customer journey map nngroup

How to Use Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) for Business Success

Discover the artistry behind creating impactful customer journey maps, refining your approach to enhance engagement and satisfaction at every touchpoint.

10 min read

Mapping a customer journey is a pivotal tool companies can leverage to understand better how to turn a customer into a loyal, long-term prospect. In simple terms, a journey map allows a business to contextualize its customer’s experience by identifying the steps a customer goes through while interacting with their service or product.

It leads to the discovery of which areas the customers find troublesome (known as pain points), and those are then applied when considering how to optimize the product by the UX design team.

With a revitalized design based on understanding this interaction, companies will improve their services or products, leading to higher customer satisfaction rates and securing future business from the targeted base. Studies have shown that upsell and cross-sell revenues by companies who engage in journey mapping increase by as much as 79% over those who do not. This guide will dive into the customer journey mapping artform, allowing your business to use the collected customer data more effectively to enhance customer experiences.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

From a holistic standpoint, a customer journey map (or CJM) visualizes the customer’s interaction with a business from start to finish. This affords businesses insights into what motivates their customers, what they need, and what they expect from the product or service. A customer journey map helps businesses better understand customers, spot potential concerns, improve customer retention, and make better business decisions.

Customer journey maps have utility across sectors. A visual map of customer interaction routes with the company and its product(s) enables a more detailed understanding of how customers behave throughout their experiences, whether for UX design , marketing, or customer support reasons.

With this information, companies may adjust their goods to the needs of their clients and improve their overall experience. Happy customers will return and make purchases from the business again, allowing the organization to reap the financial rewards.

Source: NNGroup

The first step in a journey map is the customer’s product discovery. Still, other typical touchpoints generally include researching the product, deciding to make the purchase, making said purchase, obtaining it, and everything that comes after the sale. Customers may experience pain points at any time during this process, so the business can use the CJM to improve the necessary part(s).

Perhaps even more pertinent than the steps customers take during their interaction is how they feel about the product and whether they believe they are getting what they need. If a business can tailor the improvements to those needs, the customer experience will improve, driving the customer’s loyalty and engagement.

For instance, if a customer is trying to use the business’s website to research a product but finds this difficult, key adjustments to the website navigation tactics and research areas can alleviate this frustration. As a result, customers will have an easier time finding what they need, driving satisfaction up.

When a business understands its customers’ experiences, it allows them to adjust and, in turn, acts as a tool that bolsters the meaningful nature of its relationship with that business. CJM illuminates those areas that need improvement along the customer’s journey, generates more positive experiences, and, over time, allows users to return as loyal customers while referring others, which then grows the business.

Customer Journey Mapping Benefits

The primary benefit of CJMs is the ability to identify areas where customers encounter challenges and resolve them with targeted changes, which, in turn, bolsters customer satisfaction. By providing a tighter and more concentrated understanding of customer behaviors, businesses can employ more strategic tactics to improve the customer’s experience.

This includes multi-channel improvements, process streamlining, and other operational optimizations. Understanding and adapting to customer expectations is crucial to ensure the journey maps align with customer experiences and behaviors.

Journey maps also open opportunities for a business to grow and scale. With a deeper understanding of the needs of a target audience, companies can better personalize their offerings.

Source: Zapier

Observation and study of CJMs also inform businesses about the best ways to launch products and engage in marketing campaign strategies. This can be done in real-time, employing customer feedback to make the necessary adjustments or modifications and more efficient resource allocation, ultimately leading to a higher return on investment.

Therefore, every improvement CJMs offer serves a business on multiple fronts, from loyalty building to long-term profitability.

What Is Included in a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a comprehensive visual representation that illustrates a customer’s various stages while interacting with a brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase.

It typically encompasses several essential elements, such as customer personas, touchpoints, emotions, and pain points, each contributing to a holistic understanding of the customer experience.

Customer personas (or buyer or user personas ) are detailed profiles that help to identify and understand the target audience, including demographic information, behavioral patterns, goals, and challenges. These personas enable businesses to tailor their strategies and communication to meet their audience’s needs and preferences.

Touchpoints are all the instances where customers interact with the brand, whether online through websites and social media or offline through physical stores and customer service interactions. Identifying and mapping these touchpoints ensures businesses optimize each interaction to enhance the overall customer experience.

Mapping emotions involves tracking the customer’s experiences and feelings at each journey stage. This provides deep insights into the customer’s emotional highs and lows, highlighting moments of joy, frustration, or confusion. Understanding these emotions allows businesses to create more empathetic and effective strategies.

Finally, highlighting pain points is crucial for recognizing areas where customers encounter difficulties or dissatisfaction. By identifying these challenges, businesses can address and resolve issues promptly, ensuring a more seamless and enjoyable customer experience.

Overall, a well-constructed customer journey map is a valuable tool for businesses to understand, enhance, and optimize the customer experience, fostering greater loyalty and satisfaction.

Customer Journey Mapping Process

The first component of a CJM is choosing to purchase a product and making it. That process can involve many smaller parts, and understanding any related shortcomings can help make adjustments to eliminate them. This covers the spectrum of interactions from when the customer first discovers the product to how long after purchasing it. The key step to improving something is understanding and addressing the problems it incurs.

Another component of CJMs is the customers’ emotional experience. Businesses use CJMs to tailor the customer's experience to their needs, allowing for more positive results, bolstering engagement, and securing loyalty.

Another vital component of CJMs is the set of user actions, which businesses can trend over time. This yields insights into what users want from products, allowing the organization to revise or update the product to suit those desires, needs, and requirements.

Once the needs are illustrated, user research is the next logical component of CJMs to collect data about customer preferences and typical behaviors related to the product.

Organizations can use several data collection methods, including surveys and general market research, to compare customers’ usage and satisfaction levels of similar products. This can illustrate other pain points that the business can include solutions to during their own design and development processes .

Source: Service Design Show

All of the data and information made available through customer journey maps is valuable only if actionable follow-ups are taken to lead to the final component of CJMs: solutions.

