process & strategy
User journey map
What is a user journey map?
A user journey map lays out the steps someone takes to reach a goal and plots how they feel at each one. The feeling is the point: it turns a flat list of stages into a curve where the low spots - the moments worth fixing - stand out.
Also known as: journey map, customer journey map
The demo
The same five-stage journey, two ways of seeing it. Switch from the flat list to the emotion view and watch one stage drop through the floor - then click it to see why.
Click a stage to see what's happening there.
Switch to the emotion view to find the pain point.
What this demo shows (text version)
A journey with five stages - discover, sign up, first task, hit an error, get help - each with a satisfaction level and a short note. In "just the steps" view the stages appear as an equal, flat row, so nothing marks out where the experience goes wrong.
In "with emotion" view each stage's satisfaction is plotted as a height, and one stage - "hit an error", where a payment fails with no explanation - drops far below the rest, exposing it as the pain point. Clicking any stage shows its note. The journey is identical in both views; plotting the emotion is what turns an invisible problem into an obvious one.
As a plain list of steps, every stage looked the same and the trouble hid in plain sight. Plot the emotion and the floor drops out at one stage - the real pain point, suddenly impossible to miss. The journey didn't change; mapping how it feels is what made the problem visible.
The emotion line is what earns the map its keep. A process diagram tells you what happens; a journey map tells you where it hurts, which is where to spend your effort. Build it from research, not a meeting-room guess - real quotes and observed behaviour at each stage - or you'll map the journey you hope people have, not the one they actually do.
Keep it honest about scope: a journey map covers one person, one goal, end to end - including the bits before and after your product, where a surprising amount of the pain lives. The temptation is to map only your own screens; the value is in the stages around them that you don't control but still own.