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Customer Journey Maps

A Customer Journey Map (CJM) is a visualization of the complete story of a user's interaction with a product or service over time and across different channels.

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A Customer Journey Map (CJM) is a visualization of the complete story of a user’s interaction with a product or service over time and across different channels. It narrates the experience from the user’s perspective, highlighting their actions, thoughts, feelings, and pain points at each stage.

What are Customer Journey Maps?

If Personas are a photo of your user, a Customer Journey Map is a movie about them. It doesn’t focus on a single moment, but maps the entire experience of a user as they try to achieve a goal, from the moment they realize they have a need until they resolve it and beyond.

A typical CJM is structured as a timeline and contains several layers of information:

  • Journey Phases: The main stages the user goes through (e.g., Discovery, Consideration, Purchase, Use, Support).
  • User Actions: What does the user do in each phase?
  • Thoughts and Feelings: What does the user think and feel? (e.g., “I’m confused,” “This is exciting,” “I’m frustrated”). This is often represented with an emotion line that rises and falls.
  • Touchpoints: Where does the user interact with the company? (e.g., website, app, email, physical store, social media).
  • Pain Points: What problems or frustrations do they encounter?
  • Opportunities: How could the company improve the experience at each pain point?

Why are they important?

  • They provide a holistic view: They break down departmental silos (marketing, sales, product, support) and show the complete experience from the customer’s perspective.
  • They identify key moments: They reveal the points of greatest frustration (where customers might abandon) and greatest delight (which can be amplified).
  • They generate empathy at an organizational level: They help the entire company understand and empathize with the real customer experience.
  • They align the team around the user: They serve as a single source of truth about the customer experience, helping to prioritize improvements that will have the greatest impact.

How are they made?

  1. Choose a Persona and a scenario: A CJM is created for a specific [[Personas]] and a concrete scenario. (e.g., “The journey of Ana, the student, to buy a new backpack online”).
  2. Define the journey phases: Based on your research, define the logical stages the Persona goes through. They don’t have to be the same for every business.
  3. Gather the information: Use data from your research ([[User Interviews]], surveys, data analysis, etc.) to fill in the Persona’s actions, thoughts, and feelings in each phase.
  4. Map the touchpoints: Identify where and how the Persona interacts with your company at each step.
  5. Identify pain points and opportunities: This is the most important outcome. Where does the Persona get frustrated? How could you solve that problem? Where could you exceed their expectations?
  6. Visualize the map: Create a clear and visual diagram. Use an emotion line to show the highs and lows of the journey. Use real user quotes to bring the thoughts and feelings to life.
  7. Share it and use it: A CJM stored in a folder is useless. Share it with the entire company and use it to guide strategic and design decisions.

Mentor Tips

  • Base your map on reality, not fiction: The validity of a CJM depends on the research that supports it. If you make it up, it’s just a pretty story with no strategic value.
  • Don’t do it alone: Creating a CJM is an incredibly valuable team activity. Involve people from different departments to get a 360-degree view.
  • Focus on emotion: The line showing the user’s feelings is often the most powerful part of the map. Visually highlight the lowest points; that’s where the greatest improvement opportunities lie.
  • Distinguish between current and future journeys: Sometimes it’s useful to create two maps: one showing the current experience with all its problems (Current State) and another visualizing the ideal experience you want to create (Future State).

Resources and Tools

Tags

ux artifact research strategy mid-level