact or discovery, moving through various touchpoints, and leading to a final outcome or goal.

How do I use a user journey map in UX?

User journey maps are an essential tool in the UX design process, used to understand and address the user's needs and pain points.

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Effective customer journey maps and how to create them

Mapping your customers’ journeys can feel daunting. There are many steps involved, and you may even need to create different maps for different types of customers.

Once you learn to break down the journey mapping process step-by-step, however, creating customer journey maps becomes not just manageable, but simple. This post explains what customer journey maps are, why they’re important, how to create them, and how to make them as effective as possible.

As you'll learn, there are a variety of resources available to help create customer journey maps. The more you leverage them, the faster and more efficient your mapping process will be.

What is a customer journey map?

The benefits of using customer journey maps, how to create a customer journey map, optimizing your customer journey map, customer journey map resources.

A customer journey map is a visualization of the steps your customer goes through during the process of engaging with your company. It’s visual storytelling that helps you understand and optimize customers’ experiences with your business.

Most customer journey maps are designed chronologically, meaning they represent the customer experience as a timeline of events. But in reality, customer journeys — the series of steps from brand awareness to customer loyalty — are often not linear. Instead, customers follow a cyclical, multichannel set of steps as they engage with your business. For example, they may make purchases online as well as offline during the same period (if you operate both types of sales channels).

Customer journey maps need to account for the nonlinear nature of customer journeys, even as they also represent customer experience in a chronological fashion. To achieve the right balance, journey maps should include:

• Customer touchpoints. Every time your customer has some type of contact with your brand, even if it’s indirect, that touchpoint should be noted on the customer journey map.
• Customer moments of truth . Customer moments of truth happen when an event changes a customer’s perception of your brand. These are pivotal engagements and should be noted as such on the customer journey map.
• Customer pain points. Barriers or challenges that a customer experiences when interacting with your brand — such as hiccups in digital sales tools or delayed shipments — should be included on the map so you know how such events correlate with overall brand perception.
• Desired actions. Your customer journey map should note the actions you intend for customers to take, such as engagement with content or the completion of a purchase.
• Completed actions. Note the actual actions your customers take so that you can determine how often their behavior aligns with desired actions. When your customer journey maps include all of the above information, you end up with holistic information that can help you deliver maximum benefits.

Understanding your customers’ experiences is critical. Investing in the customer experience leads to revenue increases in 84% of cases, according to research from Dimension Data. And PwC reports that poor customer experiences are the primary reason that people sever brand loyalties.

Increasing return on investment (ROI) and building a stronger brand are definitely sufficient goals, but how does customer journey mapping do it? Journey maps provide detailed benefits, including:

• Targeted customer insights. The more you know about your customers, how they behave, and what they like and dislike, the better you can optimize marketing and sales processes.
• Increased customer engagement. Customer journey maps provide insights you need to create the kind of interesting and informative content your customers want to see, improving the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts.

• Optimized touchpoints. Some customer touchpoints are more successful than others, and customer journey maps help you identify the most effective ones. They may reveal, for example, that a certain ad channel is associated with low rates of engagement — so to address that, you could redirect your marketing spend to a more effective touchpoint.
• Better customer focus. Mapping the customer journey helps to place customers at the forefront of your company’s operations and get ahead of challenges that could undercut their experiences. For example, if you are expecting a customer surge, you can proactively inform your customers of the expected delay and launch alternative resources for them.
• More new business. The more you know about the journeys of your current customers, the better positioned you are to expand on what works to engage new types of customer personas through campaigns tailored to them.
• Fewer business silos. Customer journey maps help every department visualize its respective impact on the customer experience. In turn, these maps help increase cross-unit functionality with regard to serving customers. In short, customer journey maps help stakeholders from a variety of business units to understand customers better — and that drives success across the business.

Successful customer journey mapping can be broken down into five key steps.

1. Set goals

First, you need a clear goal. Rather than creating a customer journey map just to create one, decide what you are hoping to accomplish through the map, which customers you are targeting, and which types of experiences you want your maps to highlight. In addition, your goals for creating the customer journey should reflect your overall company goals, such as increased revenue or improved customer retention.

Be sure to also decide on relevant metrics you can track as you create and use your customer journey maps. Setting clear goals is worthless if there’s no standard for measuring them.

2. Define your personas

Determine which customer personas you want to target when creating maps.

If you don’t have well-developed personas, or you need to update them, you can get the insights you need through surveys, interviews, testimonials, reviews, and feedback from customer relations teams. These teams tend to have a good perspective on the pain points that lead to falloffs during the buying journey.

The more specifics you can collect about who your customers are and what they want, the more effective your customer journey maps will be.

3. Determine your touchpoints

Identify the touchpoints that you’ll represent on your customer journey maps. Touchpoints are any point of engagement between customers and your brand, and they are the foundation for your customer journey map.

