User Journey & Experience Maps

An experience map is a visualization of the end-to-end user experience that an average user goes through to accomplish a goal. Unlike journey maps that focus on illustrating the experience users have with a particular product, this method helps create a general understanding of human behavior in a larger context without focusing on a specific product. It allows for understanding users' overall experience before you start designing your product to meet their needs.

In other words, experience maps demonstrate how people achieve their goals without using your or your competitors’ products. This helps designers identify problems and pain points at the very early stages.^[1]

A customer or user journey map visualizes an average user's process of accomplishing a goal using a specific product, organization, service, or brand. Like an experience map, it highlights pain points and builds empathy toward users.

An experience map has a broader scope — it depicts generic users having a general human experience. For example, an experience map can describe how people buy clothes at offline stores and what difficulties they face, such as long lines to the fitting rooms, wrong price tags, or a limited number of choices and item sizes.

A journey map, however, is about specific factors in specific scenarios. For example, a journey map for an online shopping app would demonstrate what steps users take to buy a necessary item online on a given app and identify problems like doubts about product quality, trust issues, delivery time, complex navigation of a website, or blurry images.^[2]

Customer journey maps help all stakeholders understand how users are treated at each channel. For example, while placing an order through a website, a mobile app, or a phone call. They can be used at any point in the design process and can pinpoint specific touchpoints that cause pain or delight in existing products or ones in the design stage.

Journey maps reflect the experience of users fulfilling their goals when using your product, service, or brand. Unlike experience maps, journey maps focus on who experiences the journey, what goal they have, what steps they take to accomplish these goals, and what expectations, emotions, and thoughts they experience along the way.

There are 3 critical elements of a journey map:

• Actor: This is the persona/user who experiences the journey.
• Scenario and expectations: A scenario describes the situation that occurs when an actor takes certain actions to achieve their goal and has certain thoughts and expectations about it. The scenario can be real (for existing products or services) or anticipated (for products or services at the design stage).
• Journey phases: Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the user journey.

Journey phases help organize thoughts, mindsets, and feelings in the journey map. Each scenario usually has different journey phases. For example, the phases for a scenario about changing a mobile plan could be: define, compare, negotiate, and select. A scenario of ordering a takeaway from a restaurant could include phases of: awareness, consideration, conversation, customer service, and loyalty.

Instead of focusing on a single user or persona's journey, experience maps provide a high-level, chronological overview of events. They’re created before journey maps to understand general human behavior without being tied up to a specific product or service.

Like user journey maps, experience maps also have phases, actions, thoughts, and mindsets/emotions.

• Phases: Phases define major goals that users want to achieve on their journey.
• Actions: Actions refer to actual steps people take to achieve their goals.
• Thoughts, mindsets, emotions: The map should reflect what emotions and thoughts arise while users go through an experience.

In the end, scan each phase of the user experience map and identify any possible areas of friction or room for improvement.^[3]

The definition of phases is the first step for both experience and journey maps. User journey maps formulate phases depending on a specific scenario, the goals of a specific persona, and a specific product or service. For example, for an e-commerce scenario (like buying AirPods), the stages can be: discover, try, buy, use, and seek support.

Experience maps also relate to goals that users want to achieve throughout their journey. However, they have no connection to a specific service or product. This makes experience maps beneficial for multiple businesses. For example, an experience map can visualize the overall experience of buying train tickets and can include stages like: discover, buy, use, and return.

Deciding the number of phases depends on your users' goals. Phases should demonstrate the entire experience or scenario, so you can easily identify where users drop off and what keeps them from going all the way to the end. Keep in mind that phases are not actions that users take to achieve a certain goal.

Also, remember that the map should be easy to navigate and read when you share it with your stakeholders. So, make sure it doesn't require horizontal scrolling.

Once the phases of the journey are defined, start mapping out the user's actions, thoughts, and emotions at each step. Focus on common patterns found during research rather than including every detail.

When deciding what to show, aim for behaviors that repeat across journeys, thoughts, and feelings that reflect user motivations or concerns, and anything that reveals friction or unmet needs.

Experience maps are not meant to capture individual preferences or feature-specific feedback. They are used to understand how people think, feel, and behave while moving through a broader experience. The goal is to highlight general behavior, not one-off requests or interface-level issues.

It's essential to involve stakeholders in the creation of experience/journey maps. Once each phase is filled with data, you and your teammates can evaluate the map, identify any points of friction, and offer opportunities. Opportunities stand for insights into what can be improved in the journey.^[4]

When working on a journey map, you can see the points where users get confused, upset, or frustrated when navigating your product or service. For example, you can identify when users decide to back off and not subscribe to your offer.

Experience maps, on the other hand, bring up the most problematic areas of user experience in a particular field. For example, you can reveal why users prefer to pay bills on a desktop and think of ways to make users feel safe when managing their finances via your mobile app.

Competition sparks progress. Don't miss the opportunity to map what competitors do at each stage of the user/persona journey. This may require prior research on what competitors offer to their users.

Your map's phases and user goals help define the main comparison criteria before you start. You can always add more criteria along the way if necessary.

What are the benefits of evaluating your competitors?

• Prevent failures and learn how to avoid them
• Discover how competitors solve similar usability issues
• Discover competitors' strengths and weaknesses
• Learn about trends and innovations in your product field

The most effective ways to evaluate your competitors include:

• Using competitors' products and evaluating all the customer touchpoints and channels — the medium of interaction between a customer and an organization^[5]
• Read reviews about competitors' products on social media, mobile app stores, marketplaces, or similar resources
• Conduct usability testing of competitors’ products^[6]

The beauty of any type of map is that you can display the way things are right now or the desired state of things.

Current mappings show the actual state of user experience. They help identify and document existing problems and pain points.

Future mappings represent the desired state of user experience. They help set goals for creating a product or service that will be tailored to user needs.^[7]

Make sure you don't confuse the idealistic visualization of future maps with how things really are. You can use future maps for building and checking hypotheses during user research. But avoid using future maps as a reference for finalized design decisions.

When planning an experience or journey map, focus on your goals — why does your team need this map? What problems can it solve?

• Hypothesis maps are based on the team's expectations and assumptions about how things are. This approach allows compiling the perspectives of all team members, formulating a research plan, and creating a user research-based map.
• Research maps are based on the research data gained for building the map. While this method is time-consuming and costly, it yields the most intriguing and useful insights into user behavior, needs, pain points, and preferences.

The fidelity level of your map depends on what design process stage you are in right now, your budget, and time resources.

• Like low-fidelity prototypes, low-fidelity maps are better for the initial stages. They're created with materials at hand (for example, sticky notes and a whiteboard) and are easier to change and move around. You can also use digital tools like Miro or Mural to this end. Low-fidelity maps are perfect for brainstorming, revising, and updating.
• High-fidelity maps are more polished and represent a final version. They're less flexible for updates and are usually created digitally as a UX artifact that can be easily shared with stakeholders.