By solving customers’ problems in the product interaction process at any stage, businesses increase satisfaction, promoting growth and product loyalty. These solutions might be in the form of slight or significant redesigns or the introduction of new features that serve the customer’s needs and preferences better. Therefore, mapping the customer journey can be quantitatively measured over time in the form of ROI.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

Not all customer journey maps are always applicable to every facet of a business. Certain types help certain companies achieve their particular goals better. Let’s discuss four different types of CJMs that businesses could use and their particular strength of purpose.

Current State

The current state map is immensely helpful for those looking to visualize the process of customer interaction with the product from beginning to end as it currently functions, yielding a better understanding of the needs and wants of the customer. This leads to businesses knowing the key areas to build upon or improve regarding their product. Surveys returned from customers, website analytics, and recordings from the company’s call centers are all perfect examples of metric and context tools that allow businesses to gather information based on which they will strategize to make informed decisions about the product’s current state.

Source: Fullstory

Future State

Future maps focus on how companies can improve future customer experience relating to their products and services by implementing new tactics and the utility of new technologies to enhance and enrich the customer’s journey. One example is the adoption of push notifications or chatbot software to personalize customer experience based on their wants and needs.

Source: Xtensio

Day in the Life

Another vital aspect for businesses to explore about the customer’s journey is tracking it over long periods across various platforms and channels. This drives companies to many leads about areas where the customer journey can be improved. Metrics used to draft this type of CJM include social media engagement, through which organizations can better assess what type of messaging engages the customers, affording feedback about the strategies that work better than others.

This type of customer journey map is used to create a formula for the ideal customer journey. It considers product placement, pricing, and messaging alongside multiple other metrics. Once this CJM is formulated, organizations utilize it as a reference point that guides their decision-making strategies to optimize their customers' experiences and avoid potential problems. When drafting a blueprint CJM, companies could consider, for instance, a long-term objective like customer loyalty cultivation alongside short-term ones such as growing conversions.

Methods of Creating Customer Journey Maps

To craft a customer journey map, a company must thoroughly study, analyze, and consider its customers' needs, motivations, and expectations. The first step is to define the goals of the customer’s journey, or in other words, what motivates the customer to seek out the business’s product and what need the customer is looking to satisfy with it. Businesses can map the steps between those two reference points with that information.

Logically, the next step includes identifying all possible touchpoints along the customer’s journey that drive the process through which customers make their decisions regarding the product. These include product research, comparative analysis, reading reviews, and deciding to purchase the product.

Source: GeoJango Maps on Unsplash

Beyond identifying these touchpoints, this step also reveals the negative or positive ramifications of each touchpoint on the customer’s experience, which will ultimately guide the product's optimization strategies.

Once the touchpoints have been gathered, data about the interactions will be collected through methods such as reviewing web analytics (bounce rates, etc.), tracking survey responses, diving into call center logs, and keeping a close eye on social media engagement. This data should fill any company's understanding gaps about the customer's journey, painting a more detailed start-to-finish picture.

Lastly, the compiled information should be leveraged to visually represent the customer’s journey, feelings, and sentiments regarding the product. This yields a full scope of the process, making it easier to identify its pain points and allowing businesses to respond to those by optimizing applications to the problem areas.

With these improvements, the pain points can be systematically addressed, bolstering customer engagement and satisfaction, proving a highly effective strategy for pleasing customers, and creating brand loyalty .

We collaborated with Discover to enhance their mobile app, focusing on improving user experience through refined onboarding processes, card activation flows, and new feature discovery. By mapping customer journeys, we identified pain points and optimized the app's design, making it more user-friendly.

This involved creating detailed flow diagrams, multiple UX prototypes for testing, and implementing a comprehensive design system with custom icons and illustrations, ensuring a cohesive brand experience across all platforms.

Discover User Journey by Clay

Customer Journey Map Implementation

A well-crafted map will be useless if it is not implemented correctly. If done right, it will yield results leading to a better customer experience. Through the correct application of CJMs, businesses can better understand the customer’s journey, allowing for proper adjustments and enhancements to grow engagement and loyalty, optimizing efficiency on an operational level along the way.

A CJM should leverage reliable data sources for their customer’s journey visualization, achieved through a review of bounce rates, page views, and other website analytic metrics like social media engagement measurements (survey responses, call center logs, likes, shares, etc.). With the sentiments and data points derived from the above, businesses can accurately capture the state of every step of the customer’s journey.

Source: NNgroup

Once the map is formed, it should be thoroughly reviewed to identify areas of improvement and any potential pain points in the process. Some aspects that must be addressed include website presentation features, messaging, or tweaks to connect with customers across various channels. Companies can enhance their customer interaction experience by testing new tactics and strategies before implementing them.

It is also highly recommended that businesses invest in tools to help them track customer journeys effectively. This allows for evaluating and comparing various strategies, adjusting them based on customer feedback for maximum success. These tools allow the CJM to stay updated and fresh so businesses have a consistent source to base their informed decisions about various product launches and marketing campaigns.

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Creating an effective customer journey map requires considering many factors and a careful plan. Certain best practices are recommended to achieve one.

Comprehensive Data Collection

Gathering as much information as possible about a customer's experience is vital before developing a user journey map. Tracking website analytics, gauging social media engagement metrics, compiling consumer survey replies, and going over call center recordings are just some techniques used to understand the user's experience more fully and to help pinpoint possible areas of concern or places for expansion.

Source: Scott Graham on Unsplash

Staying Up-To-Date

Customer journey maps must be modified frequently to account for shifts in buyer behavior. This includes ensuring the map covers all pertinent interactions, including marketing campaigns or product launches. Additionally, it is advantageous for organizations to use methods that enable them to monitor user journeys over time to assess the efficacy of various marketing initiatives and make necessary adjustments depending on client feedback.

Seeking Clarity

A consumer journey map strives to provide organizations with an accurate understanding of consumers' needs from beginning to end so they can develop focused techniques and plot business strategies that improve overall customer satisfaction. To do this, every process stage must be correctly portrayed on the map so businesses can immediately recognize any problems or areas for improvement.

Source: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Testing Before Implementing

Companies should continually assess new strategies and tactics before adopting any changes based on lessons gained via the customer journey map to see how they will affect all customer experiences before launch. This enables them to pivot strategies to achieve the best results while mitigating risk.