Consider all of the places where the customer may interact with your business. Be sure to factor in indirect engagements, like reviews of your brand that customers read on third-party sites, in addition to direct touchpoints that you maintain. Each and every touchpoint can drive customer conversion, so it’s critical to represent all the possibilities.

4. Map the current buyer journey

Once you’ve identified your customers and touchpoints, you can map the steps that buyers follow on their way to making purchases. Be sure to represent every variation on the buyer’s journey, including different types of sales channels, multiple product versions, and small-volume as well as large-volume purchases.

5. Map the ideal buyer journey

The journey you want customers to take may vary from their actual journey, especially if you release new products or services and the desired buyer journey changes as a result. Be sure to represent the ideal buyer journey alongside actual buyer journeys on your maps.

Creating customer journey maps is a huge step toward increased visibility into the customer experience, an enhanced ability to reach new personas, and better cross-unit functionality within the business. No customer journey map is ever truly “done,” though. They need regular reviews and updates to keep them optimized.

Whenever your product or service offerings change, your customer journey maps will need to change too. Likewise, whenever you detect new types of customer roadblocks — challenges related to pricing, brand credibility, or product functionality — you’ll want to add them to your customer journey maps.

You can also optimize these maps by investing in tools that automate omnichannel marketing . These tools can make it more efficient to generate and update customer journey maps, especially in cases where customers engage with your business through multiple channels at once.

Although creating customer journey maps may seem complicated at first, they’re actually quite simple once you break the process down into manageable steps.

Adobe Analytics can help you optimize both online and offline interactions so that you can optimize your customer journeys using data to create comprehensive customer journey maps. Likewise, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics can help you to visualize cross-channel customer interactions.

The better your ability to automate the process of tracking and interpreting the customer experience, the more efficient and effective your customer journey mapping process will be.

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Customer journey map templates to visualize your buyer’s point of view.

Use FigJam’s online whiteboard to plot your ideal customer journey from first to final touchpoints.

Bring over existing journey maps from Figma

If you already have a team library of journey map components and styles inside Figma, copy and paste them into FigJam to build out new maps faster. Curated tools and styling in FigJam let you edit most layers that you bring over.

No one journey is the same

Customer journey maps illustrate a buyer’s actions, emotions, and barriers as they interact with your brand, on a diagram. With FigJam you can:

Capture your customer personas: Create and import tabular data on target audiences directly into your FigJam workspace.

Capture and document customer’s touchpoints: Out-of-the-box shapes and connectors snap right into the grid for a visual representation of your buyer’s current and future states.

Organize, test, iterate: Widgets let you add branches to map customer interactions along the different stages of a user journey.

Chime in to bring this shared vision to life

The customer journey is something everyone should feel connected to and a part of. With audio for live conversations, cursor chats, stamps and emotes, and observation mode real-time collaboration is easier than ever. With Open sessions anyone can join your FigJam space for 24 hours—no new account required.

Get started with diagramming templates

Start diagramming with any of these free diagramming templates. Or, if you want to see how other teams jam with FigJam, head over to our Community.

Fishbone diagram

Spark ideas, create a visualization, and get to the root cause of an issue.

Try this template

Affinity Diagram

Explore ideas, identify opportunities, and create solutions together with this affinity diagram.

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Better products start with better ideas. Brainstorm ideas with this mind map.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes when interacting with a product, service, or company. Journey mapping should include every individual touchpoint to fully understand the buyer persona, customer needs, and potential pain points. It's an effective tool for a variety of stakeholders, including customer service, marketing, product, and design teams dedicated to creating an optimal user experience.

Click here to learn more about how to make an effective customer journey map.

How do you create a customer journey map?

Our free template helps teams map out the entire customer journey.

Start by identifying your target customer - develop a buyer persona to understand their needs, pain points, and goals. Map out their journey, making sure to include every customer touchpoint. Identify key actions within each touchpoint, and evaluate if there are opportunities to optimize that customer interaction.

Further customize your customer journey map with specific details, especially after gathering data from multiple sources (including feedback forms, customer service data, and more). Test and validate your map as needed to ensure accuracy.

What are the benefits of using a customer journey map template?

Customer journey map templates help teams better understand customer behavior at each key touchpoint. In doing so, teams can address needs, create solutions for potential pain points within the buying process, and support overall customer retention efforts.

What are some tips for creating an effective customer journey map?

As part of this mapping experience, your goal should be to create an optimal customer experience. Some other tips include:

• Use multiple sources of data (qualitative and quantitative) to accurately portray customer behavior. Review market research, social media comments, customer service queries, and more.
• Get customer feedback to understand specific thought processes and feelings throughout different parts of their journey.
• Review the map regularly and make updates as needed to reflect existing and potential customers (especially if your product or service offering has changed significantly).

Other templates you might like

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Work plan template

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Strategic plan template

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User Journey Templates

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