What is Journey Mapping?

Episode Transcript

Moderator: What is journey mapping? Mike, could you start off?

Michael: What is journey mapping? Journey mapping is a UX research exercise that allows you to really step back and get a holistic view of the customer’s journey while trying to accomplish a specific goal. So imagine, the process of (I’m going to relate this back to e-commerce) buying a specific product. You look at the journey of that customer when the first exposure they get is through an email marketing campaign and it’s like hey, here’s this thing that’s on sale. Click this if you’re interested. That takes that user through a specific path.

What journey mapping does is allow you to map those touch points that that customer has with your organization and you get to create themes – generally create themes of how you want to evaluate that process. You map how delightful that experience is based on their emotional take away, the interaction with your organization at that step, as well as what specific actions they are actually taking along with what channel they might be experiencing that interaction on. These are the general themes in which you would do that.

At the end of the day when you go through the journey mapping process and map out that entire experience, you start to see opportunities, and areas of friction that you may not have seen prior because a lot of times your organization is siloed. So they only are thinking through a specific lens, a specific step maybe but what journey mapping allows is for your organization to look at the entire experience. This allows your organization to create empathy with the customer to see exactly what they’re going through, how they are feeling.

It allows you to evaluate that process and say, “what are the things that we should be working on to help improve this experience?” You want to tie that back to your business KPIs and what is a priority to your business in terms of how and where you should be focused on that specific journey and starting there. That’s just the beginning part of the journey mapping experience. A natural next step of journey mapping is figuring out which opportunity to focus on and ideating on potential solutions off of that. That essentially is journey mapping in a nutshell, Craig?

Craig: I think what journey mapping allows for the business to do is really look at where there’s some opportunities for quick-wins and low-hanging fruit to help prioritize the work to be done. And then looking at where the next higher impact or higher impact/lower effort priority should be and then, prioritize that work going forward.

One big challenge with any transformation, innovation, or redesign is biting off too much and then not being able to see the wins quick enough and then the organization gets fatigued in the project and so doing journey mapping is not just a one-time thing, but a consistent exercise or practice which allows you to keep a good eye on how you’re doing with your customers and where you can improve.

Moderator: Thanks.

Craig:/Michael: You’re welcome.