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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

• What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
• Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
• How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

• Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
• Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
• Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
• Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
• Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience.  In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

User Journey

Relevant templates

A user journey is the path a person takes when interacting with a product or service, from initial engagement to the desired outcome. It's a critical aspect of user experience design and optimization.

Meaning of User Journey in Agile and Why It's Useful

In the realm of Agile development , the concept of a User Journey takes on a particular significance. A user journey in Agile refers to the path a user follows while interacting with a product or system, emphasizing their experiences, interactions, and emotions at each stage of the journey.

It serves as a valuable tool for Agile teams as they work to deliver customer-centric solutions efficiently. Let's delve into why user journeys are useful in Agile methodologies.

Understanding User Needs

One of the core principles of Agile development is prioritizing customer needs and delivering value to them. By mapping out user journeys, Agile teams gain deeper insights into how users engage with a product or system. 

This understanding helps identify pain points, user preferences, and opportunities for improvement.

Aligning Development with User-Centric Goals

User journeys provide a clear visual representation of the user's path, enabling Agile teams to align their development efforts with user-centric goals. When everyone on the team has a shared understanding of the user's perspective, it becomes easier to make decisions that prioritize features and improvements that matter most to users.

Enhancing User Stories and Features

In Agile, user stories and features are the building blocks of development. User journeys complement these by providing a broader context. They help in breaking down user stories into smaller, actionable tasks and ensure that the team remains focused on delivering features that contribute to a seamless user experience.

User Journey vs. User Flow

While user journeys and user flows are related concepts, they serve different purposes in Agile development.

A user journey is a high-level view of the user's interactions and experiences throughout their engagement with a product or system. It focuses on the user's emotions, goals, and key touchpoints.

User flows, on the other hand, are more detailed and specific. They outline the precise steps a user takes to complete a particular task or achieve a specific goal within the product or system. User flows are often used to design and optimize individual processes, such as a sign-up process or a purchase flow.

User Journey Examples

Let's explore a few examples of user journeys to illustrate their practical application:

E-commerce User Journey

Goal: Purchase a product online

• User lands on the e-commerce website.
• User searches for a product or browses categories.
• User selects a product and adds it to the cart.
• User proceeds to the checkout process.
• User provides shipping and payment information.
• User reviews the order and confirms the purchase.
• User receives an order confirmation.

Social Media User Journey

Goal: Share a post on a social media platform

• User logs into the social media platform.
• User navigates to the "Create Post" or "Share" option.
• User types or uploads content.
• User adds tags or mentions other users (if desired).
• User selects the audience (public, friends, etc.).
• User clicks "Post" to share the content.

How Usersnap Templates Can Help with User Journey Mapping

User journey mapping often involves visual representations and collaboration among team members. Usersnap offers templates and tools that streamline this process in Agile development.

Collaborative Features

Usersnap's collaboration features allow Agile teams to work together in real time on user journey maps. Team members can add comments, annotations, and feedback directly to the maps, facilitating communication and decision-making.

Feedback Collection

Usersnap's feedback widgets can be embedded in the product or system, enabling users to provide feedback at specific touchpoints in their journey. This feedback is invaluable for Agile teams looking to improve the user experience continuously.

In conclusion, user journeys are a fundamental concept in Agile development, enabling teams to gain insights into user experiences, align development efforts with user-centric goals, and enhance user stories and features. 

When used in conjunction with tools like Usersnap, the process becomes even more efficient, collaborative, and user-focused, ultimately leading to the creation of products and systems that delight users and drive success.

Relevant terms

A comprehensive guide to effective customer journey mapping

A brand's user experience shapes its target audience's entire perception of your organization. Maximize audience engagement with customer journey mapping.

Discover key challenges today's marketing teams are facing, as well as opportunities for businesses in 2024.

Incorporating customer journey mapping into your web design process helps elevate consumer engagement to drive loyalty and sales.

Many in-house teams and web designers strive to better serve users by optimizing their customer experience (CX). Considering how your customers use your platform or service helps you see your website from a user perspective, letting you shape your design to better meet their needs. To achieve this, web designers can look to customer journey mapping.

A particularly handy tool for user experience (UX) design , this process helps teams understand who their users are and how to fulfill their expectations, guiding development decisions for improved audience engagement. Learn more about customer journey mapping and how you can implement it to enhance your CX.

User journey mapping: an overview

User journey mapping, also known as customer journey mapping (CJM), maps a website visitor's experience from their perspective. Presented through a visual diagram, the customer journey map charts the user’s path as they seek information or solutions, starting at the homepage and tracking their routes across other menus and links.

To create a customer journey map, you begin by researching who users are, what they want from your site, and how positive or negative their experiences have been. 

There are two main purposes for mapping your customers’ journey.

1. Improve customer experience

This is the ultimate goal of CJM. Site navigation can be especially tricky to assess because you’re already familiar with the layout. A fresh perspective on your site often uncovers overlooked details such as navigation issues or broken links.

By conducting research on UX trends and visually mapping your results, you’ll identify any parts of your design that confuse or frustrate visitors. This process also reveals areas that work well, which you can repurpose elsewhere in the design.

2. Maintains ease-of-use as your site grows

A customer journey map can make even a simple site more straightforward to navigate. When your website or business grows, you may need to add content and features to accommodate the expansion. Implementing customer journey mapping ensures your website's fundamental flow remains intuitive and that new material and features are easily discoverable and usable.

Primary user journey map types

There are various ways to approach customer journey mapping based on the specific insights you’re seeking. The end result of each map will look similar, but the focus of each is different — which changes the information it offers. Here are three standard types of maps to get you started.

Current state

The current state map is the most common type. It evaluates your website’s present state to better understand visitors’ current experiences, helping identify improvement opportunities for its existing design.

Future state

A future state map explores a hypothetical "ideal" website, considering the visitor’s experience if every site component were optimized. This map is helpful when planning a total redesign or a specific change. When you collect user research and translate the results into your map, you can present a visual outline to your client or company for a straightforward explanation.

Persona-based

A persona-based map lays out the journey of a single designated type of user, or persona (which we will define below). This type of diagram is useful when optimizing your website for a specific sector of your audience with particular needs.

Learn best practices for integrating the workflows between design and development in this free webinar.

The 5-step customer journey mapping process

Once you’ve set clear goals for your map’s achievements, you can select the appropriate diagram type. To begin visualizing your user journey, follow this five-step process.

1. Define the map’s scope

Your map may focus on just one customer interaction or outcome, such as finding the newsletter sign-up sheet or making a payment, or it could cover the entire website’s navigation. A focused scope helps you troubleshoot a problem area or ensure an especially critical element functions properly. Alternatively, a larger-scope map provides a big-picture perspective of how the site works as a whole. Creating a comprehensive map is more complex, but high-level mapping helps comprehend the entire user experience from beginning to end.

2. Determine your user personas

A persona describes a particular type of visitor using your site. When imagining and defining these users, you can assign a name to each and include details about who they are, what they’re looking for, and why.

Focus on users who contribute most to your business goals, consulting your marketing or sales teams for insights. To define your customer personas, explore current user behavior through surveys, online reviews, and email list responsiveness.

For example, if you’re creating a website for a store that sells artisanal coffee-making tools, your personas could be:

• The gift giver. This user only knows a little about coffee but wants to select an impressive gift for someone else. They’ll need help with purchase decisions, so they might interact with an FAQ or chat feature before visiting the products page. They may also leave your site if overwhelmed by options, so it’s important to offer helpful information proactively. This will keep them engaged and more likely convert them to paying customers.
• The coffee nerd. This person is knowledgeable and always seeks the highest-quality tools, so easily accessible product details and customer reviews are important to them. To support their user experience and encourage them to purchase, ensure these elements are easily discoverable.
• The tourist. This user is on vacation and looking for a cute brick-and-mortar shop to visit. They aren't interested in your online store, but an appealing photo of your physical store with easily accessible hours and location information may convince them to come by in person.

These three types of users have very different needs and goals when visiting your website. To capture all of their business, create a map for each of them to ensure you accommodate their specific wants and circumstances.

3. Give the personas context

User context is the “when” and “how” of each persona visiting your site. A user will have a different experience loading your site on a mobile device than on a laptop. Additionally, someone in no rush may use your website differently than someone looking more urgently with a specific purpose.

Figure out when, how, and in what mindset your personas most commonly visit your site to map their experience accurately. This context has very concrete impacts on your finished design. If visitors tend to look for one specific page whenever in a hurry (like contact or location information), placing those details on the front page or prominently linking to it will smooth the user experience for those users.

Here’s an example of how to place a persona in context.

Persona: Jo is an apartment hunter in her early 20s and is still in college. She's looking for off-campus housing for herself and some roommates. The collective group values location and cost more than apartment features.

Context : Jo is in a hurry and trying to visit as many apartments as possible. She’s looking at property rental websites that clearly state apartment addresses in each listing.

Method : Jo is browsing the sites on her iPhone.

4. List persona touchpoints

Touchpoints mark when the user makes a purchase decision or interacts with your user interface (UI) . They include visitors' actions to move toward their goals and consider each associated emotion. The first touchpoint is how they reach your website — such as tapping a social media ad, clicking on a search result, or entering your URL directly.

First, list each action the visitor took and their corresponding emotional reactions. Subsequent touchpoints include instances when they navigate a menu, click a button, scroll through a gallery, or fill out a form. When you diagram the route through your site in an A-to-Z path, you can place yourself in the persona's mind to understand their reactions and choices.

A met expectation — for example, when clicking a "shop" button takes them to a product gallery — will result in a positive emotional reaction. An unmet expectation — when the “shop" link leads to an error page — will provoke an adverse reaction.

5. Map the customer journey

Illustrate the user journey by mapping these touchpoints on a visual timeline. This creates a narrative of users’ reactions across your entire service blueprint. To represent your users’ emotional states at each touchpoint, graph their correspondences like this:

The map helps you understand the customer experience as a whole. 

For example, based on the diagram above, touchpoint 3 is the largest navigation challenge on the website. The graph also shows that the user's mood eventually rebounds after the initial setback. Improving the problem element in touchpoint 3 will have the biggest impact on elevating the overall user experience.

Customer journey mapping best practices

Now that you understand the mapping process, here are some best practices to implement when charting your customer journey. 

• Set a clear objective for your map: Define your CX map’s primary goal, such as improving the purchase experience or increasing conversions for a specific product.
• Solicit customer feedback: Engage directly with customers through surveys or interviews so you can implement data-driven changes. Ask users about their journey pain points and invite both positive and negative feedback on the overall navigation.
• Specify customer journey maps for each persona: To specifically serve each customer persona, consider charting separate paths for each based on their behaviors and interests. This approach is more customer-centric, as not all user types interact with your website the same way.
• Reevaluate your map after company or website changes: As your business scales, your website must evolve — and so will your customer’s path. Review your map when making both large and small website adjustments to ensure you don’t introduce new user challenges. Navigational disruptions can frustrate visitors, causing would-be customers to leave your site and seek competitors .

Optimize your user journey map with Webflow

A user journey map is only as effective as the improvements it promotes. When redesigning your website based on insights your map provides, explore Webflow’s vast resource bank to streamline your design processes. 

Webflow offers web design support with diverse guides , tutorials , and tools for straightforward web design. Visit Webflow today to learn how its site hosting , e-commerce , and collaboration resources support enhanced user experience for better engagement.

Webflow Enterprise gives your teams the power to build, ship, and manage sites collaboratively at scale.

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What is a User Journey Map in UX?

Introduction to UX Journey Mapping

Definition and purpose.

UX journey mapping is a strategic exercise aimed at creating a holistic view of the customer experience by outlining every touchpoint and interaction a customer has with a brand. This visualization helps designers, stakeholders, and team members understand and address the needs, challenges, and opportunities within the customer experience. The purpose of UX journey mapping is not merely to document, but to foster a deep empathy towards the users, enabling teams to design more intuitive and user-centered products and services. Through this comprehensive overview, organizations gain invaluable insights into customer motivations, behaviors, and pain points, which can then be leveraged to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, business outcomes.