Examples of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey modeling is an effective tool for businesses of every size. Using a variety of examples and templates, one can generate an effective map. One such is the Customer Journey chart Canva , which uses four sectors to help businesses chart the customer's journey. With the help of this template, organizations can quickly pinpoint where clients begin their experience and which behaviors are observed through its various stages.

The Customer Journey Audit Template is another example that delves more thoroughly into the customer's journey. By examining consumer feedback, website analytics, and social media interaction indicators, this template aids companies in identifying any shortcomings of current tactics or potential areas for change. Businesses could then use this information to make adjustments to improve customer satisfaction.

Source: Figma

The User Journey Map Template from UXPressia is another template option that gives companies a thorough understanding of user behavior while continually monitoring their sentiment. It draws attention to matters including the nature of customers' engagement with products and services and what factors influence the degree of their satisfaction. Utilizing this knowledge, businesses can implement strategic changes that optimize user experience while minimizing potential issues.

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Final Thoughts

Companies must develop an effective user journey map to provide consumers with the most satisfying experience feasible. This valuable resource enables them to make well-informed choices about marketing campaigns and product launches by utilizing real-time data that focuses on their target audience. They gather thorough data, keep it updated with relevant touchpoints, strive for understanding in each process step, and evaluate strategic approaches before implementation.

Having a carefully thought-out user journey map will help companies better understand their consumers' demands, resulting in an overall boost in client satisfaction and revenues.

Clay is a UI/UX design & branding agency in San Francisco. We team up with startups and leading brands to create transformative digital experience. Clients: Facebook, Slack, Google, Amazon, Credit Karma, Zenefits, etc.

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Guide: How to effectively incorporate customer journey mapping into your marketing strategy

A comprehensive customer journey mapping guide that helps you understand the role of digital transformation and customer experience in your company’s success.

30-second summary:

• A customer journey map is a visual representation of every interaction between you and your customers. Proper customer journey mapping can make a huge difference in conversions and help you create a more customer-centric marketing strategy.
• Customer journey mapping starts with identifying your user personas. This way, you’ll know exactly which customer segment to market.
• Next, you identify and map out every touchpoint or experience along the customer journey. This will help you learn and later predict customer behavior and buying decisions.
• Chief content writer, Connie Benton guides you through the customer journey mapping process outline with some great examples and tools to help you.

When it comes to building a robust marketing strategy, most beginner entrepreneurs have nothing to start off with except expert advice they find on digital marketing blogs, let alone the idea of customer journey mapping. While this alone will last you a long way, ultimately, you’re borrowing experiences from somebody else’s business, not building on your own. This is why large corporations spend so much on big data and analytics. 

But it’s not just the corporations that do that. According to OnePath, 67% of SMEs spend over $10,000 a year on analytics . Why do they pay this huge price?

The answer is simple. You can only go this far using somebody else’s analytics. At some point, you should start gathering and interpreting data yourself. Without this, you can’t possibly expect to understand your thousands of clients.

If you’re looking for a point where you can start, you can postpone getting into behavioral segmentation and other advanced analytics, and follow a strategy that can yield great results on a shoestring budget . Create a customer journey map. Here’s all the information and tools you’ll need to create one.

How to create a customer journey map

A customer journey map (CJM) is exactly what it sounds to be. A map of the path that a customer makes from their decision to make a purchase or any other action, to successfully making it. Here’s an example of what it looks like from the NNGroup.

Source: NNGroup

You can create a customer journey map for most processes that involve customer decisions and use this map for different purposes. A detailed map of going from the latest stage of the sales funnel to making a purchase can be used to improve conversions. A map of making purchases after the initial conversion will help you increase customers’ lifetime value.

For now, we’ll concentrate on the basics and look at how to create a general customer journey map that covers a customer’s path from being interested in your product to making a purchase. It will help you improve your overall marketing strategy.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to set the frame of the customer map, where it should start and where it should end. Since we’re making a general map that covers the whole funnel, let’s set the start at being interested in the market, and the end at making the first purchase.

The most important thing, though, is to find the right path to trace. Most businesses have different types of clients that have different journeys. Let’s start by defining your user personas.

Analytics The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

Analytics data analytics in marketing, digital marketing the third-party data deprecation playbook, digital marketing utilizing email to stop fraud-ecommerce client fraud case study, 1. define user personas.

Needless to say that a user looking for online shopping websites will differ from someone in search of the best online business ideas . That’s why defining user personas is so important for successful customer journey mapping. 

Before you trace the customer’s journey, you need to have an idea of who’s making that journey. To do this, you need to know at least these four core data sets about your customer:

• Demographic information (for example, age, gender, country)
• What problems do they solve with your product
• What do they value from the product
• Where do they get information

With these points, you’ll be able to learn more about the customers themselves and their journey. Here’s how you can gather this information.

Tools to use

• Sign-up forms
• Google Analytics
• Facebook Analytics
• Pop-up surveys (Hotjar or similar)
• Email surveys (MailChimp or similar)

You can easily gather the most basic demographic information on your leads with the sign-up form. When they’re registering on the website or grabbing a freebie, ask them to fill a bit more than their email address, and you already have a decent database. While you’re at it, you can also gather employment information, which is extremely helpful if you run a B2B company.

If that’s not an option, gather that data with Google or Facebook analytical tools. You can also get an insight into what your users are interested in by looking up Affinity Categories in Google Analytics.

Most likely, you have not one but several main demographics. Look for the largest age and sex groups and run Affinity Category reports on them. You may find that say, men and women in their 30s that buy from you have different interests on average.

The answers to why people buy from you and what do they value the most can only be inferred from user surveys. Do it via pop-ups or send surveys to your newsletter subscribers.

That said, these are just the basic tools that will cover most needs. Feel free to use any advanced analytics tools at your disposal.

2. Identify touchpoints

Once you know who your customer is, it’s time to begin tracing their path towards the purchase. You’ll need to track the touchpoints they have with your brand as they go through every step of the sales funnel.

Asking them how they ended up on your website may not be the perfect idea as a lot of touchpoints will be forgotten before the purchase. Here’s how you can do it more efficiently.

• Lead scoring software (HubSpot or similar)

Let’s start by looking at the off-website touchpoints. These are the touchpoints that lead a customer to your website: social media, ads, blog articles in Google search, and other similar online portals. You can gauge these easily by looking at where the traffic comes from in the Google Analytics panel.

