Creating a Journey (Map)

You’ve probably heard of a journey map before.

Sarah Gibbons of Nielson Norman Group describes journey mapping as “a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.” In many ways, it’s just like documenting a process to do something.

These are some of the most common UX tools that designers employ, compiling user actions into essentially a timeline.

This allows us to then go into each step of the process and try to find ways to improve the experience.

This also goes beyond what just data can tell us, by being a physical journey that documents the frustrations and experiences of the user.

Let’s take a look at an example to get a better understanding.

A Journey of a Vacation

Let’s say that someone wants to go on vacation, and we get to document their experience. For this, our user is Lucas, an average guy who hasn’t traveled much in the past. He decides that he wants to go on a big vacation abroad, but he has never really done something like this before.

Our first step in this process would be the inciting incident, aka, the sudden urge to go traveling.

Here we can start documenting Lucas’s thoughts and expectations, as well as start writing his actions.
Through this, we want to be able to summarize so that we can see where problems occur so that they can be opportunities to improve the product or process.

It can also be beneficial here to add small icons or emojis to help bring some of the journey map together. Here, with Lucas being unsure about where he wants to go or what to do, I put him as anxious but still happy.

Next, we can start moving into the rest of the journey. For this, I created five sections, planning, research, selection, preparations, and travel.

Now, we continue the process, documenting thoughts and actions as Lucas moves through his journey of traveling.

If we skip forward to the research phase, we can see some icons next to some of these action items.

These are noted opportunities for improvement, essentially parts of the process where the user struggles with an aspect, such as searching for flights and hotels in this situation.

Because Lucas is an inexperienced traveler, he really doesn’t know exactly where to start when looking for flights, with his only idea coming from Googling flights and having something come up. Where are you supposed to find deals? Do you book directly on the website or through a third party?

With this information, hotel and airline companies now can go back to try and find ways to simplify this process.

This is why journey maps are so helpful, as it is able to show struggle more plainly than most other data collections ever can.

If we jump towards the end of this journey, in the travel phase, we can see there are two more opportunities for improvement.

Often when people go abroad, they only go with a loose plan of what to do, with some scheduled items that they want to happen, and the rest left up for exploring.

Lucas has some trouble figuring out exactly what to do and spends time trying to find things to do around the city.

This is a prime opportunity for travel companies to step in, and try and create guides that can help people better travel and explore without getting lost or needing to download more apps.

All together, journey maps are an excellent way to really investigate the process, and allow for everything to run a bit more smoothly.

To see the full journey map, scroll down below or click here to view it as a PDF!

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