Journey mapping begins with the compilation of data from various sources including market research, user research, and analytics. This information forms the backbone of the journey map, detailing the user’s actions, emotions, and mindset throughout their interaction with the product or service. The exercise of mapping out these interactions encourages a shift from a business-centric to a customer-centric perspective, ensuring that user experience design decisions are grounded in real user needs and preferences rather than assumptions.

The Importance of Journey Maps in UX Design

Journey maps are vital in UX design as they provide a bird’s-eye view of the user experience, highlighting how customers interact with a product or service across multiple channels and touchpoints. This panoramic perspective is critical in identifying friction points that may hinder customer engagement and satisfaction. Moreover, journey maps serve as a shared language among cross-functional teams, facilitating better communication and alignment on the goals and vision of the user experience.

The significance of journey maps extends beyond problem identification; they are pivotal in uncovering hidden opportunities for innovation and improvement. By understanding the customer journey in its entirety, companies can anticipate user needs and craft experiences that exceed expectations, thereby fostering a strong emotional connection with the brand. This connection is the key to building a loyal customer base and achieving competitive advantage in the market.

Components of a Successful Journey Map

Identifying your user persona.

A user persona is a semi-fictional character that represents a segment of your target audience, crafted based on user research and data. Personas are crucial for journey mapping as they ensure the map reflects the experiences of real users rather than hypothetical ones. Each persona should include demographic information, goals, motivations, and pain points, providing a comprehensive profile that guides the mapping process.

Mapping Out User Scenarios and Expectations

User scenarios and expectations set the stage for the journey map, outlining the sequence of actions a user takes to achieve a goal. These scenarios are grounded in user research and feedback, ensuring they accurately represent the tasks and objectives users are trying to accomplish. By mapping these out, designers can visualize the path users take, from initial awareness to final action, and identify potential barriers to completion.

Key Elements of Journey Maps: Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions

The heart of a journey map lies in its ability to depict the user’s actions, mindsets, and emotions at each touchpoint. This triad offers a comprehensive view of the user experience, combining what users do, think, and feel. Actions refer to the steps users take, mindsets to their attitudes and expectations, and emotions to their responses to the interaction. Highlighting these elements in the journey map enables teams to empathize with users and tailor experiences to meet their needs.

Creating Your Journey Map

Steps to build an effective journey map.

The process of building a journey map starts with gathering comprehensive user data through methods like interviews, surveys, and usability testing. This data is then synthesized into a coherent narrative that represents the typical user journey. The mapping process involves several key steps:

• Define the scope and objectives of the journey map.
• Identify user personas to focus on.
• Outline key stages and touchpoints in the user journey.
• Detail actions, thoughts, and emotions for each stage.
• Visualize the journey through diagrams or software tools, making it accessible and understandable for all stakeholders.

Tools and Techniques for Journey Mapping

Several tools and techniques facilitate the journey mapping process, ranging from simple pen and paper to advanced software applications. Digital tools like UX mapping software enable dynamic visualization and easy updates, while traditional methods offer simplicity and tangibility. The choice of tool depends on the complexity of the journey and the preferences of the team. Regardless of the method, the aim is to create a clear, actionable map that guides the design and optimization of the user experience.

Analyzing and Utilizing Journey Maps

Identifying pain points and opportunities.

Analyzing a journey map involves looking for patterns and anomalies that indicate pain points or opportunities for enhancement. Pain points are moments of friction or dissatisfaction that detract from the customer experience, while opportunities are areas where improvements can significantly impact satisfaction and engagement. This analysis should be grounded in empathy, considering the emotional journey of the customer as well as the practical aspects of their experience.

Implementing Insights to Enhance User Experience

The ultimate goal of journey mapping is to apply the insights gained to improve the user experience. This may involve redesigning touchpoints, streamlining processes, or introducing new features that address users’ needs more effectively. Implementation should be strategic, prioritizing changes that will have the most significant impact on customer satisfaction and business objectives. Continuous testing and iteration are essential to ensure that modifications truly enhance the user experience.

Advanced Concepts in Journey Mapping

Journey map variations and their applications.

Journey maps can take various forms, each suited to different aspects of the user experience. For example, service blueprints provide a more detailed view of the service delivery process, including backend actions and interactions that support the customer journey. Other variations focus on specific aspects of the experience, such as emotional journey maps that highlight users’ feelings throughout their interaction with a product or service. Choosing the right type of journey map depends on the specific goals and needs of the project.

Integrating Journey Maps into Broader UX Strategy

Journey maps are most effective when integrated into a broader UX strategy. They should inform and be informed by other UX research and design activities, ensuring a cohesive understanding of the user experience. This integration enables a more strategic approach to design and development, where decisions are made with a comprehensive view of the user’s journey, rather than in isolation. The ultimate aim is to create a seamless, engaging user experience that meets users’ needs and exceeds their expectations at every touchpoint.

In conclusion, UX journey mapping is a powerful tool for understanding and improving the customer experience. By visualizing the journey from the customer’s perspective, organizations can identify pain points, uncover opportunities, and design experiences that truly resonate with their users. The journey map is not an end in itself but a means to a more empathetic, user-centered design approach that fosters loyalty, satisfaction, and business success.

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Frequently asked questions.

The stages of the UX user journey typically include Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy. These stages represent the user’s journey from becoming aware of a product or service to becoming a loyal customer and advocate for the brand.

A UX experience map is a visualization that represents the overall experience a user has with a product or service, encompassing all touchpoints and channels. Unlike journey maps, which focus on specific tasks or interactions, experience maps provide a broader view of the user’s relationship with the brand, capturing emotions, motivations, and barriers across different contexts.

To conduct user journey mapping, follow these steps:

• Define the goals of the mapping exercise and the target persona.
• Gather data through user research to understand the persona’s needs, goals, and behaviors.
• Map out the key touchpoints and stages in the user’s journey with the product or service.
• Identify the user’s actions, thoughts, and emotions at each touchpoint.
• Analyze the map to identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and moments of delight.
• Prioritize and implement changes based on insights gained from the journey map.

Creating a journey map in design thinking involves several steps:

• Empathize: Conduct research to understand the user’s needs, pain points, and the context of their interactions with the product or service.
• Define: Clearly articulate the user’s problem or need that the journey map will address.
• Ideate: Brainstorm the stages, touchpoints, and experiences that comprise the user’s journey.
• Prototype: Visualize the journey map, detailing the user’s actions, emotions, and challenges at each stage.
• Test: Share the journey map with stakeholders and users to gather feedback and refine your understanding. Design thinking emphasizes a user-centered approach, ensuring that the journey map reflects real user experiences and drives meaningful improvements.

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How the User Journey Impacts Your Success

User journeys play a large role in business success. Learn what a customer journey map should include, read examples, and discover how to improve your customers' experience.

A user or customer journey, sometimes visualized as a journey map, is the path a person follows as they discover a product, service, or brand, learn about it, consider spending money on it, and then make a decision to purchase—or not. Not every user journey ends in a conversion, but it is typically the goal.

Creating a customer journey map can help drive sales, because when you better understand your user's journey, you can provide the information or encouragement they need to commit and become a customer.

Let's look at a couple of examples of user journeys.

User Journey Example: Under-caffeinated Chuck

Chuck is downtown and he wants a cup of coffee. His journey might look something like this:

• Chuck feels drowsy on the way to work and realizes that he wants coffee. He is in a downtown area and has several choices.
• He looks around and sees a local cafe with organic fairtrade coffee, a cheap coffee chain that also offers donuts, and another internationally franchised cafe known for their sustainably grown coffee.
• He considers distance from his current location, expected prep time, his budget, and his values—he appreciates both sustainable agriculture and supporting local businesses.
• He knows that 2 or the 3 options offer coffee that match his ethics about food, and although the franchised cafe with sustainable coffee is slightly closer, he prefers going to the local cafe where he can also do more to boost his city’s economy. The local cafe is also typically faster because it’s less crowded.
• He chooses the local cafe with sustainably sourced coffee.

This is a straightforward example of a user journey. A more in-depth example might include asking an employee for information or, if the journey is entirely online, searching for information, looking up reviews, comparing the competition, and considering the cost.

How to create an accurate user journey

To map an accurate customer journey, you need to know your customers and how they discover your brand. To create customer profiles, begin by learning about the demographics of customers who already shop with your brand. This profile is an outline of your target customer’s interests, pain points, income level, age range, location, and more. The entry point is where they become aware of your brand. In the 2 examples above, both had street-level entry points, but other entry points include online searches, word-of-mouth recommendations, as well as social media, television, and print ads.

Consider all the entry points that might lead customers to your brand. Then generate user journeys from those points using your customer profiles to target similar audiences. After that, you'll need to refine your journey maps to turn shoppers into buyers.

Your goal is to guide your potential customers along their journey as much as possible. This will also help you reduce or eliminate barriers to conversion like by answering questions, making the right offers, and providing clarity when it’s needed.

The stages of the user journey

Each user journey is unique. But no matter what customer profile you're dealing with, or what their point of entry is, the structure of all customer journeys has stages in common:

Consideration

Your goal at each of the first 3 phases of the journey is to improve the chances of purchase and retention. Every point on the journey has a connection to every other point, especially when the goal is to motivate and maintain customer loyalty and drive customers through retention and back through the whole process again.

In the awareness phase, the user learns about or is reminded of your product or service, usually as a response to something they need or desire. The awareness phase can follow a previous purchase, which means that the retention phase was a success, leading them around to begin the cycle again.

Here, the user looks at the virtues and the flaws of your brand and any other brands also up for consideration. This is when pricing, value, customer service, branding, communication, and other factors come into play.

At this point, the user has looked at the relevant differences among the available options. If there's any information about your product or service that the customer hasn't been able to find at this point, it could mean losing the sale.

Here, the user either makes a purchase or doesn't. But this isn't the end of the journey—keep in mind that they may be buying from you because another brand is not available to serve their needs at the moment. This is your chance to curry favor with such customers: Your e-commerce platform should be easy to navigate, your customer service should be on point, and any discounts you may have on offer should be extended.

Now that a customer has purchased from you, you want to retain their loyalty. It's a good idea to check in with them after their purchase: Ask for feedback, tell them about complementary products or updates to your services, and try to discover ways to increase their satisfaction in the future. When they reenter the awareness phase, you want positive interactions and friendly and complete customer service to follow them into the next round of consideration.

How to improve a user’s journey

The key to getting the most out of the user's journey is to know your customer as well as possible. This is why a customer profile and all the possible entry points into the journey are important to understand as you define your customer journey . You want an extensive, complete, and accurate profile of the various kinds of people who shop for the products or services you offer.

You need to consider possible entry points into the user's journey. Here’s an example: A woman named Carla is in search of new headphones. She knows that she could travel to her local mall to search for just the right pair, and then she wouldn’t have to wait for them to be delivered. But she also knows that by shopping online, she can more easily compare more options. In this example, a business that sells headphones would need to consider all of the paths that Carla may take to find their products. She could visit a store where they are sold, she might search online, or she might find the right pair through an ad on social media or an email promotion.

The customer profile, the entry point into their journey, and what you have on your shelves (whether brick-and-mortar or online) should all flow together to make a coherent experience for each potential customer.

Build user journey maps

A user journey can be mapped with flow charts or diagrams that take the needs, wants, and habits from a given customer profile and trace a journey from entry point and awareness to retention and back through again. Ideally, you want a journey map for each user starting at each possible point of entry. You're going to need several versions of each user journey map, with different paths based on entry point, previous purchases, email engagement, and so on.

Your goal is to be able to anticipate and answer questions a customer might have before they move on to make a purchase. After they've made a purchase, you want to make sure that the retention phase directs them back to the beginning of the journey. It's all about communication—you need to keep in touch to let them know how you can meet their needs, promote new products or services you have on offer, and get them hooked via rewards and discounts.

That's where Mailchimp's Customer Journey Builder comes in. Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing and e-commerce platform, allowing you to send marketing emails, newsletters, product and service updates, and everything else you need to keep your customers engaged and satisfied. With Mailchimp, you can also create your business website, employing best practices that will help you turn potential customers into brand-loyal repeat customers. Remember, the customer journey doesn't have to end with the purchase, and Mailchimp is here to make sure it doesn't.