Don’t forget to add UTM markers to different links you leave around the web to make sure you’re getting the full picture.

You can also get an approximate picture by including a question like “How did you find us” in your sign-up forms. However, this only shows the bottom of the funnel, and won’t provide the full picture.

The idea behind it is to award more points to actions that lead to conversion. You can use this system to first track what actions do lead to a conversion.

This way, you’ll know what set of actions a potential buyer performs on the website. The other method to learn is to use the ‘Reverse Goal Path’ in Google Analytics.

This tab lets you take a goal from your campaign and see what actions did a person who ended up converting did on the website. This shows you the majority of the on-site customer journey.

3. Draw the map

Now you know who your customers are and what set of actions do they perform before making a purchase. All you have left to do is to actually draw the customer journey map.

You can do it whatever way you want, just make sure it will always be handy for future use.

• Drawing tool of choice: A piece of paper, an online mindmap, Photoshop, or any such platform that you’re comfortable using

Start with defining the user persona for the map you’re drawing. Since different user personas may have different journeys, you may need to draw several maps.

For now, let’s assume your customer is a 25 to 35-year-old male or female who owns an online store and is looking for SaaS software to help run it. Let’s call them Jessie since it’s a good gender-neutral name.

Start with what drives Jessie to make the purchase. Point out their motivation in this search. Then, track their behavior off-site. Maybe they search for the product reviews online or see several ads before they finally click on one of them.

Follow their path on your website based on the data you received from website analytics, and end the journey on their first purchase. Make sure to state how many users leave at a certain touchpoint and do not covert further.

In the end, you’ll have something like this.

Source: Digital.gov

How to improve marketing strategy with CJM

There you have it,  you’ve successfully created your first customer journey map. Now, let’s dig into how you can use it to improve your marketing efforts.

1. Search for insights

No customer journey map is complete without the insights, or potential opportunities for improvement, as noted in the map above. Gather your team if you haven’t already, and brainstorm the opportunities for improvement that you can infer from the map.

There’s no single way to go about it and it all depends on the situation you have on the map. For instance, if you see that a particular touchpoint has a conversion rate far below the rest, it’s probably something you should address.

Do more research on it, come up with a hypothesis as to why it underperforms, and try to improve it.

2. Improve messaging

Your customer’s motivation to make a purchase is a huge factor in how they decide what company to stick with. If you find that what your customers are looking for is not what you advertise, it’s a clear sign you should improve it.

3. Focus tangential interests

If you’re doing content marketing, your findings from the ‘Affinity Categories’ could be of good use. Some users can discover your product while reading articles on topics connected to it. For instance, Jessie’s journey to discovering a SaaS tool they need may have begun from reading an article on SMM.

Look up the data on affinity categories, and you can add a few more topics to your content marketing arsenal.

4. Focus on high-converting channels

While we’re on the topic of content marketing, customer journey mapping also allows for figuring out what marketing channels work best. Look at what channels are the most prevalent in the first half of the customer journey and figure out why they work best.

From then on, you have two options. You can either try to fix the channels that do not bring you enough customers or double down on the ones that already bring you the best ROI.

5. Improve on-site conversion

CJM provides some of the best analytics on the on-site actions of your customers. This gives you an opportunity to see what exactly are your customers doing on the website before they convert and improve the whole process.

This goes far beyond just improving the touchpoints you have. You can also change your on-site conversion strategy and add new touchpoints.

For instance, you may notice that people who grab freebies or attend webinars convert much more than regular visitors. You may start including these converting assets in pop-ups, or on the bottom of your blog posts.

If the issue is that your sales reps can’t keep up with the number of customers, you may need a sales funnel software to automate some of the tasks and work with bigger loads.

Improve every business aspect with customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a tool that helps you visualize so much data about your customers and their path to conversion. Create a map that reflects how customers really do, not what you think they’re doing, and you can see all the mistakes your business does in attracting them further to conversion. Gather the data continuously and update the map to see how customer behavior changes, especially during unusual situations like a pandemic .

But it doesn’t stop there. You can improve most business processes that involve customers taking a set of actions towards a goal with a customer journey map. All you have to do is to set another frame and go through every process in this guide again.

This way, you can improve anything from increasing viewership on your blog to reducing customer churn.

Connie Benton is a chief content writer, guest contributor, and enthusiastic blogger who helps B2B companies reach their audiences more effectively. You can find her on Twitter at @ConnieB34412379 .

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How To Create A Customer Journey Map? (With Examples)

In this article.

Be it paying for a coffee through a contactless payment app, or purchasing an item online, providing a seamless user experience goes a long way in leaving a positive impression and improving metrics such as conversion and engagement rates.

Besides having a good product or strong branding, having a clear user experience strategy has become a necessity for companies looking to stay competitive in the industry and relevant to their customers. A key approach to developing a strong end-to-end user experience is to understand the needs, thoughts, and emotions of the user throughout their interactions with the company, which can be done through detailed journey mapping. So, before we jump into how to create a customer journey map, let us first discuss what is a customer journey map all about.

What is journey mapping?

A journey map is a visual representation of the user or customer’s entire UX user journey with the product or brand. It serves to help a company get a better sense of how users interact with their products throughout the different touchpoints, in order to better understand their user’s actions and feelings at each stage.

Source: innovationtraining

For example, a journey map is useful in answering deeper questions such as:

• Are users having trouble using the app? Is it due to unfamiliarity with the interface and a lack of onboarding processes?
• Are the users able to access help in a timely manner? Is our customer service team able to address their issues properly?
• Why are more users leaving the site on a certain page? Is there something on it that affects their browsing experience?

Why is journey mapping important?

Understanding a user’s journey goes beyond increasing metrics like revenue or retention rate, it also allows a company to develop a consistent and positive customer experience which in turn leads to brand loyalty and advocacy.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs

Another key aspect of using journey mapping is the ability to create personalised experiences across different touchpoints and channels. By delving deeper into the user’s perspective at every stage of the journey minimises any potential issues they might face. 80% of consumers also say that they are more likely to purchase from a company that provides a personalised experience.

Other key uses of journey mapping:

• Target specific user personas
• Identify and remove ineffective touchpoints
• Discover potential roadblocks early on
• Align the organisation to user-centricity
• Better communication between teams regarding the product
• Pinpointing areas to engage users in

How to create a customer journey map?

