What is a user journey map, and do you need one?

Web design trends come and go, but the UX artefacts we create have remained fairly constant.

The interfaces themselves may be barely recognisable from those we designed in the 00’s, but the deliverables and diagrams we make haven’t actually changed that much over the years.

Sure, things have levelled up. Interactive prototypes have replaced PDF wireframes (don’t judge, it was a different time!), and AI is allowing us to synthesise research data way more efficiently.

But the fundamental outputs have stayed true. One such is the journey map.

Now, I’ve often found user journey maps to be one of the more confusing UX deliverables. Unlike wireframes and sitemaps, there can be a lot of variation in how designers approach them, and what clients expect from them.

Today, we’re going to take a deep dive into the user journey map. What are they? What are they for? And how can they add value to your project?

What is a user journey map?

At its core, a user journey map is a diagram showing the typical steps person will go through, when interacting with your product or service. From start to finish, it maps tasks and touch points, alongside other factors like the user’s questions, feelings and outcomes.

The goal of the diagram is usually to align project stakeholders. It helps to give everyone a shared understanding of what the user journey involves, and offers a snapshot of the whole experience at a birds-eye view.

User journey maps also allow us to target opportunities to improve things. By breaking up the user journey into stages, we can suggest improvements to content, functionality, or design at the specific moments where they’ll be most useful.

What does a user journey map look like?

The look of a user journey map can vary, depending on what you’re trying to show. Designers will also have their own preferences for how they set things out.

At it’s most basic though, think of the diagram as a table.

The columns from left-to-right represent a different user journey step. And then each ‘row’ is dedicated to outlining different things like user tasks, emotional states, questions and so on.

What should a user journey map show?

These diagrams are quite versatile. There’s a lot they can show, which is going to vary depending on the project, and what you’re trying to achieve with it.

At Pixelfridge, our user journey maps often show :

• Steps : The main phases of the user journey. These are the ones that make up the columns, from left-to-right.
• Tasks : The individual interactions that a user moves through, as part of a step.
• Emotional state : How the user is likely to be feeling, and how that might it affect their behaviour.
• Questions : What the user might be asking, and things they could get confused about.
• Gain creators : Features, content or design considerations can we make to improve the UX.
• KPIs : The practical ways to measure our success.

Depending on what you want to achieve with the diagram, not everything we’re talking about here may be relevent.

The beauty of a user journey map is it can contain as much or as little detail as it needs to. Some journeys may fit on a single presentation slide. Others might span several steps, and require some serious horizontal scrolling from the reader. It’s all down to the complexity of the product or service.

That being said, even for more complicated projects we’re not looking to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry. The goal of this diagram is to help stakeholders understand the user journey and key elements of the UX at a glance. It’s an overview, not a deep-dive. We’ve got other deliverables like wireframes and functional specs, which are better for giving a more granular breakdown of how things work.

How do I get started?

First, consider how this user journey map is going to add value to your project. What’s it trying to achieve?

Perhaps it’s depicting an existing process that we want to improve. In this case, it should focus on drawing out pain-points in the current UX, and where we could add value in our new version.

Alternatively (or additionally) the journey map could depict the future vision for that flow. Rather than focusing on what’s going wrong, it may instead want to focus on the various gain creators and UX considerations for future.

When it comes to the actual content of your user journey map, it’s important to remember that this information doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the result of research, discussions and team decisions.

Research for a user journey map

Each user journey map needs to be based upon a typical user profile. This means that for certain projects, you may actually produce multiple user journey maps for your different types of users. Ideally, we’d have already done some kind of audience research in order to inform our user profiles, and understand how they’re currently interacting with your service.

This kind of user research can get quite involved, but it also doesn’t have to be expensive. There are many ways you can go about building a picture of your users, even when access to them is limited.

We use various research techniques to inform our user journey maps, including :

• Surveys and questionnaires
• User testing sessions of the existing product
• Analytics and SEO data (search keywords are a great way to understand user intent and language)
• Online forums like Reddit and Mumsnet for consumer research
• Desk research and existing research publications
• Interviews with stakeholders who have frequent contact with users, such as the customer services team

User personas are a great way of encapsulating user research findings, and describing the reasons why a certain type of user may visit your site. They’re a great place to start for your user journey map, which becomes more powerful and impactful if accompanied by a realistic user profile.

So. Does my project need a user journey map?

Not always! Sometimes our design projects are quite straightforward, and these kinds of self-explanatory solutions can be easily communicated by more literal artefacts like wireframes or functional specifications. On the other end of the spectrum, some projects involve user journeys that are so nuanced and non-linear, that they can be hard to represent in this ‘left-to-right’ format. In these cases, a more abstract diagram like a concept map can be more helpful.

A user journey map comes into it’s own where we have long and fairly linear process to describe.

They help break down a user’s tasks, questions or issues across stages of the journey, whilst also capturing our own project and design considerations. If you need  a simple way to communicate a linear flow to stakeholders, then a journey map can be an invaluable output in your early UX process.