When you work with user-centred designers you’ll often hear them talk about user journey maps. But what are they, and what’s the point of them?
As the Sparck/BJSS design lead on the NHS.UK account I spend a lot of time helping stakeholders understand the benefit of user-centred design (UCD) and the tools we use to practice it.
As design jargon goes ‘user journey map’ is one of the easier terms: it’s a map (or diagram) that shows how people using your service progress through it.
They’re communication tools, or visual aids, that make it easier for some people to understand these user journeys.
The alternative might be having it described to you in a meeting, or reading about it in a document – both quite difficult ways to take in information.
But, as the cliché goes, a picture paints a thousand words.
Here's an example of a very simple journey map created showing a user's progress through a service.
Having said that it's a visual tool, it’s important not to get hung up on shiny outputs and artefacts.
A map is a map is a map. It might be some sticky notes on a wall, a table in a document, or a flashy, fully designed infographic.
What matters is that they’re tangible and communicate meaning in a useful way.
As well as explaining how the service works, putting together journey maps also helps everyone involved in designing the service gain a shared understanding of how it works.
User journey maps are also storytelling tools that bring the experiences of real people to life.
Journey maps are always user centred and should:
To achieve that, they’re always based on user research. In practice, that means:
Each map depicts one user’s experience at a high level. It explains what the user is trying to do and where they are likely to face blockers on their way.
For example, a journey map might tell us what motivated a customer to go into a particular restaurant to get dinner and what their experience was while they were there.
It’s also important to think about the full extent of the user journey. It often stretches beyond the formal limits of the service.
For example, in healthcare, we might think about the complex referral process that a patient has been on long before they get to a particular service in the NHS.
And we’ll also map where they go next, once they’ve been discharged from care.
The real purpose of service maps is to help us design and deliver better services.
They do that by defining how users currently experience a service, known as the ‘as is’ journey.
This will include ‘pain points’ – those moments of frustration which might make them drop out, or struggle to achieve their goals.
In research, we’ll pay attention to the language they use, the feelings they express, and whether their expectations were met.
Once we’ve identified those problems, we can start to think about how to solve them, with a second, aspirational version of the journey map – the ‘to be’ vision.
This sets out how we need the experience to change to better serve users.
Although the second map is arguably more exciting, and inspiring, it’s important not to put the cart before the horse. Defining the ‘as is’ has to come first.
My favourite example from up here in Scotland is the famously bad Willie Wonka immersive experience that made the headlines a year or so ago.
The people behind that experience sold the ‘to be’ without having mapped the ‘as is’, with its bleak vibe and numerous pain points.
Less flippantly, without an ‘as is’ map, it’s all too easy to focus on the ‘happy path’ – how things are supposed to go – and to neglect the reality of the situation.
Journey maps are part of a bigger toolkit
User journey maps are best used alongside other design tools and techniques like:
You might have heard about service blueprints before and be wondering how they’re different from journey maps.
In short, they’re bigger and more complex, mapping the needs of multiple user groups in great detail.
Continuing with the restaurant example above, a blueprint would tell us the same thing, but also when the buns are delivered, the sequence an order needs to be cooked in, who refills the ice cream machine, how the till ties into stock control, and so on.
You can find out more about service blueprints in this blog post by some of my colleagues from the service design practice at Sparck.