1. conduct persona research.

A user persona is a fictional representation of your customer/user. The journey map will be focused on their experience as they are the target audience. Thus, conducting user research is necessary to properly elaborate on the details of the persona, such as their age, personal motivations, habits, and personality.

Source: UserInterviews

2. Define the Scenario

The scenario serves to describe the situation portrayed by the journey map and what the customer is experiencing. It touches on the when, why, and how the customer interacts with the brand or product.

Journey maps are perfectly suited for such scenarios as it is able to detail the different processes along the timeline. Scenarios can be based on a real situation or an anticipated one depending on the product. For example, a scenario can be a user trying to purchase a smartphone from an online e-commerce retailer.

3. Identify Customer Journey Stages

Next is to identify and list out all key touchpoints between the user and product. This would form the main journey stages that serve as a structure for the rest of the journey map.

Following our previous scenario, the journey stages can be:

• Discovering the product on the website
• Browsing through alternative product models
• Purchasing the product
• Using the product
• Seeking customer support for the product

4. Look into Customer’s Actions, Thoughts & Emotions

From here on, we can start structuring the narrative based on information defined in the earlier stages, such as the target persona, scenario, and customer journey stages. Visualising the user’s journey is important to better empathise and understand what they are going through and how they feel through the process.

The journey is then complete by placing all this information together on a stage-by-stage timeline. Each stage pinpoints the user’s experience with your company or product and delves into their actions, thoughts, and emotions behind it.

Actions are what the users do at each stage. It looks into the interaction between the user and the product.

While it is important to know what actions users take at every step, looking into their emotions and how they feel is also key in connecting with them on a closer level. This allows us to design experiences and products that are more user-focused and suit their needs.

Lastly, the user’s thoughts at each stage are also considered. This helps to provide better insight into their feelings and actions. It delves into aspects such as the types of questions that they face, their motivations behind certain actions, or their reasons for feeling a certain way.

Take a look at this example for an idea of how a journey map is structured, with each category placed into different rows and columns.

Source: searchcustomerexperience

5. Refine Journey Map

Once the initial mapping is completed, a good practice would be to further refine it using information obtained from usability tests or user interviews. With the ever-changing nature of product design and customer behaviour, it is important to constantly re-evaluate and update the journey map. These practices ensure that it remains representative of the target audiences and continues to generate relevant insights.

6. Identify Key Opportunities

To make the most out of journey mapping, it should be used to derive unique insights about users and identify any opportunities that can be capitalised on or on areas that can be further improved. These insights are crucial in helping the team refine the overall experience or even come up with new and useful ideas.

Customer User Journey Examples

The following journey map portrays a scenario about a customer’s experience in trying to switch mobile plans. The journey map further talks about aspects of internal ownership pinpointing teams that should take actions according to the insights obtained.

Source: nngroup

The next example focuses more on a user’s interactions with the product itself, in this case, when trying to place a food order on a food delivery app. The map includes the category of potential touchpoints such as the app, social media, or customer service platform, as they are all relevant to the user. It also talks about the customer goal, to look into the reasons behind certain actions.

As you can see, journey mapping can be done in many different ways and for all types of situations. There is no fixed rule as to how a journey map should look as long as one takes note of the fundamental steps mentioned in the article.

Journey mapping is a useful tool used across different organisations to obtain a clear overview of their user’s perspectives and the challenges they face. It aligns the team towards a common understanding of how to better improve the user experience while zooming in on useful findings and implementing better ideas.

If you want to know more about user experience and its industry, do check out our other resources available on our website, such as our articles, weekly webinars, and podcasts. CuriousCore offers both a 2-day UX Design Course and a 4-month UX Career Accelerator for those keen on transitioning into the industry. Click the buttons below to find out more.

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How to Create Four Different Customer Journey Maps

The most successful marketers understand how their customers arrive at a decision to buy—as well as how and where to meet a customer and become a trusted guide for the rest of their customer journey. Getting to know your customer is just the first step. Understanding the journeys customers take to find, engage, and eventually advocate for your product is how you create a lasting relationships with them.  Customer journey mapping helps you move beyond surface-level assumptions about your customers and toward the heart of what drives their purchase behaviors. 

Mapping the Customer Journey

Mapping your customers’ journeys gives you an opportunity to connect with stakeholders, refine your marketing strategy, and even work with the design team to create a memorable, visually appealing journey map to inform future initiatives. Here are four unique ways to create a customer journey map, and how each one can help you achieve your marketing objectives.

1. Current-State Customer Journey Map

Eighty-four percent of organizations are embracing a customer-centric model, and that means to land their business, you need an acute understanding of your customers’ current states. Current-state journey maps can help you accomplish this. This type of journey map outlines everything your customer currently does, thinks, and feels when interacting with your company.

Current-state journey maps can help you spot new opportunities to update your marketing strategy and improve customer interactions with your brand. The map below was designed for a utility company’s customer journey. Note how it identifies risks and opportunities in the current customer state.

2. Day-in-the-Life Customer Journey Maps

Day-in-the-life customer journey maps are similar to current-state journey maps, but help paint a more detailed image of your customer or prospect by including customer activities unrelated to your company. 

This approach to customer journey mapping examines everything customers do, think, and feel within a specific area of focus—whether it involves your company or not. For example, a day-in-the-life journey map will tell you if your customer checks Instagram right away in the morning, or first dives into the news. It outlines the estimated time your customer spends at work, at home, watching TV, reading customer reviews – the list goes on.

These maps highlight existing pain points in your customers’ and prospective customers’ lives, helping you uncover new possibilities to drive innovation and meet customers’ changing needs. 

When you know what a day in the life of your current customer looks like, you can more strategically update your communications approach to meet them where they are, and present them with an offer at the exact moment they’re ready to buy.

Here’s an example of a map that an airline or travel business might use. It includes both interactions with the business and relevant interactions with colleagues, friends and family.

Source: tandemseven

3. Future-State Customer Journey Maps

As its name might suggest, a future-state journey map is a goal-setting map. It seeks to improve customer interactions by imagining what the most ideal interaction might look like, and identifying steps your company can take to reach that ideal. 

