Journey Mapping with colleagues

I recently led an exciting journey mapping session for my colleagues. Journey maps are powerful storytelling tools that UX, Product, Sales, Marketing, and other professionals use to document the steps it takes for a person to complete a task.

Here are some thoughts:

1.   Before creating a journey map, you must know and understand the user.
·      Gain empathy for the people who use your product.
·      Have a good understanding of who they are, their motivations, and their pain points.
·      You can create a persona or empathy map.
·      This must be grounded in user research.

2.   What is the scenario?
·      Determine if you want to illustrate the current experience or the vision for the future experience.
·      Where is your user when they are interacting with your product or service?
·      Focus on one path, but document thoughts for other paths.
·      Where does your story begin and end?
·      Determine the level of detail to put into your journey map.

3.   Always include users’ emotions in your journey map.
·      It lets your audience understand how your users feel.
·      This will help to quickly identify the user’s areas of frustration.
·      Use graphical elements like emojis or icons to visually tell the story.

Journey maps help not only to tell the story but also to identify opportunities and areas of improvement. Whether you formally create a journey map or not, you should be thinking of the steps it takes your user to complete a task and how they feel while doing it.