Keep customers coming back for more with Mailchimp’s free Customer Retention Kit

Whether you’re looking to improve existing strategies or seeking fresh insights into who your customers are, this kit is a comprehensive collection of resources designed to cultivate lasting relationships with valued customers.

Fill out the form below to receive your free Customer Retention Kit

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Related Topics

• Email Automations
• CRM Automations
• Transactional Email
• Map Customer Journeys

20+ User Journey Map Examples and Templates

12 min read

Looking at user journey map examples can help you come up with a visual representation of your customer’s journey.

Customer journey mapping research also allows you to identify areas of opportunity in your processes and plan to reduce those friction points. For instance, you might discover that you need user onboarding software to retain users after the first three months.

So, we’ve compiled 20+ examples and templates of customer journey maps to help you get inspired.

Let’s get started!

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a document that shows the steps a user follows to reach a goal with your product or service. It’s usually used for UX visualization as it tells the story of a person navigating your product and their interaction with different touchpoints.

This document also helps you gather information about the user and the functionality they find most relevant.

In your first version of a user journey map, you may only add the user’s actions. But as you expand it, you should also add their emotions and thoughts.

User journey maps vs customer journey maps

User journey maps and customer journey maps are almost interchangeable terms. They both show the road a person takes to achieve goals and help improve the user experience .

However, these vary in scope, definitions, and goals:

• Scope. User journey maps usually showcase the way a user experiences and interacts with a specific product or service. On the other hand, customer journey maps visualize the end-to-end experience of a customer across various brand touchpoints.
• Definitions. The word ‘touchpoints’ has different meanings in each case. A touchpoint in a user journey map refers to interface interactions and in-app experiences. However, a touchpoint in a customer journey map means every moment a customer interacts with or becomes aware of your brand — e.g., advertisements, customer support, or at checkout.
• Goals. User journey maps are useful to influence product design improvements. The insights of a customer journey map , usually inform broader business strategies and customer engagement efforts.

Types of user and customer journey maps

Using customer or user journey maps for different purposes allows you to influence different aspects of your business. For instance, a day-in-the-life journey map lets you spot areas of your customer’s routine where you can participate.

Here are different types of user and customer journey visualization to implement in your business:

• Current-state map. Illustrates the critical user journey as it is now. It helps you visualize the current state of the user experience based on facts. This type of journey map allows you to identify the strengths and opportunities of your current process.
• Future-state map. Design how you wish the customers’ journey could look in the future. This type is aspirational and it’s useful when speculating potential customer paths. It’s mostly based on data from the current state map and creativity.
• Day-in-the-life map. Lists everything a customer does throughout the day despite those actions being related to your brand. A day-in-the-life map gives you an overall understanding of who your customer is, how they spend their time, and where your company falls. This map is based on user research data.
• Service-blueprint map. This is an internal document that states all the actions, policies, and processes that go behind customer-facing services. The service blueprint is usually for employees to know what they need to do to meet the customer across the journey.

User and customer journey map examples

Take a look at examples of user and customer journey maps from successful businesses and get inspired to draft your own.

1. Userpilot’s current user state journey map

To examine the user’s current state, you can use Userpilot to perform a path analysis .

With path analysis, you can identify and understand how users navigate through your product, pinpointing the key interactions and touchpoints they encounter.

For example, to optimize conversion , you can look into how enterprise users navigate toward the conversion point. Then you can use the discovered insights to replicate the experience for new users.

2. Spotify’s music-sharing user journey map

Spotify is a music streaming platform with various features. This example shows a detailed view of a Spotify user’s journey when sharing music with friends and family.

The image shows the steps the user takes to find and share music as well as their thoughts, emotions, touchpoints, and actors. It starts with a user opening Spotify to listen to music at work. They look up the different playlists and feel excited to see the suggestions.

Once they find a song that makes them feel happy, they share it with a friend by sending the link through WhatsApp. They follow up and wait for an answer.

This example is particularly interesting since it includes the actions, thoughts, and sentiments of two different personas.

3. Uber’s first experience user journey map

Uber is a popular transportation company for booking rides. This current-stage customer journey map shows all the steps a user takes from the moment they choose to use Uber as a new user, up to when they arrive at their destination.

It includes screenshots that show exactly what the user sees when they go through each of the customer journey stages.

This example includes goals from the persona on the side. It also includes verbatim thoughts and emotion tags that give you deeper insights into the target persona.

The bottom part of the map shares critical insights that help marketing and sales teams understand the user on a deeper level and improve their experience.

4. Dropbox’s customer journey map

This journey map includes the user persona’s jobs-to-be-done (JBTD) and the path they follow from the problem-awareness stage.

Since Dropbox is a cloud storage platform, using it for business affects the day-to-day of all workers. Hence, this map includes a clever section named “cast” which includes the profiles of everyone who’ll be affected by the decision to use Dropbox.

As you can see, Sophia starts her journey when she discovers Dropbox. She researches alternatives, books a demo, and signs up for the application.

This looks like a future state journey map as it seems quite simplified for a current state map.

5. Mailchimp’s day-in-the-life customer journey map

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform. The customer journey map captures everything a marketing worker named Dani does every two weeks.

This customer journey map compiles all the little tasks she does before, during, and after she sends a marketing email.

It’s considered a day-in-the-life map rather than a current-state one because it includes more detail than simply outlining the steps Dani takes to send an email. Instead, it includes the digressions she takes before actually completing the task, as well as emotions and areas of opportunity.

6. Hubspot’s customer journey map

This platform offers multiple services for managing a business. This is the current state of Hubspot’s customer journey . It shows everything a user does from the moment they become dissatisfied with previous tools.

This map explains in detail how customers interact with Hubspot until they become paying users. It also includes all the other actors involved, the factors that lead to a positive or negative experience, and the decision points.

This map also includes thoughts and sentiments, friction points, customer touchpoints, and internal actors involved.

7. Netflix’s customer journey map

Similar to the Mailchimp example, this customer journey map explains the macro steps a user like Jen takes to watch a movie on Netflix.

As a media streaming platform, Netflix’s algorithm comes up with movies and TV show recommendations. This map shows how Jen disregards those recommendations and searches for a different movie instead, making it an area of opportunity for the Netflix team.

As part of the analysis, this map also includes Jen’s pain points, motivators, and emotions. This is an example of how breaking the journey down into smaller goals can simplify spotting friction points by showing an end-to-end process on a single screen.

8. Canva’s user journey map

Canva is an online graphic design platform, mostly suited for non-designers. This user map tells the story of Laura, a woman who isn’t a designer but wants to build beautiful flyers to promote her hobby.

As you see, the map walks us through the process of building a new design. It starts with Laura creating a board and ends when she exports the design. Similarly to the Netflix example, this journey map is also restricted to one scenario.

This user journey also includes actions, pain points, goals, expectations, and thoughts across the phases.

9. Zoom’s user journey map

This popular online meeting platform serves different purposes. This example is about Zoom for teachers and it’s broken down into three main categories: Action, emotions, and thinking.

This user journey map explains what a teacher does to give online lectures. It’s separated into five main action buckets with a breakdown of the tasks that go into each bucket. For example, for a teacher to “Start teaching” they need to open Zoom and roll the call.

You can also see how the teachers’ emotions and thoughts vary throughout the session. Plus, the design of this map lets us quickly identify opportunities just by looking at the emojis.

10. HeartiCraft’s user journey map

HeartiCraft is an online store for people who want to buy handcrafted products. The experience begins when the user researches and finds the website and ends when they decide to buy again.

It’s an interesting view of a user journey map as it exposes where HeartiCraft shines but also where it fails to delight users.

This map highlights four different stages and includes all the actions, thoughts and feelings, pain points, and delights under each of them.

11. Say Yeah!’s customer journey map

This company helps businesses deliver products and services that better serve neurodiverse users. To analyze this customer journey , you need to place your eyes on the left side of the screen and skim through the stages.

As you can see, this is the journey of an adult child looking for health support for their parents. It starts at the moment they discover a problem and ends after they’ve made a purchase.

This map includes the tasks, actors, emotions, media, tactics, and the thinking process of the user across the stages. It also shows how relevant each of those moments is for serving the customer properly.

12. Gartner’s B2B customer buying journey map

As a consulting firm, Gartner has a deep understanding of the B2B sales process. You can see that in this example because it paints the B2B buyer’s journey as a non-linear path.

This is likely informed by historic customer behavior, journey analytics , and user research. In the map, you’ll see four main actions across the user’s journey that allow them to buy a product.

However, there are internal discrepancies that Gartner manages to capture in this map. For example, showing that the person meeting with the company isn’t necessarily the decision maker and needs to go back and get the CEO’s approval before agreeing to make a purchase.

13. Service blueprint map for technical support

As mentioned above, a service journey map helps employees know what needs to happen internally to power customer-facing tasks. In this example, we can see how systems are interconnected and linked to company policies.

This map also shows the actions employees take to provide service, including the invisible back-end tasks and the evidence that supports each action.

Templates for user and customer journey mapping process

Explore the different templates included on this list, and edit them to fit your customer journeys:

1. User journey map template in Figma

You can leverage this template on Figma for your customer journey mapping exercise and uncover user activities and emotions across different stages – from realizing their needs to becoming a paid customer.

It allows you to add what you expect the user’s emotions, experience, and expectations to be at each of the stages.

You can include as many ideas as you wish on this canvas or even invite your teams to work on this together.

2. User empathy mapping template in Notion

An empathy map compiles your target user’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

This Notion template follows the classical approach by including the four main categories:

• Says. Direct quotes or statements that provide insight into the user’s thoughts and opinions.
• Thinks. Reflects the user’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.
• Does . Includes what the user does in real life or during their interaction with a product or service.
• Feels . Fears, frustrations, joys, and other emotional responses.

3. Future state customer journey map template from Xtensio

Use your creativity and your current state journey map to fill out this template. Explore alternative customer paths to offer a better customer experience.

This template includes space to add:

• Stages of the journey.
• User’s thoughts and feelings.
• Actions and touchpoints.
• How this map is different from the current journey.

4. Service blueprint customer journey map template from Miro

This is a typical service blueprint template. Miro lets you edit it to your liking by following these steps:

• Define the customer service scenario to investigate.
• Plot customer actions in chronological order.
• Lay out processes, actors, and support systems.
• Add roles and responsibilities by specifying interactions, visibility, and internal actions.
• Illustrate cross-functional relationships.

5. Customer journey map template from Mural

Use Mural’s customer journey map template to have a better understanding of your target audience’s touchpoints, needs, motivations, and barriers.

Here you can:

• Establish a customer scenario, e.g., buying a shirt online.
• Define the customer steps, including big and small actions.
• List all customer interactions with your brand, either in physical or digital touchpoints.
• Determine your customer’s goals and motivations.
• Highlight the positive moments at each stage.
• Define the negative or frustrating moments across the journey.

6. Customer journey map template from Canva

Find many different customer journey map templates on Canva. These all let you edit the customer actions across stages, and depending on the option that you choose, you’ll also be able to add the user’s:

• Emotions and feelings.
• Thinking process.
• Physical or digital touchpoints.
• Barriers or pain points.
• Solutions to barriers.

7. Customer touchpoint map template from InVision

Map out the customer touchpoints on this InVision template. Here, you’ll be able to list all the different interactions between the user and your business, as well as mention all the involved actors. You can break down the actions by stages and teams.

8. Customer journey mapping template from Slidesgo

Slidesgo provides you with 29 customer journey mapping examples. You can choose the design that piques your interest the most and add the different stages, touchpoints, actions, and sentiments. These designs are mostly suited for journeys of up to five steps.

9. B2B customer journey map template from UXPressia

UXPressia developed a set of B2B/B2C customer journey map templates for you to use. This mix also includes persona templates to guide you when creating personas for your journey maps.

You can use these templates as-is to guide your thinking or adapt them to fit your specific project needs.