Instead of detailing what your customers and prospects are currently up to, future-state journey maps illustrate what your customers will do, think, and feel as they interact with your business in an idealized future.

This type of journey map is most useful for communicating your vision for new products and services with internal and external stakeholders. For example, this map comes from a student project to demonstrate the effectiveness of a proposed solution:

4. Service Blueprint Customer Journey Maps

Think of the service blueprint as “bonus content” that ties together your customer journey and your business’ journey to meet that customer. This type of customer journey map starts with any of the other three maps, then layers on the systems required to be in place to deliver exceptional customer experiences . 

These “systems” include employees, company best practices, technology, and process. Service blueprint customer journey maps help you move past understanding where your customers are now, to predicting where they will be in the future, anticipating their needs and how your product or service helps meet those needs.

Here’s an example from NNgroup that includes customer journey, customer-facing employees, and what happens behind the scenes:

Understand Your Customers

There’s no one right way to create a customer journey map. Depending on your industry and audience, one or all of the approaches above might be the right format for you and your internal teams, who are the end-users of the maps, after all. 

And as more companies take a data-driven approach, they’re learning that often, customers can take many different, often surprising customer journeys. Sometimes, the emergence of trends in the paths your customers take will result in new customer experiences, packaging, or even new product offerings inspired by common customer journeys.

Once you’re ready to begin mapping the customer journey, a reliable customer data platform (CDP) can help you get started. Successful customer mapping requires a unified, single customer view (SCV) view of your customers—and the right CDP will help you get there.

Learn how to create a custom customer journey map for your business.

Tom Treanor

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Ux deliverables: glossary.

August 9, 2024 2024-08-09

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In UX, a deliverable is a document that serves as a record of work that has occurred .

UX practitioners produce a wide range of deliverables to communicate design ideas, research findings, and the context of projects to various audiences. Juggling all these different deliverables requires knowledge and understanding of many jargon terms. Use this glossary as a reference as you navigate various UX deliverables throughout a project’s lifecycle.

Jump to a definition in the table or review the complete glossary.

Affinity Diagram (Affinity Map)

The clustering of information, often using sticky notes, into relational groups based on similarities or themes.

• Related article: Affinity Diagramming for Collaboratively Sorting UX Findings and Design Ideas
• Related video: Affinity Diagramming: Collaborate, Sort and Prioritize UX Ideas
• See also: landscape map

Analytics Report

A data report that describes what users do with a live product, such as their navigation paths, feature engagement, traffic sources, and exit points. This information can help monitor the performance of various content, UIs, or features in a product and identify what doesn’t work.

• Related article: Translating UX Goals into Analytics Measurement Plans
• Related video: Analytics vs. Quantitative Usability Testing
• See also: dashboard , usability report

Antipersona

A representation of a user group that could misuse a product in ways that negatively impact target users and the business.

• Related article: Antipersonas: What, How, Who, and Why?
• Related video: Antipersonas in UX
• See also: persona

An abstract representation of a user type, summarizing behaviors, attitudes, motivations, pain points, and goals without specific personal details like names or photos.

• Related article: Personas vs. Archetypes

A high-level, chronological method of displaying and organizing all the screens and elements users encounter across channels when completing a workflow or journey, to assess its consistency.

• Related article: Asset Mapping for Experience Consistency
• See also: journey map , wireflow

Chronological Map

Visualization of the users’ experience over time. There are 3 types of chronological maps: experience map, service blueprint, and user-journey map.

• Related article: Why Map in Discovery: 3 Mapping Methods
• Related video: Discovery Mapping Methods
• See also: experience map , service blueprint , user-journey map

Cognitive Map

A visual representation of a person’s (or a group’s) mental model for a process or concept. Cognitive mapping is free-form and can include numerous visualization methods, including bulleted lists, flowcharts, concept maps, mind maps, or affinity diagrams.

• Related article: Cognitive Mapping in User Research
• Related video: 3 Powerful Visual Mapping Strategies in UX Design
• See also: concept map , mind map , affinity diagram

Concept Map

A graph in which nodes represent concepts and labeled, directed edges illustrate relationships between them.

• Related article: Cognitive Maps, Mind Maps, and Concept Maps: Definitions
• See also: cognitive map , mind map

Content Audit

An evaluation of the quality of the content listed in a content inventory. Content audits uncover content that needs updating, gaps for new content, and whether certain pieces of content are ready for removal.

• Related article: Content Inventory and Auditing 101
• Related video: How To: Content Inventory and Audit
• Template: NN/g_Content Inventory and Auditing_Excel Template(XLSX)
• See also: content inventory

Content Inventory

A list of every piece of digital content you currently have, captured at either the page or asset level. It includes specific characteristics about each piece.

• See also: content audit

A framework created by Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt, and the team at Livework São Paulo for outlining and visualizing what everyone involved in a project knows ( Certainties ), hypothesizes ( Suppositions ), and doesn't know yet ( Doubts ).

• Related article: CSD Matrix: Framework and Template for Shared Understanding
• Related video: Using a CSD Matrix in Discovery
• Template: NN/g_CSD Matrix_Excel Template(XLSX) , NN/g_CSD Matrix_Miro Template(RTB)

A collection of data visualizations, presented in a single-page view that imparts at-a-glance information on which users can act quickly.

• Related article: Dashboards: Making Charts and Graphs Easier to Understand
• See also: analytics report

Design System

A complete set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns.

• Related article: Design Systems 101
• Related video: Design Systems and Their Benefits
• See also: style guide , content inventory

Ecosystem Map

A visual representation of the people, organizations, products, and services that a user may interact with during a particular experience.

• See also: chronological map , process map

Empathy Map

A collaborative visualization used to articulate what is known about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to create a shared understanding of user needs and aid in decision making.

• Related article: Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
• Related video: How to Empathy Map
• See also: persona , affinity diagram

Experience Map

A visualization of an entire end-to-end experience that a “generic” person goes through to accomplish a goal. This experience does not involve a specific business or product. An experience map is used for understanding a general human behavior (as opposed to a customer-journey map, which is more specific and focused on a specific business).

• Related article: UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
• See also: journey map , service blueprint , chronological map

Feasibility, Desirability, and Viability Scorecard

A prioritization method developed by IDEO that ranks items based on a sum of individual scores across feasibility, desirability, and viability. 

