A journey map is a diagram of a user’s experience during different steps before, during, and after using a process, product, or service to accomplish a goal.
A journey map is often used to understand the current user experience. The user’s emotion (ranging from positive to negative) is indicated for each step in the experience. Steps that cause negative emotions identify opportunities to improve the user experience through a new solution.
A journey map shows the experience for a particular type of user (i.e., a particular persona) during a specific scenario.
For example, imagine creating a journey map for visiting a doctor’s office. A brand new patient would probably have a different experience than a regular patient. A patient having a routine check-up would probably have a different experience than a patient receiving test results.
There are different formats for displaying journey maps. Here is an example of a journey map that uses emojis to show the experience of a repeat customer buying a drink from a coffee shop. Multiple customers were observed and interviewed to gather the data used to construct the journey map.
EXAMPLE:
The employees at the coffee shop could then use this journey map to identify the parts of the current user experience that are positive, neutral, or negative.
The positive experiences should be obviously be kept because these are the things your users enjoy about your current product or service. If possible, you should try to enhance, extend, or emphasize these positive experiences.
Even if there are very positive parts in the overall experience, it is critically important to fix or reduce the negative experiences. This is because users tend to remember the bad parts of an experience more than the good parts – this is called negativity bias.
You should also try to make the neutral experiences become more positive. Otherwise, there is a danger of them turning into negative experiences. In the coffee shop example, waiting in line for your drink starts off as a neutral experience. However, if the wait becomes too long, it becomes a negative experience. What if the coffee shop could figure out a way to actually make waiting an enjoyable experience?
The point is that you cannot provide a better user experience until you know what is – and what isn't – working well in the current experience. This is true whether you are trying to improve an existing solution or trying to design a brand new solution.
YOUR TASK
Construct a journey map of the current user experience for one of your target user personas:
Use your team’s research data to identify the sequence of steps involved in the current process (i.e., without your smart device) for the persona. For each step, identify the persona’s emotional reaction (from positive to negative). For example, if your team is focusing on improving student lockers, show the current experience of how students use their lockers to show what is good and bad about using the current lockers.
Use this drawing template to construct your journey map. Add text boxes to briefly describe each step, and represent the persona’s emotion at each step with a corresponding emoji. A range of emoji has been included in the template for you to use. Just delete any emoji that you don't need for your journey map. (If necessary, you can download other emoji images from EmojiOne.)
Connect the emojis with arrows to create a line graph of the user experience over time. Any steps that show a decrease or that have negative emotions represent opportunities for your team to design an improved solution (i.e., your smart device) that will provide a better user experience.