10. Customer journey map template from Conceptboard

This customer journey map template is a classical one. Open the file with a clear understanding of your user persona.

There, you’ll be able to add customer data concerning each stage, more specifically regarding their:

• Touchpoints and channels.
• Overall experience.
• Pain points.
• Areas of improvement.

Exploring user journey map examples can inspire you to enhance your customers’ experience by pinpointing critical areas, such as better onboarding processes.

To create an effective customer journey map, you need a deep understanding of your user and a clear mapping path, i.e., via conducting user interviews and contextual research.

Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform that can equip you with actionable customer journey insights. Get a demo to explore our powerful analytics capabilities!

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Design and Technology Guides

A guide to user journey mapping

By Rachel Robinson, Brittany Murphy, Sayla Tenenbaum, and Crystal Gee

User journey maps help tell the story of customer experiences across a brand’s touchpoints. At Think Company, our teams use journey mapping to understand how customers are actually using and experiencing a tool or process—and how that real-world experience aligns with the design’s intention. User journey mapping gives us valuable context and insight to build digital strategies that perform in real life.

Table of Contents

• What is a user journey map

Why is user journey mapping important?

Components of user journey maps, when to build a user journey map.

• How to create a journey map
• Types of user journey maps

User journey map examples

Service blueprints and user journey maps, forming digital strategies with user journey mapping, what is a user journey map.

User journey map: Visual representation of users’ various paths while using a tool or system.

A user journey map, also commonly called a customer journey map, is a tool that communicates a user’s “journey”—the path they take while they navigate an experience. User journey maps shed light on the emotional state at specific points during an experience, and can be used to highlight critical touchpoints along that journey. In general, user journey maps help stakeholders see the digital experience within a larger context.

User journey mapping also goes beyond the tool’s intention and illuminates how the user actually uses it and experiences it. If there’s a problem in the user journey, a user journey map allows you to identify the problem in the real world—and resolve it.

The most important benefit of a user journey map is that it highlights any gaps between intention and reality. Digital experiences designed by even the most seasoned UX teams can still have a distinct difference between how they’re intended to be used and how a user moves through them. There’s always an element of unpredictability.

Customer journey mapping identifies “easy fixes” to alleviate obvious pain points while planning for the future, while also providing insight for creating a roadmap to fixing existing problems and building future solutions. But it’s not all doom and gloom—user journey maps also identify what’s working! This information provides an opportunity to learn from what’s successful, too.

Understanding the areas of disconnection not only inform design teams about where they can try to bridge the gap in the short term, but these learnings also inform future design decisions.

The other benefit to user journey mapping is that it creates a source of universal truth for the whole team to look at together. In many organizations, no one is responsible for looking at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. With a user journey map, the data is comprehensive, objective, and can be talked about and addressed by the entire team.

While journey maps come in many different formats, there are a few important (and familiar) components that should be considered:

• User archetype: Simply put, the people who experience the journey—who the journey map is about. The archetype should be rooted in data.
• Scenario: The scenario is the situation (or journey) that the map addresses. A scenario can be real or anticipated (if the product doesn’t exist yet and is in the design phase), high level or detailed. 
• Journey phases: The stages in the journey; the steps the user moves through. Examples include discovery, purchase, adoption, evaluation, expansion, etc.
• Pain points: The moments in the users’ journey that cause friction, confusion or drop offs, and point  to spots for improvement.
• Opportunities: Insights gained from customer journey mapping that help us understand where and how we should optimize the product.

A user journey map can be a framework within which to communicate research findings during a discovery phase. They are great tools when user research is done to understand how a customer or an employee experiences a process or journey–maybe the team went into identify opportunities for improvement in a sales process or to find where to make changes in an onboarding journey or to plan out a new purchasing experience. Journey maps help to shift perspectives to align with users’ actual needs versus what your company stakeholders might be projecting as needs. It’s important to build journey maps based on actual user data, so if you don’t have the ability to do the research, the journey map might be a waste of valuable time and resources.

How to create a customer journey map

Journey maps can be created in many tools and formats. Don’t overthink it, start simple with sticky notes or a simple whiteboard tool. There’s no “right way” to create a journey map, they will look different depending on the business, product or service you are mapping out. Below we share the steps you can take when creating a journey map.

Step 1: Identify the scenario

When thinking about how to create a user journey map, the first step is to identify the specific scenario you’ll be examining.

You can look at scenarios like:

• What moments are causing people to call customer service?
• How are new hires experiencing our onboarding process?
• What factors influence customers to upgrade their subscription?

It’s also essential to think about this user journey and its relevance to the big picture. What is the larger context for this experience, and what other factors might be influencing the user’s journey?

For example, within the customer service ecosystem, users can call, chat, sometimes visit a store, sometimes a sales rep visits their home, or all customer service is self-serve. Ideally, all those experiences are equally seamless or even enjoyable for users. But if one of these individual experiences is inferior, it impacts the customer service experience. It’s essential to consider how this single journey influences and is influenced by other factors before you start.

Step 2: Research

When you create a user journey map, the second step is to identify your target user. This can be a group like current customers, customers of competitors’ experiences, employees, or even specific sub-segments of customers.

Then, double-check that the scenario is timely and relevant to your target. For example, if the scenario is onboarding, the users you learn from should be current employees who are going through onboarding now or have completed onboarding within a few months of the research.

It’s also essential to understand the length of time you’ll be studying. Do you want to look at a user’s 5-minute interaction with an app? Their experience with a brand over a year? The period matters here.

Once you’ve identified your target group, the period you’ll be examining, and ensured this scenario is relevant to your target user, you can move to gathering information. Conduct in-depth interviews, perform a contextual inquiry , or analyze the data from user surveys to understand each step the user takes as they interact with this digital experience.

You’ll want to understand as much about the user’s goals and needs while going through the experience, and their pain points along the way. During this step, it’s essential to use as many different types of research as needed to ensure your data is as comprehensive as possible.

Step 3: Synthesize

Once you have hit saturation with your data, move to finding commonalities within the users’ journeys. Create “ stages ” and identify key moments, touchpoints, and emotions that happen within each stage. It can also help to focus on these users’ needs and determine whether or not users can be grouped into personas or archetypes. From there, analyze the data to pinpoint what’s working—as well as pain points, user reactions to those issues, what the user needs from the client at that moment, and the available methods for troubleshooting.

This is often a great time to compare the data to initiatives that have already been implemented to meet users’ needs and identify opportunities for further research on touchpoints or archetypes.

Step 4: Build the user journey map

Once you’ve synthesized and examined your data, you can start using the stages you’ve developed to begin plotting the user journey. It helps to create a touchpoint map , visualizing the customer processes and key interactions they have with you.

When building the overall customer journey map, size and color help to emphasize major key moments and touchpoints, and varying highs and lows in the path conveys positive and negative emotions felt throughout the journey. This can sometimes lead to diverging paths if there is an overwhelming pain point that could occur.

It’s important to remember that while the user journey map tells the basic story of the user’s journey, it does not need to account for the nuance of each archetype. Think back to the goal of your map; what key insights do you want to communicate? Let that influence the data you highlight.

Step 5: Make it useful

This basic journey map will help you understand the user, but not necessarily how to address the user or the issues users face. To take it a step further, identify opportunities and create strategies to meet the user’s needs. This is the time to transition from research to design and start to take advantage of the insights you’ve gleaned.

Step 6: Further research

Sometimes, we don’t get all the insights needed to flesh out the full story during the first research phase. Depending on the subject matter, a quantitative survey may be required to understand the frequency of situations surrounding a particular touchpoint or validate whether a key moment happens often enough to be included in the journey map.

Types of customer journey maps

As mentioned above, there is no “right way” to create a customer journey map, just like there is no single type of customer journey map. Depending on your goals and what data you’re trying to glean, you might want to utilize one over another. Below we’ll explain more about a few types of customer journey maps; from current state and future state to day in the life and service blueprints, each has a unique use case. Learn which one might be right for your project!

Day in the life customer journey maps

If you want a wider vantage point, a day in the life customer journey map allows you to understand the actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers are currently experiencing pertaining (or not!) to your company. Utilizing this type of user journey map is helpful when you’re looking towards new product development—allowing you to create solutions from the ground up. Importantly, day in the life journey maps can be both current or future state, but more on that below.

Current state customer journey maps

Widely used, the current state customer journey map allows you to understand how your customers are interacting with your product or service as it is right now. These user journey maps help you evaluate and improve your product to better your customer’s experience.

Future state customer journey maps

If you’re looking at the future evolution of your product, these customer journey maps visualize what customers will experience in future interactions with your product or company. This type of customer journey map is a great tool to utilize when you’re in the visioning and strategy mindset, assessing your goals and planning for future improvements to your products or services.

We’ve compiled a few customer journey map examples so you can see a few of the many ways these maps can look.

In this example of a journey map for a hired service, you see two simultaneous customer journeys—one for a best-case experience across touchpoints and one for a worst-case experience. The worst-case experience identifies points of frustration for the customer, eventually leading to a negative experience with a company. These examples can apply to many business and service types.

This example highlights how an employee experience can be tracked and assessed during a shorter time frame, like a typical workday. As employee needs are identified, and we find pain points caused by employer systems, the experiences create positive or negative patterns.

Often intertwined with user journey mapping, a service blueprint is service-focused and maps out the full details of how a service does or could work. It’s all the steps of a service with the employees, customers, tools, and systems involved. A service blueprint’s goal is to help us understand what enables and supports a service, what is inconsistent, and what isn’t working like it’s supposed to.

This example of a service blueprint—a visual representation of all people, content, and processes in large projects or service design initiatives—shows another way to map experience when the details are more complex and involve many touchpoints. In this instance, all people involved in a roof installation project can see roles and responsibilities alongside a timeline with corresponding requirements and content needs.

In the context of digital strategy, user journey mapping is a valuable decision-making tool. A journey map helps your team understand what’s going well within your users’ experiences and where adjustments to your products can make them more helpful to the user.

By thinking about this user journey within a larger digital strategy, you can help your digital tools function within the larger environment and fit into your internal flows. It can also help you think through how your team works from design to development and where product owners fit in.

At Think Company, our teams use journey mapping to understand how users are actually using and experiencing a tool—and how that real-world experience can be adjusted to better align to the design’s intention and the client’s overall goals. But more importantly, user journey mapping empowers our team to understand the high-level, real-world experience the tool fits within. By zooming out of the digital into the real world and then zooming back in to specific touchpoints with the tool, we can create more successful experiences overall.

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The Do’s and Don’ts of User Journey Mapping

Getting it right is the first step toward going places.

Last March, three weeks after Joseph Siwak was hired as an experience designer at the online hotel-booking company Rocket Travel, they sent him home — not with a pink slip, but with a new set of marching orders.

“I went from, literally, being in the middle of a normal traveler journey map to saying, ‘OK, what could the new normal be?’” Siwak said.

For Siwak, an illustrator whose user journey maps resemble artful graphic novels, the arrival of the pandemic meant, among other things, redrawing his vision of the modern traveler’s online experience. And he wasn’t the only one.

“We kind of suspected that people would want more localized safe spaces, like Airbnb and Vrbo, to hang out,” Autumn Schultz, director of experience design at Rocket Travel, said. “So we hypothesized around those ideas and what people might want to do in that space as well.”

User Journey Mapping Do’s

• Clarify your goals.
• Consider the scope. 
• Gather a multidisciplinary team.
• Validate assumptions with analytics.
• Validate assumptions with interviews of loyal users.
• Start the journey prior to the customer’s discovery of your product.
• Differentiate new and existing customers.
• Match the fidelity of the map to its goals.
• Weave in real-life artifacts.
• Sync your in-app messaging with user journey flows.

These conversations led to a new journey map plotting users’ experiences on Rocketmiles, the company’s signature hotel booking app. Cartoon personas took on new expressions of anxiety. Once concerned over hotel prices, travelers were now frightened at the prospect of going, basically, anywhere. The map suggested where in-app messaging at key touchpoints could help address user concerns.

Turns out, user journey maps serve many functions. They help internal teams empathize with user needs. They clarify where and how features or engagements should surface in a digital product. They contextualize how a product or offering stacks up to a competitor’s.