• Related article: 5 Prioritization Methods in UX Roadmapping
• Related video: UX Design Prioritization Methods
• See also: impact–effort matrix , MoSCoW analysis , RICE method , Kano model

Field Roadmap

An expansion of the themes that a UX team owns on the product roadmap. It represents all future problems to be solved by UX (for example, related to design, research, or content) but does not include problems outside of UX (for example, in marketing, development, and support).

• Related article: 3 Types of Roadmaps in UX and Product Design
• Related video: 3 Types of Roadmaps
• See also: roadmap , product roadmap , specialty roadmap

Hierarchical Task-Analysis (HTA) Diagram

A graphical representation of task analysis that breaks down a user’s process of achieving a goal into tasks and subtasks, illustrating the sequence and structure of actions needed to achieve that goal.

• Related article: Task Analysis: Support Users in Achieving Their Goals
• See also: user flow , process map

Impact–Effort Matrix (Prioritization Matrix)

A 2D-visual that plots relative user value against implementation complexity.

• Related article: Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions
• Related video: Prioritization Matrices in UX Decision Making
• See also: MoSCoW analysis , RICE method , Kano model , feasibility, desirability, and viability scorecard

Interactive UX Map

A high-fidelity map that utilizes UI-design software to add interactive elements like revealing user-research data alongside specific findings or showing specific elements.

• Related article: Building Interactive UX Maps
• Related video: Interactive UX Maps 101
• Template: NN/g_Interactive Journey Map_Figma Template
• See also: journey map , experience map , service blueprint

Interview Guide (Discussion Guide)

A guiding document used in structured interviews that lists interview questions and helps provide focus to the interview.

• Related article: Writing an Effective Guide for a UX Interview
• See also: screener , research plan

Jobs-to-Be-Done

A framework based on the idea that whenever users “hire” (i.e., use) a product, they do it for a specific “job” (i.e., to achieve a particular outcome). The set of “jobs” for the product amounts to a comprehensive list of user needs.

• Related article: Personas vs. Jobs-to-Be-Done
• Related video: Jobs-to-Be-Done vs. Personas
• See also: persona , UX story

Journey Map (User-Journey Map or Customer-Journey Map)

A visualization of the process that a person goes through to accomplish a goal.

• Related article: Journey Mapping 101
• Related video: Customer Journey Mapping 101
• Template: NN/g_Customer Journey Map_Excel Template(XLSX) , NN/g_Customer Journey Map_Apple Numbers Template(NUMBERS)
• See also: service blueprint , experience map , chronological map , scenario map

A prioritization framework published by Dr. Noriaki Kano where items are grouped into four categories according to user satisfaction and functionality and then plotted on a 2D graph.

• See also: impact–effort matrix , MoSCoW analysis , RICE method ,  feasibility, desirability, and viability scorecard

Landscape Map

Arranging groups of similar content (usually written on sticky notes) into a preassigned structure (such as a customer-journey map) to understand relationships and patterns across items, groups, and time.

• Related article: Foundational UX Workshop Activities
• Related video: 7 Fundamental Activities for UX Workshops
• See also: affinity diagram , scenario map

A tree that represents a central topic and its subtopics.

• See also: cognitive map , concept map

Mockup (UI Mockup or Design Comp)

A static, high-fidelity simulation of a proposed UI design that includes visual-design details such as colors and imagery.

• Related article: UX Prototypes: Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity
• See also: wireframe , prototype

A collage of images, video frames, patterns, or text that convey a certain feeling at a glance. 

• Related article: Mood Boards in UX: How and Why to Use Them
• See also: style guide , design system

MoSCoW Analysis

A prioritization framework created by Dai Clegg for clustering items into four primary groups: Must Have , Should Have , Could Have , and Will Not Have .

• See also: impact–effort matrix , RICE method ,  Kano model ,  feasibility, desirability, and viability scorecard

Paper Prototype

A low-cost, quick-to-create research tool that involves sketching out potential concepts, flows, or ideas on paper and testing those sketches with users.

• Related article: Paper Prototyping: A Cutout Kit
• Related video: Paper Prototyping 101
• Template: NN/g_Paper Prototyping Cutout Kit_A4(PDF) , NN/g_Paper Prototyping Cutout Kit_Letter(PDF)
• See also: prototype , wireframe

A fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target product user.

• Related article: Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members
• Related video: Personas 101
• See also: jobs-to-be-done , antipersona , proto persona , statistical persona , qualitative persona

Process Map

A visual representation of a zoomed-in view on a specific user or business process, used to understand how a given process works. Possible formats of process map include flowcharts, operational-sequence diagrams, or HTA diagrams.

• See also: HTA diagram ,  user flow

Product Roadmap

A strategic document that represents all future problems that need to be solved, whether related to UX, marketing, content, design, research, development, support, or operations.

• See also: roadmap , field roadmap , specialty roadmap

Promptframe

A design deliverable that documents content goals and requirements for generative-AI prompts based on a wireframe’s layout and functionality.

• Related article: Promptframes: Evolving the Wireframe for the Age of AI
• See also: wireframe

Proto Persona

A persona type meant to quickly align the team’s existing assumptions about who users are, but not based on (new) research.

• Related article: 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical
• Related video: Proto Personas
• See also: persona , qualitative persona ,  statistical persona

An early version of a design used to test and validate ideas, interactions, and functionality.

• Related video: Prototypes vs. Wireframes in UX Projects
• See also: wireframe , mockup , wireflow , site map

Prototype Specification (Prototype Annotation or Prototype Redline)

Text written next to a prototype and describing details, such as font size, line spacing, click effects, and active or inactive conditions of UI elements.

• Related article: Use Good Prototype Specifications to Empower Team Collaboration
• Related video: Prototype Specifications: 3 Types
• See also: prototype , design system , style guide

Qualitative Persona

A persona type based on small-sample qualitative research, such as interviews, usability tests, or field studies.

• See also: persona , statistical persona , proto persona

RACI Matrix (Responsibility-Assignment Matrix)

A framework outlining how individuals with different specializations will participate in tasks such as work phases, activities, and the creation of deliverables.

• Related article: Setting UX Roles and Responsibilities in Product Development: The RACI Template
• Related video: RACI for UX Roles and Responsibilities
• Template: NN/g_RACI Matrix for Product Development_Excel Template(XLSX) , NN/g_RACI Matrix for Product Development_Apple Numbers Template(NUMBERS)
• See also: relationship map , skill map

Relationship Map

A diagram of an organization's essential teams, people, and resources. The diagram is used to describe relevant resources under the control of these individuals, how they might help each other, and the manager of that person or team.

• Related article: Relationship Mapping: Strategically Focus on Key People
• Template: NN/g_Relationship Map_Excel Template(XLSX) , NN/g_Relationship Map_Miro Template(RTB)
• See also: RACI matrix , skill map

Research Plan

A document that outlines the research objectives and how the research will be executed.

• Related article: Project Management for User Research: The Plan
• Related video: Creating a UX Research Plan
• See also: screener , interview guide , research repository , usability report

Research Repository

A shared collection of UX-research elements designed to enhance organizational UX awareness and participation, as well as to support and streamline UX professionals' research activities.

• Related article: Research Repositories for Tracking UX Research and Growing Your ResearchOps
• See also: screener , interview guide , research plan , usability report ,  analytics report

RICE Method

A prioritization framework developed by  Intercom that takes into account four factors: reach, impact, confidence, and effort to prioritize which features to implement.

• See also: impact–effort matrix , MoSCoW analysis , Kano model ,  feasibility, desirability, and viability scorecard

Scenario Map

An ideation tool used in brainstorming workshops that helps UX teams visualize how persona segments might approach an activity using a product or service. It is meant to facilitate ideation for design solutions.

• Related article: Scenario Mapping: Design Ideation Using Personas
• Related video: Scenario Mapping for Design Exploration
• See also: landscape map , affinity diagram , journey map

A questionnaire that gathers information about candidate participants’ experiences to quickly identify and prioritize optimal candidates that are representative of your target audience and exclude any candidates who may not be a “good fit” for your research study.

• Related article: Recruiting and Screening Candidates for User Research Projects
• Related video: Screen Your Research Participants to Avoid Bias in User Research
• See also: research plan , survey , interview guide , usability report

Service Blueprint

A diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

• Related article: Service Blueprints: Definition
• Related video: 4 Key Components of Service Blueprints
• Template: NN/g_Service Blueprint_Excel Template(XLSX) , NN/g_Service Blueprint_Apple Numbers Template(NUMBERS)
• See also: journey map , experience map

A visual representation of the organization of your site’s content.

• Related article: Information Architecture vs. Sitemaps: What’s the Difference?
• See also: wireflow , user flow , asset map

Sketch Test

A research method of providing a deliverable to a colleague, asking them to create a brief sketch or summary of it, and then observing their output to identify and refine any confusing or unclear elements in the original document.

• Related article: The Sketch Test: How to Test and Improve Your UX Deliverables and Other Documents

A collaborative activity used to visualize strengths and weaknesses of UX professionals and UX teams in order to take inventory of the existing team’s composition.

• Related article: Skill Mapping: A Digital Template for Remote Teams
• Related video: 3 Uses for Skill Mapping in UX Teams
• Template: NN/g_Skill Map_Excel Template(XLSX)
• See also: relationship map , RACI matrix

Specialty Roadmap

A subset of field roadmaps that focus only on problems within one UX area (for example, in user research).

• See also: roadmap , product roadmap , field roadmap

Stakeholder Persona

A fictional character that represents a typical character from your stakeholder group.

• Related article: UX Stakeholder Engagement 101
• Related video: UX Stakeholder Engagement 101
• See also: stakeholder profile , persona , relationship map

Stakeholder Profile

An artifact to organize and understand stakeholder insights so they can be used strategically for a project’s success.

• See also: stakeholder persona , persona , relationship map

Statistical Persona

A type of persona that emerges from the statistical analysis of a large-sample survey informed by initial qualitative research.

• Related video: Statistically-Generated Personas
• See also: persona , proto persona , qualitative persona

Story (UX Story)

An account of events from the user’s perspective; the events in the story show the evolution of an experience.

• Related article: UX Stories Communicate Designs
• Related video: Framing UX Data with Storytelling
• See also: storyboard , jobs-to-be-done

An artifact that communicates a story through images displayed in a sequence of panels that chronologically maps the story’s main events.

• Related article: Storyboards Help Visualize UX Ideas
• Related video: How to Create a UX Storyboard
• Template: NN/g_Storyboard Template(PDF)
• See also: story , user flow , journey map

Style Guide

A piece of documentation that contains specific guidelines, visual references, and design principles.

• Related article: Design Systems vs. Style Guides
• See also: design system , mood board

A questionnaire that collects participants’ self-reported perceptions and attitudes through a set of multiple-choice or open-ended questions.

• Related article: Should You Run a Survey?

Usability Report

A synthesis of findings, insights, and recommendations from a usability test.

• Related article: Making Usability Findings Actionable: 5 Tips for Writing Better Reports
• See also: screener , research plan , research repository

The typical or ideal set of steps needed to accomplish a common task performed with a product. User flows can be represented with artifacts such as wireflows, flow charts, or task diagrams. 

• Related article: User Journeys vs. User Flows
• See also: process map , HTA diagram , wireflow

User-Story Map (Story Map)

A lean-UX map method used by Agile teams to visualize the interactions that the team expects users to go through to complete their goals in a digital product.

• Related article: Mapping User Stories in Agile
• Related video: User Story Mapping 101
• See also: story , jobs-to-be-done , journey map

UX Roadmap (Roadmap)

A strategic, living artifact that aligns, prioritizes, and communicates a UX team’s future work and problems to solve.

• Related article: UX Roadmaps: Definition and Components
• Related video: UX Roadmaps 101
• See also: product roadmap , field roadmap , specialty roadmap

A design-specification format that combines wireframe-style page-layout designs with a simplified flowchart-like way of representing interactions.

• Related article: Wireflows: A UX Deliverable for Workflows and Apps
• See also: wireframe , user flow , site map

A skeletal outline of a design layout used to represent the structure and functionality of an interface before visual design is considered.

• Related article: How to Draw a Wireframe (Even if You Can’t Draw)
• See also: mockup , prototype , wireflow

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