“It’s a tool to generate ideas, to get people in a room and have real discussions, strategically, about what we want to address and when.”

Whether created on physical whiteboards or the digital boards of companies like Miro, Figma, Confluence or Lucidchart, journey maps offer a high-level view of a customer’s experience that sheds light on how they feel as they navigate the product.

“It’s a tool to generate ideas, to get people in a room and have real discussions, strategically, about what we want to address and when. Not every pain point is the worst pain point and not every opportunity is a happy path,” Siwak said.

Here, executives and product leaders reveal what to do — and what not to do — to make the exercise worthwhile.

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Clarify Your Goals

“All good journey maps have a goal in mind,” said Keith Mancuso, a technical product manager at the digital agency Happy Cog. “You might want to increase utilization of discounts, increase average order value or increase page views.”

At Fueled, a New York-headquartered web and app development consultancy, journey mapping serves a two-fold purpose, Derek Burgess, the lead product manager, said. For existing clients like MGM Resorts International, Verizon and Warby Parker, journey mapping guides the development of new or existing products or services. For prospective clients, Fueled uses journey maps to plan and execute pitches.

“Any time a designer kicks off a project like this, it’s really important to describe why you’re doing it and what we should expect.”

“We do communications-strategy deliverables and growth-strategy deliverables. And with both of them, we use the user journey map to target areas that may be inefficient,” Burgess said.

Often, the goal is to rally support for a feature release among internal teams.

“Any time a designer kicks off a project like this, it’s really important to describe why you’re doing it and what we should expect,” Schultz said. “[Designers] all get really excited about doing these things, but if your partners — whether that’s your product people, engineers, CEO, operations or customer service people — don’t know why you’re doing it, it feels untethered.”

Consider the Scope

Matthew Hardesty is vice president of product at Brainbase, a platform that helps organizations like BuzzFeed and the Van Gogh Museum manage their intellectual property. He said his team generally spends no more than a week on a journey map. However, the time allotted reflects the breadth of the tasks being mapped.

A map might span the entire product lifecycle or a single engagement, such as the registration flow. The scope of the map should reflect the projected value of the product or proposed changes.

“You want to understand the tradeoffs, whether they are monetary or based on strategic reasons,” Hardesty said. “We know conversion rates are each worth X dollars. We think these improvements will increase the value by X amount and affect this many users.”

Gather a Multidisciplinary Team

Schultz recommends gathering a multi-disciplinary team early on to co-create the user journey map.

“So, not just design, but maybe it’s operations, maybe it’s customer service, maybe it’s a product person,” she said. “You could do this as a workshop, you can start mapping Post-Its from, say, the moment people start thinking about an experience to when they start looking for solutions to their problem or whatever they’re trying to achieve.”

Validate Assumptions With Analytics

Journey maps tend to be chock full of assumptions. One way to validate these is through behavioral analytics platforms like FullStory, Hotjar and Amplitude that offer reports, performance graphs and session replays to evaluate user engagement.

“With tools like FullStory, you can basically watch user sessions,” Hardesty said. “Press play and see exactly what they did. It’s not just analytics or a heat map, but how far they scrolled down a landing page, where they are in the viewport, what they’re looking at and whether they’re converting.”

Validate Assumptions Through Interviews With Loyal Users

Hard data helps validate assumptions, but qualitative interviews with longtime customers are often just as valuable.

“If they’re a repeat customer, and you’re trying to understand lifetime value, you can’t outsource that all that easily,”  Schultz said. “One thing I think is super interesting is if you can get actual videos of your customers — if they’re willing to be recorded. Because tying an emotional hook to the experience is a lot more compelling for an engineer, or someone who is pretty far from the customer experience. It’s a way for them to understand, ‘This is why we’re doing it.’”

Conversations can happen informally, Siwak said, via a Zoom call with a customer who has opted in to provide input on a beta release, or a shared Slack channel where a peer from another company may be able to provide useful insights. Companies like dscout and UserTesting also offer remote user testing services.

Start the Journey Prior to the Customer’s Discovery of Your Product

A user journey map doesn’t have to start inside your product — it can start in the mind of a prospective user, Siwak said. Take the journey of a would-be traveler on Rocketmiles: “You’re sitting at work one day, and you’re just daydreaming of doing something different,” he said. “That’s a great jumping-off point for thinking about [the journey map].”

Envisioning the user’s journey holistically, beginning even prior to discovery, can lead to unexpected insights.

“People are discovering things [during the pandemic] maybe they wouldn’t have in a normal life and doing things differently — learning to ski all of a sudden,” Siwak added. “I have a friend who’s living near Yellowstone and trying to become an influencer with some buffalo.”

Differentiate Between New and Existing Customers

Within a journey map, design patterns often follow a typical chronology and tree logic. At registration, for instance, a visitor might be asked to sign up or continue as a guest. Assuming they sign up, a subsequent message asks for permission to send notifications. Later, they might be asked if they’d like to share their location.

But it’s important to differentiate the journeys of new and long-time users, Burgess told me.

In a mapping project for an insurance company offering supplemental employee benefits and discounts, Fueled plotted two distinct journeys  — one for new employees enrolling shortly after being hired, and a second for established employees casually shopping online.

New employees received the promotions as an upgrade offer when they enrolled for standard benefits packages. For the second group, a pre-installed Chrome extension embedded in the insurance platform promoted discount codes at optimized intervals.

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Match the Fidelity of the Map to Its Goals

The fidelity of a map should match its goals. Rocket Travel uses low-fidelity journey mapping to explore how potential Rocketmile customers use rival services such as Expedia, TripAdvisor — even Google — to plan for travel.

“I often will start with a lower-fidelity user journey with lots of assumptions on it,” Siwak said. “And just put a giant watermark that says, ‘These are all assumptions.’ And then, as we validate things, I’ll increase the fidelity — make it feel like we’ve talked to people about this, we know that it’s true.”

“I often will start with a lower-fidelity user journey with lots of assumptions on it, and just put a giant watermark that says, ‘These are all assumptions.’”

As a journey map becomes more refined, Siwak sharpens the imagery to create a dramatic narrative that accentuates pain points and happy moments along the user’s journey.

“I’ll try to make them almost like a comic,” he said. “Because I want people to be excited by the map and feel like it’s something they want to look at. The online [templates] are usually just so dry. If it’s all text, people will not want to read it.”

Weave in Real-Life Artifacts

Digital artifacts or “bread crumbs” — such as links to competitors’ sites, video or audio recordings of customer interviews, surveys and key research findings — are another way to create an emotional hook. Want to strengthen your case for adding a new feature? Try adding a snapshot of what’s possible.

For example: “We might include a picture of a Google spreadsheet of a user’s hotel options,” Schultz said. “It’s very true that customers create these to manage their reservations and share with their friends. Clearly, there’s a pain point in the travel experience that we’re not addressing and no one else has actually addressed, and that’s an opportunity. People have developed their own hacks. How do you lean into those hacks?”

Sync Your In-App Messaging With User Journey Flows

Platforms like Intercom, HubSpot and Braze now include custom journey builders designers can use to map the delivery of announcements, product tours, feature highlights and call-outs. These automated messaging services have become quite sophisticated in recent years, Burgess said.

“It’s almost like a CMS,” he explained. “You can use [the tools] to set up the structure for when a message triggers and how it triggers, and you can even set goals. It will report back to you the open rate and where people dropped off.”

User Journey Mapping Don'ts

• Don’t build journey maps from customer support tickets.
• Don’t limit your journey to the product funnel.
• Don’t over-index your map.
• Don’t forget your internal users and administrators.
• Don't wait to consult with other teams.
• Don’t create too many personas.
• Don’t ignore your non-users.
• Don’t do journey mapping in a vacuum.
• Don’t act on every customer suggestion.

Don’t Build Journey Maps From Customer Support Tickets

Joseph Ansanelli is CEO and co-founder of Gladly, a company that helps consumer brands like Crate & Barrel, Porsche and Ralph Lauren provide customer service through a multi-channel platform. He said journey maps that scope a customer’s experience across a single support ticket, rather than their entire history with a brand, miss the mark.

“We come at this from a standpoint of questioning how everyone else is doing journey mapping,” Ansanelli said. “The historical model is to create a journey based on a support ticket. That’s the wrong journey.”

“The historical model is to create a journey based on a support ticket. That’s the wrong journey.”

Instead, Ansanelli said interactions across channels — web browsers, in-app chat services, social media and live phone calls with customer-support agents — should be treated as a single journey.

“The right journey is when a customer contacts you, and you get them to the best person to help. It’s part of one lifelong conversation,” he said. “Otherwise, anytime a problem arises, you have to create another journey and another ticket, which requires two different support people to manage. That’s a broken system.”

Don’t Limit Your Journey to the Product Funnel

Conceptualizing the user journey as a funnel can make sense from a business standpoint, but that model has limitations.

“People don’t live in a funnel, they bounce around,” Schultz said. “Things are not constant. Journeys aren’t linear.”

Instead, journey maps should approach the product experience from a customer’s perspective. Stages in the journey such as discovery, onboarding, experimentation and habit-building should track the user’s evolving attitudes and reasoning.

“When you talk about funnels, it’s very hard to wear both hats,” Schultz said. “You’re looking at it from like a purely quantitative perspective — again, not wrong, just a different type of framework. Whereas journey mapping is meant to deepen your empathy and generate ideas.”

Don’t Over-Index Your Map

It’s easy to get bogged down in minutiae that mean little to customer satisfaction, much less the bottom line. Unless you’re a designer at a huge company like Amazon, where you might be called on to work toward infinitesimal improvements of a nano-feature, your focus should be on prioritizing what’s really important.

“What percent confidence are you adding by knowing a user scrolled 5 percent more on a page?” Hardesty asked. “Unless it’s your landing page, who cares? It’s not meaningful information.”

A better route, he told me, is to use a prioritization framework, such as the Kano model , to determine which features are most likely to resonate with customers. As he put it: “Do we think this will be a big winner? Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Don’t Forget Internal Users and Administrators

Too many companies consider the journeys of their end-users, but not the internal teams supporting the software.

Recently, Happy Cog consulted on a web design and development refresh for Posse, a non-profit organization that awards scholarships to groups of first-generation college students. The site offers several touchpoints to guide students through the nomination and selection process.

However, the support that students receive from mentors once they attend college is equally important to the program’s success. Are they maintaining good grades? Are they attending organizational meetings? These factors needed to be better addressed in the design, Mancuso said.

“Posse, for the longest time, only focused on what student nominees see. But the internal audience has a journey as well, through more complicated content management systems that allow mentors to post news, update marketing features and check in on students,” he said.

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Don’t Wait to Consult With Other Teams

Another way to torpedo a journey map is by waiting too long to invite key stakeholders.

“The more you wait, the more folks might feel surprised or question your findings,” Siwak said. “When people feel like they’re discovering it with you, there’s a lot less pushback. No one likes the surprise of hearing, ‘Hey, whatever part of the journey you’re responsible for sucks.’”

Beyond that, the journey mapping exercise can build solidarity for new product initiatives.

“I’ve never had anyone be like, ‘I think it was a waste of time,’” Siwak said. “And even if nothing scandalous is discovered in an ideation session, most people just enjoyed doing something different with their day.”

Don’t Create Too Many Personas

On the surface, separating personas by demographics — for instance, women in their 40s and men in their 20s — might seem like a good way to get an accurate view of your customer cohorts. But you can quickly lose the forest for the trees.

“Creating too many personas divides the audience too much,” Mancuso told me. “The journey becomes too complicated because there’s too much noise.”

Keep it simple: three to five personas.

Don’t Ignore Your Non-Users

What does this mean at a hotel-booking site like Rocketmiles?

“You have travelers who will never use the internet,” Siwak said. “Like the person on a road trip. You hit a rest stop in Tennessee, and there are those little pamphlets, and maybe you’re like, ‘You know what, I am going to go check out Dollywood today.’ Knowing that happens in the world might give us an opportunity, in the future, to capture a new market.”

Don’t Do Journey Mapping in a Vacuum

Talking to real customers to understand their attitudes toward your product, as well as those of competitors, is crucial to journey mapping. But companies often shortchange this part of the process.

“You get small companies that say, ‘We don’t have a lot of resources and money and time, and we’ve made this decision and we’re going to go with it.’ Or big companies that think they know everything about their customers,” Hardesty said.

Both views are distorted.

“Every time you come up with a feature idea, go back to the journey map, go back to your highest-grossing customers, your champions. At previous companies, I’ve helped establish customer advisor boards — a set of industry experts you can go to to gut check your assumptions.”

Don’t Act on Every Customer Suggestion

When several customers point to a particular bug or feature flaw, that’s a good signal that it’s time to revisit the journey map. However, while customers are good at seeing what’s broken, they’re less adept at positing solutions.

For example, if a customer requested a better way to search, sort and filter information: “You have to take these things with a grain of salt,” Hardesty said. “Maybe we create a different page, or reassign some of the content, and take care of 90 percent of what the individual user needs.”

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App User Journey

Have you ever wondered what makes your favorite app so delightfully captivating, so engrossing, and so fun to use that it keeps you coming back for more every day? Is it the slick and elegant design, the innovative concept, its ingenious features and impressive functionalities? While these are most certainly important and will go a long way in making your app great, the unsung hero behind the triumph of any mobile app is often its user journey.

Every step a user takes within your app can either make or break their experience. A meticulously planned app user journey will keep your users hooked and coming back for more, transforming a one-time download into a cherished daily ritual. For app developers, mobile marketers, and product managers alike, fully comprehending and optimizing the user journey is the key to crafting an app that people simply can’t resist.

So, let’s talk about the app user journey. In this guide, we’ll explore all facets of the mobile app user journey. We will talk about what it is and what it isn’t, discuss its benefits and challenges, and learn how to map the app user journey as well as how to analyze and optimize it. We will also be delving into a plethora of examples, case studies, and templates to ensure you’ve got everything you need to ace the mobile app user journey.

Prepare to embark on an illuminating journey through this watershed moment of the app experience. From the initial download to becoming a staple of your users’ daily routines, we’ve got your app user journey covered! Let’s dive in.

But first, the basics. What is an app user journey?

What is an app user journey?

In a nutshell, the app user journey refers to the series of steps that users take within an app as well as the ways they interact with it—from the moment of discovery and app install to the point when they achieve the goals they set out to achieve when they first downloaded your app.

In the context of app user journeys, the goal can take many different forms—for a dating app, it would be finding potential dates/partners; in the case of a gaming app, it would be beating the final game level; the goal for an eCommerce app is most certainly going to be making a purchase; whereas for a health and fitness app, the goal will likely be regular sessions within the app and daily engagement, and so on.

App user journey

Click on image for full size

Source: Medium

Simple enough, right? As with so many other things in life, it’s easier said than done—developing a killer user journey takes countless hours of app development and meticulous analysis. It involves dissecting user behavior to identify and mend any weak points that hinder users on their path to success, i.e. achieving their goals.

When we speak of weak points, we refer to any stumbling blocks, UX and UI inconsistencies as well as any other sources of hesitation and confusion for users that might prevent them from exploring further and diving deeper into your app. To avoid losing any users and tanking your engagement and retention rates along the way, it’s paramount that you identify and eliminate any and all pain points.

App Engagement Guide

Download our App Engagement Guide , covering all the trends, strategies, and metrics you need to know to ace app engagement in 2024.

Mapping your app’s user journey empowers you to effectively address these pain points. It will also enable you to efficiently streamline and optimize your app’s UX and UI, which, in turn, will have a positive effect on your app’s engagement and retention and ultimately your users’ lifetime value (LTV) .

App user journey FAQs

Before we dive any deeper, let’s address a few elephants in the room to ensure we are all on the same page.

User journey vs. customer journey vs. user flow vs. user funnel

User journeys focus only on user interactions within your app, i.e. download, use of features and functionalities, etc. As such, user journeys only pertain to digital touchpoints within an app. In contrast, the customer journey extends to all touchpoints—both digital and physical—with your brand. In other words, user journeys are a subset of customer journeys.

User journey vs. customer journey

Source: CleverTap

User flows, crafted by UX designers, detail the micro-steps needed to achieve specific actions within an app’s interface. User journeys may reference these steps but primarily aim to extract insights about user experiences. A user journey evaluates user sentiments, desires, and broader perspectives, while a user flow focuses on optimizing a single, specific step within the app, e.g. sign-up or log-in flow. User journeys generally encompass multiple user flows.

User journey vs. user flow (I)

Source: AppsFlyer

Another way of thinking about it is to consider user flows as purpose-driven, i.e. the goal is to get users to complete an action—register, log in, complete a purchase, etc. The goal of a user journey is optimization to ensure smooth navigation and overall experience and increase an app’s engagement and retention rates.

User journey vs. user flow (II)

User funnels, on the other hand, track users through a series of steps and serve lead generation and customer conversion purposes. Funnel steps can be part of a user journey, but funnels are generally way broader and more abstract. While user journeys provide granular insights into user interactions and experiences within the app, tailored to specific user segments, funnels focus on the overall steps completed by all users.

User journey vs. user funnel (Top, middle, and bottom of funnel)

Why does the app user journey matter?

For mobile marketers, it’s crucial to showcase an app’s functionality and benefits, i.e. its value, to users. Understanding why users install your app allows you to optimize their experiences, shorten the time from install to purchase / subscription , and fix UX and UI issues that cause users to churn . As an app’s user base grows and new in-app features and functionalities are introduced, mapping the user journey becomes increasingly important for marketers and product managers alike.

What is the purpose of an app user journey?

Instead of considering your users as an abstract mass, a user journey map helps you visualize your app from the user’s perspective, enabling you to focus on their unique experiences and interactions within the app. A user journey map can highlight areas in need of improvement but also areas where user expectations align with your business objectives and the direction your app is already going in.

Why is it important to understand your app’s user journey?

App user journeys unlock your app’s potential by helping you understand user behaviour and revealing pain points and user desires. By leveraging insights gained from mapping the user journey, you can uncover critical issues before they turn into major problems and optimize an app’s design and functionality to cultivate long-lasting engagement with users.

How can mapping the user journey help improve app performance?

Visualizing and mapping the user journey provides crucial insights for streamlining and optimizing the user experience, reducing friction points, and driving conversions and retention. It’s possibly the best strategy to increase engagement and enhance your app’s performance.

When to build a user journey map?

Start mapping your user journey once your app starts gathering steam and you have collected enough users, but before your user base grows into the thousands or your app experiences viral success. It’s best to start mapping the user journey in the early days of growth; this allows you to understand your crucial touchpoints, ensure high levels of user satisfaction before your app gets too big, and discover untapped opportunities before scaling up.

Benefits of an app user journey

Understanding the journey users take within your app can yield a plethora of benefits for a business. When you dissect a user’s journey step-by-step, it not only helps you understand user behavior and enhances an app’s design but also boosts user retention and engagement.

Here’s how and why a user journey map proves invaluable:

Improved user experience

Delving into how users interact with your app provides vital insights for enhancing their experience. By tracking the user journey, you gain a profound understanding of how your app addresses users’ problems and facilitates them in achieving their goals. It allows you to pinpoint the features that users find most valuable and useful as well as to identify friction points that need to be addressed in order to make the user experience as seamless as possible. These insights empower you to craft an easy-to-use app that users genuinely love and value.

Increased user retention, boosted user engagement

Mapping your app’s user journey reveals areas where improvements are needed. For instance, if users tend to churn shortly after downloading your app, it may indicate issues with your onboarding process . Armed with these insights, you can optimize specific areas of your app to make them as user-centric as possible, which, in turn, enhances the overall user experience and boosts your app’s stickiness . When users find your app instrumental in achieving their goals, they’re more likely to stick around , aka not churn.

User journey maps can also be shared across various teams within your organization, including marketing, product development, and sales. This sharing of insights allows each team to align with a user-centric approach. It equips teams with a clear vision of the users they’re targeting, empowering them to craft an app that resonates with the intended audience.

Targeting the right users

Understanding your target audience is paramount for app success. Trying to appeal to a broad range of users without a clear understanding of what they want or need can be and, to be fair, often is counterproductive.

Researching the goals users want to achieve when using your app as well as the challenges they face along the user journey they take within your app helps you gain deep insights into your users.

This clarity enables you to identify who your users really are and how your app can solve their problems effectively, which, in turn, allows you to target potential new users more efficiently and augments your user acquisition (UA) efforts.

App user journey stages

App user journeys are often dynamic and can vary depending on factors like your app’s category and monetization model. A gaming app, for instance, will inevitably have a very different user journey compared to a health and fitness app, which, for its part, will differ vastly from an eCommerce app, and so on.

While each user journey is unique, there are common stages shared by most apps.

Here’s an overview of the core stages that outline an effective user journey, from initial discovery to ongoing loyalty:

App discovery and awareness stage

When users download an app, they usually do so with a purpose—they have a “problem” that needs solving. The problem can take many different forms—they need to relax and unwind, they want to buy items online, they want to have fun, they want to exercise and/or lose weight, you get the gist.

However, the app stores are crowded places and are saturated with millions of apps across a single category. In the app discovery stage, users search the Internet and the app stores to find the app that will best fulfil their needs and solve their problem .

So, to stand out in a crowded app market, make sure to prioritize App Store Optimization (ASO) and referral marketing campaigns. These strategies will help you boost the visibility of your app and encourage users to choose it over all the other options available.

App download (user acquisition) stage

The download stage is the most pivotal for your app’s growth and overall success. It’s a watershed moment, the making or breaking of your app—the download stage represents the first conversion point where users take action and install your app.

Optimizing your app store listing is essential here—from app name, icon, and description to subtitle, screenshots, and preview video , don’t leave anything to chance.

Also, don’t forget to consider factors like positive reviews on the app stores that build trust and convince potential new users to download.

App onboarding and exploration stage

App onboarding is yet another watershed moment in the app user journey. Your users might have downloaded your app, but now you have limited time to show them how it works and why they should stick around and keep using it (i.e. show them your app’s value), otherwise, they are churning faster than you can say ‘retention’ and likely never coming back.

A well-designed onboarding experience is, thus, a must and a cornerstone of user engagement . Users need to understand your app’s value proposition, learn its key features and functionalities, and grant necessary permissions. This guided introduction reduces confusion and user friction, familiarizes users with the app’s interface, and encourages effective further exploration, setting users on a path to subscription or in-app purchases (depending on your app’s monetization model).

In-app engagement (app reuse) stage

To combat early churn and foster user loyalty, maintaining user engagement is crucial. Many users tend to leave after the initial onboarding stage, making ongoing engagement vital for long-term growth, success, and profitability.

Focus on getting users to explore on their own after initial onboarding and promoting the adoption of key features to increase active users on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis (DAU, WAU, or MAU).

Use in-app messaging to offer helpful tips, pointers, and rewards, ensuring users keep coming back for more. The overall goal here is to get users hooked and nurture app loyalty.

In-app purchases/subscription (monetization) stage

In-app purchases , or IAPs for short, and subscriptions , depending on an app’s main monetization model, represent a significant milestone and a primary objective for most apps.

The user journey from awareness to purchase

Source: Sendbird

The key to success here is not just targeting all your users at once but nurturing the most lucrative users (the ones most likely to upgrade to a paid plan or make a purchase). So, knowing your target user segment is essential for planning the user journey and messaging around it in order to get the highest number of users possible to convert, i.e. make a purchase and/or subscribe.

Re-purchase stage

After an initial in-app purchase, it’s time to start encouraging repeat conversions and re-purchases from existing users. It’s an incredibly cost-effective strategy compared to acquiring new users . Use messaging channels such as email, push notifications , and in-app messaging  for follow-up communication and recommendations. This is also a great way of personalizing the app experience .

Remember though that not all apps rely on IAPs (see above). Some rely on subscriptions or in-app advertising . In such cases, user loyalty and retention become essentially indispensable if you want to succeed in the app world.

User loyalty and retention stage

As users progress through the app’s user journey, their needs and expectations evolve. Personalization becomes crucial—it’s vital to tailor purchase recommendations, app experiences, and promotions based on individual user preferences. Also, refine your messaging strategy with targeted approaches and leverage advanced segmentation . The end goal is to create a supportive community where users can showcase their achievements, which, in turn, fosters loyalty and keeps users hooked and engaged.

Each stage of the user journey presents an opportunity to enhance the user experience, increase retention, and drive user satisfaction. Understanding these stages and employing effective messaging strategies can help your app thrive in a competitive market.

How to map your user journey

Mapping the user journey: steps, best practices, and pro tips.

Mapping the user journey for your app is a strategic process that involves understanding user goals, motivations, expectations, and concerns in order to deliver an experience that best addresses their problems, needs, and wants.

8 Steps to map the app user journey

Follow these eight easy steps to create an effective user journey map that enhances the app experience:

Define your goals and objectives

Begin by clearly defining your objectives for mapping the user journey. Decide whether you want to focus on the entire user journey or a specific aspect of your app’s experience. This sets the direction for your research, which will help you identify what metrics to track and what strategies to employ to improve your app.

Also, consider involving different teams, such as product development and marketing, in this process. Leveraging their expertise can prove invaluable in defining your goals and objectives.

Build user personas

After you’ve defined your user journey objectives, it’s time to create detailed user personas. User personas are fictional representations of your target users and they will go a long way in helping you understand your real users as well as what they want and need.

Gather insights from current users about their app experience, including demographic and behavioral data, discovery, touchpoints, goals, challenges, and decision-making factors. This data can then be used to create your user personas, each getting its own name, detailed description, and a visual representation for clarity.

After your personas are ready, share them with all relevant teams to ensure a unified understanding of your user base.

Identify key interaction touchpoints and channels

Next, map all the touchpoints where users interact with your app. Make sure to include as many touchpoints as possible to gain a comprehensive understanding—this can include push notifications, websites, search engines, other mobile apps, email marketing, social media, ad impressions, post-purchase events, etc. The more interaction touchpoints you include, the clearer the picture you’ll get.

Utilize mind-mapping techniques, brainstorming sessions with your team, direct communication with your audience to collect feedback, online surveys, and competitor analysis to identify all your touchpoints and channels effectively.

Pro tip : When conducting surveys and gathering feedback, consider where users are in the customer lifecycle. The timing of user feedback can significantly impact the results. Analyzing feedback based on the user’s stage in the lifecycle helps identify trends and insights that can inform optimizations.

Visualize the user’s journey

Visualize, aka map out , how users engage with your app, starting from their initial encounter to conversion. Then, capture their thoughts, emotions, and actions throughout this journey.

The goal is to gain a deep understanding of how your app fits into your users’ daily lives and how it helps them address challenges and solve problems.

It’s important to keep in mind that each user persona may have and, truth be told, likely has a unique journey, so tailor the user journey map accordingly to address their specific needs and challenges.

For instance, let’s consider onboarding. Not all users will need an in-depth onboarding, some, usually the tech-savvy ones with lots of experience using similar apps or apps in general, might prefer to explore on their own without any guidance. So, remember not to generalize and use one-size-fits-all approaches when crafting your user journey.

Identify and overcome obstacles

The next step is to pinpoint obstacles and critical points that may hinder users as they progress through the journey, causing them to churn/drop out.

For example, identify situations where users may abandon the app due to user friction or unclear calls to action. To take the onboarding example further, unclear, overly complicated, and confusing onboarding processes tend to annoy users—a surefire way to make them churn.

Learn more about creating killer onboarding journeys here .

List all the obstacles you can identify and brainstorm solutions to eliminate them, streamlining the UX of your app along the way. If implementing changes alters the user journey, create a new map to assess the impact of these changes.

Design and test the final user journey firsthand

Next, compile all collected data into a comprehensive user journey map. Don’t forget to include user steps, success criteria, retention rates, conversion rates, interaction points, obstacles, and solutions (basically, everything we’ve just talked about).

What a user journey map looks like

After that, test the user journey yourself to gain a deep understanding of the user experience firsthand and make necessary improvements based on your findings. This hands-on approach allows you to identify both positive and negative aspects of your app’s user experience. You can also test the app from the perspective of different user personas to determine what works best for each group.

Create several user journeys

Recognize that users engage with your app in various ways, and their goals may differ. To avoid generalizing your audience and misinterpreting data, create multiple user journeys tailored to your different user personas. This approach enables you to better understand how different user groups interact with your app and deliver a more personalized and customized experience.

Develop and monitor essential KPIs

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate your user journey map’s (preferably maps’) performance. Monitor mobile app metrics like active users, cost per acquisition, conversion rate, retention rate, lifetime value, etc.

By analyzing these metrics, you can then gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and user personas. This will also help you identify specific areas that require further improvements in your user journey map.

Pro tip : Here’s a list of all KPIs to consider when deciding what you need to monitor and track. Remember that not all KPIs listed here may apply to your app: Revenue, a ctive users (DAU, WAU, MAU), cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per install (CPI), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, retention rate, churn rate, uninstall tracking, lifetime value (LTV), return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), average revenue per user (ARPU), average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), average revenue per paying user (ARPPU), re-engagement rate.

Continuously optimization

Finally, remember that mapping and optimizing your app’s user journey is an ongoing effort. Continuously seek ways to improve the user experience and meet the needs of all your users.

This may involve eliminating unnecessary steps in the user journey as a way of streamlining it or developing new strategies to keep users engaged. A/B testing should be a regular practice to refine and enhance your app’s performance based on fresh data.

Remember that optimization is an iterative process, so keep regularly gathering insights, analysing data, and refining your app to create an even better user experience.

By following these steps and best practices, you can create a user journey map that not only enhances your app but also contributes to long-term user satisfaction and engagement.

User journey template: Core elements of the app user journey

Creating an effective user journey map for your app involves considering several core elements to provide a comprehensive view of the user experience.

Here’s a breakdown of these elements:

Personas : Start by defining user personas, which represent different groups of users with unique characteristics and needs. Understanding your target audience helps tailor the user journey to their preferences. See above for more information on creating user personas.

Timeline : The user journey map should have a clear timeline with a beginning, middle, and end. The end goal is typically a conversion, purchase, or app installation. Map out the interactions a user has with your app throughout this timeline.

User journey timeline

Actions : Identify the actions users take at each interaction point with your app. This can include activities like watching an onboarding video, clicking a push notification, making a purchase, or completing a specific task within the app.

Feelings, expectations, and questions : Chart the emotional states of users at different points in the user journey. Analyze user feedback and behavioral data to understand your users better and the emotions they experience at each stage. Additionally, consider the expectations and questions that users may have during each interaction.

Channels and touchpoints : Determine the channels through which users interact with your app and brand. This can include desktop, mobile devices, in-app notifications, email, social media, and more. Understanding the channel preferences of your users will help you tailor your app’s communications and messaging.

User journey template

User experience (UX) : Evaluate the overall user experience of your app, including factors like usability, design, reliability, and overall functionality. A positive UX is essential for a good user journey as well as user satisfaction and retention.

Transactions and payments : If your app involves in-app transactions (IAPs or subscriptions), ensure that the payment process is seamless, trustworthy, and accommodating to various payment methods. Also, clear communication regarding pricing and order confirmations is crucial.

Personalization : Personalization is the best way to deliver in-app experiences that charm users and gain their loyalty long-term. Consider implementing personalization strategies based on user data. Remember to take into account factors like user personas, engagement style, messaging, location, etc. to deliver a personalized user experience that meets individual needs.

By incorporating these core elements into your user journey map, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the user experience and identify areas for improvement. This information allows you to optimize your app to better meet user expectations, increase engagement, and drive conversions.

How do you analyze the user journey and overcome major roadblocks and challenges?

Analyzing the user journey and making sure you don’t fall prey to common pitfalls and misconceptions regarding the user journey are critical steps in optimizing an app’s performance and user experience.

Here’s how you can effectively analyze the user journey to make it as smooth and pleasant for users as possible:

Identify unnecessary interactions : Review the user journey to identify any unnecessary touchpoints or steps that may cause friction. Simplify the journey by eliminating or streamlining these interactions to make the user experience smoother.

Address negative experiences : Pay close attention to the low points in the user journey where expectations are not met, or users have negative experiences. These pain points are opportunities for improvement. Prioritize these areas and work on reversing the negative experiences to enhance user satisfaction.

Recognize successes : Identify areas in the user journey where your app has successfully met or exceeded user expectations. Analyze what worked well in these instances and consider replicating these success factors in other parts of the user journey.

Omnichannel friction : Given that user journeys often span multiple devices and channels, look for instances where transitioning to a new channel disrupts the user’s flow. Ensure that users can seamlessly move from one channel to another without encountering friction or inconsistencies.

Time spent at each stage : Analyze how much time users spend at each stage of the journey. Evaluate whether the timing aligns with your goals and whether any stage takes longer than necessary. Adjustments can be made to optimize the pacing of the user journey.

Avoid overgeneralization : There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so a single app user journey map simply won’t make the cut. Each user is unique. Broad strokes are easy and convenient, but it’s the small details and nuances that set a great app apart from an average one.

Segmentation : Recognize that not all users follow the same journey. Segment users based on behavior, demographics, or other relevant criteria. (Learn how to segment your user base here .) Analyze the unique journeys of different user segments to tailor experiences to their specific needs and preferences.

Outliers and micro-moments : Don’t overlook outliers or the significance of micro-moments in the user journey. Sometimes, exceptional user experiences or minor tweaks in micro-interactions can have a substantial impact on overall satisfaction.

In short, to overcome challenges in mapping the app user journey, avoid overgeneralization, pay attention to the small details and nuances, focus on micro-moments and outliers, celebrate successes and remove negative and/or unnecessary experiences and interactions as quickly as possible. Additionally, leverage analytics and user feedback:

Analytics : Utilize analytics tools to gather data on user behavior, preferences, and patterns. Look for tools that offer both quantitative and qualitative insights, such as heatmaps, to understand where users engage the most and where they drop off.

User feedback : Collect direct user feedback through surveys, reviews, and direct interactions. Analyze indirect feedback by studying session replays to uncover the reasons behind user behavior. This qualitative feedback provides valuable insights into user emotions, motivations, and frustrations.

By combining quantitative data from analytics with qualitative insights from user feedback, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the user journey and make informed decisions to enhance the user experience and drive app improvements.

App user journey useful resources: Case studies, examples, user journey map templates

• User journey map guide with examples and free templates ( UXCam )
• User journey map examples ( UXtweak )
• 6 User journey map examples to enhance your UX ( Appcues )
• An introduction to the user journey for mobile apps ( Medium )
• The user journey: Onboarding ( Medium )
• The user journey: Activation and commitment ( Medium )
• The user journey: Disengagement and reactivation ( Medium )

Well, we did it—we just covered almost everything there is to cover about app user journeys. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey and will forgive me for the cheekiness.

Before we go, here’s your TL;DR:

Importance of user journey : The app user journey is a critical concept and an important step in app development. It involves mapping out the steps users take to interact with your app and achieve their goals. The idea behind mapping out the user journey is to create better user experiences and increase user satisfaction, which ultimately leads to greater app success.

Benefits of the app user journey : User journeys offer several advantages, including enhanced understanding of your user base, valuable analytics insights, improved user experiences, precise targeting of the right users, and increased user retention and engagement. The value of a well-thought-out user journey map cannot be overstated—it’s the difference between a successful app and a failed one.

Key stages in a user journey : While user journeys vary depending on the app itself and its target audience, they typically encompass seven key stages: app discovery and awareness, app download/UA, app onboarding and exploration, in-app engagement and reuse, monetization, re-purchase, and retention and user loyalty. Each stage comes with its own specificities and should be carefully optimized for maximum success.

Mapping out the user journey : To optimize your app experience, you should start by defining clear goals and then create detailed user personas based on thorough research and user feedback. After that, you should identify all touchpoints and channels where users interact with your app.

Having done all of this, it’s time to finally create your user journey map or rather maps . There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to user journeys, and each user persona will need a dedicated user journey map. Mapping out the journey and testing it yourself helps highlight and eliminate potential roadblocks and obstacles.

Ongoing optimization : App user journeys are an ongoing effort, you can’t simply create your user journey maps and stop at that. Continuously seek ways to enhance the user experience and cater to different types of users. A/B testing, data collection, and analysis are essential components of this ongoing improvement effort.

By understanding and effectively utilizing the app user journey, you can create a more user-centric and successful app that resonates with your target audience.

About the author

Nayden Tafradzhiyski

Nayden is an Editor and Content Manager at Business of Apps.

User Journeys vs. User Flows

April 16, 2023 2023-04-16

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User journeys and user flows are both UX tools that capture how people accomplish goals with certain products or services. They share some similar traits. Both user journeys and user flows are:

• Used during design ideation or evaluation activities for the purpose of understanding and optimizing experience.
• Structured around a user goal and examined from the perspective of the user or customer (not a company or product).
• Captured and communicated via UX- mapping methods .

Their main distinction, however, is the level of detail and focus for each: User journeys describe a user’s holistic, high-level experience across channels and over time. User flows zoom in to describe a set of specific, discrete interactions that make up a common user pathway through a product.

In This Article:

What is a user journey, what is a user flow, combining user journeys and user flows, comparison: user journeys vs. user flows.

User journey: (Or customer journey) A scenario-based sequence of the steps that a user takes in order to accomplish a high-level goal with a company or product, usually across channels and over time.

The underlying goal of a user journey is high-level. Describing the journey will involve understanding the experience of a user across many points of interaction, because, in a journey, users might use with multiple channels or sources of information.

Consider a new-patient journey as an example. For any person finding and evaluating a new doctor, there will be many touchpoints  over a long time (days, weeks, or months): researching information on the practice’s website, calling to schedule an appointment, receiving email communications, visiting the physical office, accessing information in a patient portal, and following up via phone if necessary.  

Because of the complexity of the journey, contextualizing these actions with information about users’ emotions and thoughts can be useful for analyzing and optimizing the experience.

Journey maps are a common artifact for visualizing journeys, as they are narrative and descriptive. Effective journey maps don’t just relay the steps taken to achieve a goal; they tell a user-centered story about the process.

The best research methods for journey mapping are usually context methods , such as field studies and diary studies , which uncover longer-term user goals and behaviors in the moment. These methods can be combined with user interviews to uncover first-hand frustrations and needs.

Definition: A user flow is a set of interactions that describe the typical or ideal set of steps needed to accomplish a common task performed with a product.

Compared to a user journey, the underlying goal of a user flow is much more granular, and the focus is narrowed to a specific objective within one product.

Some appropriate goals to capture in user flows might be: purchasing a tennis racket on a sporting goods site, signing up for email updates on a credit-score-monitoring application, or updating a profile picture on a company’s intranet. These goals can be accomplished in the short-term (minutes or hours, at the most), and with a relatively limited set of interactions.

User flows can be represented with artifacts such as low-fidelity wireflows , simple flow charts, or task diagrams. These maps capture key user steps and system responses; they do not contextualize the process with emotions and thoughts like a journey map does.

The best research method for obtaining the data to map user flows is usability testing , which allows us to watch users interacting directly with the product in directed scenarios. As with user journeys, tools that capture analytics (e.g., click heatmaps) are a useful secondary source of insights.

It’s often useful to capture both user journeys and user flows and combine them to understand both macro- and micro-level views of experience. User flows can be thought of as a deep dive into specific areas of the high-level user journey.

For example, let’s go back to the high-level activities that make up the new-patient journey described earlier. Some of those activities entail using digital products (e.g., researching information on the practice website, accessing results in the patient portal). By documenting the associated user flows for these goals, we could further understand the micro-level experience in context of the greater journey.

Unfortunately, most teams do not have systematic processes in place to connect these views, due to gaps in internal team structures, lack of holistic measurement programs, or plain lack of capacity and competency to do the work.

The main differences between user journeys and user flows are captured in the table below:

To determine whether a user journey or a user flow is best for your specific context, consider the following questions:

• Does your user process involve more than one channel or more than one, known product (e.g., your company’s website)? User journeys are best for capturing activities dispersed over multiple channels; user flows are well-suited for interactions within one product.
• Can users generally accomplish the goal in minutes or hours, at the most, or will they need to complete activities over days, weeks, or months? User journeys are better for communicating activities over longer periods of time; user flows are better for relatively short-term goals.
• Will it be critical to understand not only the actions but the emotions and thoughts of users across more complex decision-making? User journeys capture those; user flows are limited to sequences of steps, with no additional information about users’ emotional states.

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The User's Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love Paperback – March 22, 2016

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Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.

• Print length 160 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Rosenfeld Media
• Publication date March 22, 2016
• Dimensions 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rosenfeld Media; 1st edition (March 22, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1933820314
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1933820316
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
• #118 in Industrial Product Design
• #245 in User Experience & Website Usability
• #439 in Industrial & Product Design

About the author

Donna lichaw.

Donna Lichaw is an executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling books, The User’s Journey and much-awaited follow-up, The Leader’s Journey. She helps high-growth CEOs, tech executives, and senior leadership teams transform their leadership so that they can more effectively scale their business growth and make a positive impact in the world.

Donna works with superheroes and teams of superheroes at companies like Google, Disney, Twitter, Microsoft, Mailchimp, and Adobe, as well as a plethora of high-growth startups and nonprofits. She has been on the adjunct faculty at New York University, Northwestern University, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts.

When she’s not working, you can find her hanging out in Brooklyn, NY, with her partner, Erica, superkids, Max and Micah, superdog, Ralph, and supercat, Shadow.

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UserJourneys

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In Azure Active Directory B2C, custom policies are designed primarily to address complex scenarios. For most scenarios, we recommend that you use built-in user flows . If you've not done so, learn about custom policy starter pack in Get started with custom policies in Active Directory B2C .

User journeys specify explicit paths through which a policy allows a relying party application to obtain the desired claims for a user. The user is taken through these paths to retrieve the claims that are to be presented to the relying party. In other words, user journeys define the business logic of what an end user goes through as the Azure AD B2C Identity Experience Framework processes the request.

These user journeys can be considered as templates available to satisfy the core need of the various relying parties of the community of interest. User journeys facilitate the definition of the relying party part of a policy. A policy can define multiple user journeys. Each user journey is a sequence of orchestration steps.

To define the user journeys supported by the policy, a UserJourneys element is added under the top-level TrustFrameworkPolicy element of the policy file.

The UserJourneys element contains the following element:

The UserJourney element contains the following attribute:

The UserJourney element contains the following elements:

AuthorizationTechnicalProfiles

Suppose a user has completed a UserJourney and obtained an access or an ID token. To manage additional resources, such the UserInfo endpoint , the user must be identified. To begin this process, the user must present the access token issued earlier as proof that they were originally authenticated by a valid Azure AD B2C policy. A valid token for the user must always be present during this process to ensure the user is allowed to make this request. The authorization technical profiles validate the incoming token and extract claims from the token.

The AuthorizationTechnicalProfiles element contains the following element:

The AuthorizationTechnicalProfile element contains the following attribute:

The following example shows a user journey element with authorization technical profiles:

OrchestrationSteps

A user journey is represented as an orchestration sequence that must be followed through for a successful transaction. If any step fails, the transaction fails. These orchestration steps reference both the building blocks and the claims providers allowed in the policy file. Any orchestration step that is responsible to show or render a user experience also has a reference to the corresponding content definition identifier.

Orchestration steps can be conditionally executed based on preconditions defined in the orchestration step element. For example, you can check to perform an orchestration step only if a specific claim exists, or if a claim is equal or not to the specified value.

To specify the ordered list of orchestration steps, an OrchestrationSteps element is added as part of the policy. This element is required.

The OrchestrationSteps element contains the following element:

The OrchestrationStep element contains the following attributes:

The OrchestrationStep element can contain the following elements:

Preconditions

Orchestration steps can be conditionally executed based on preconditions defined in the orchestration step. The Preconditions element contains a list of preconditions to evaluate. When the precondition evaluation is satisfied, the associated orchestration step skips to the next orchestration step.

Azure AD B2C evaluates the preconditions in list order. The order-based preconditions allows you set the order in which the preconditions are applied. The first precondition that satisfied overrides all the subsequent preconditions. The orchestration step is executed only if all of the preconditions are not satisfied.

The Preconditions element contains the following element:

Precondition

The Precondition element contains the following attributes:

The Precondition elements contains the following elements:

Each precondition evaluates a single claim. There are two types of preconditions:  

ClaimsExist - Specifies that the actions should be performed if the specified claims exist in the user's current claim bag.

ClaimEquals - Specifies that the actions should be performed if the specified claim exists, and its value is equal to the specified value. The check performs a case-sensitive ordinal comparison. When checking Boolean claim type, use True , or False .

If the claim is null or uninitialized, the precondition is ignored, whether the ExecuteActionsIf is true , or false . As a best practice, check both that the claim exists, and equals to a value.

An example scenario would be to challenge the user for MFA if the user has MfaPreference set to Phone . To perform this conditional logic, check if the MfaPreference claim exists, and also check the claim value equals to Phone . The following XML demonstrates how to implement this logic with preconditions.  

Preconditions examples

The following preconditions checks whether the user's objectId exists. In the user journey, the user has selected to sign in using local account. If the objectId exists, skip this orchestration step.

The following preconditions checks whether the user signed in with a social account. An attempt is made to find the user account in the directory. If the user signs in or signs up with a local account, skip this orchestration step.

Preconditions can check multiple preconditions. The following example checks whether 'objectId' or 'email' exists. If the first condition is true, the journey skips to the next orchestration step.

Claims provider selection

Claims provider selection lets users select an action from a list of options. The identity provider selection consists of a pair of two orchestration steps:

• Buttons - It starts with type of ClaimsProviderSelection , or CombinedSignInAndSignUp that contains a list of options a user can choose from. The order of the options inside the ClaimsProviderSelections element controls the order of the buttons presented to the user.
• Actions - Followed by type of ClaimsExchange . The ClaimsExchange contains list of actions. The action is a reference to a technical profile, such as OAuth2 , OpenID Connect , claims transformation , or self-asserted . When a user clicks on one of the buttons, the corresponding action is executed.

The ClaimsProviderSelections element contains the following element:

The ClaimsProviderSelections element contains the following attributes:

The ClaimsProviderSelection element contains the following attributes:

Claims provider selection example

In the following orchestration step, the user can choose to sign in with Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Google, or a local account. If the user selects one of the social identity providers, the second orchestration step executes with the selected claim exchange specified in the TargetClaimsExchangeId attribute. The second orchestration step redirects the user to the social identity provider to complete the sign-in process. If the user chooses to sign in with the local account, Azure AD B2C stays on the same orchestration step (the same sign-up page or sign-in page) and skips the second orchestration step.

ClaimsExchanges

The ClaimsExchanges element contains the following element:

The ClaimsExchange element contains the following attributes:

JourneyList

The JourneyList element contains the following element:

The Candidate element contains the following attributes:

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Journey's frontman vows to quit band pending online fan vote.

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Article content

Journey’s lead singer is asking the band’s fan base to hold on to that feelin’ after a recent trouble-filled performance at the Rock in Rio Festival in Brazil.

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Journey's frontman vows to quit band pending online fan vote Back to video

Arnel Pineda, the classic rock band’s Filipino frontman recruited from YouTube, recently found video footage circulating online that showed him having issues with his ear monitors and struggling to reach the right notes during last week’s show in Rio de Janeiro.

The vocalist, who has been with Journey since 2007, was so affected by his performance and subsequent criticism that he offered an online poll for fans to determine his future with the rock band.

“No one more than me in this world feels so devastated about this,” Pineda wrote on Facebook. “It’s really amazing how 1 thousand right things you have done will be forgotten just cause of THIS.

“Mentally and emotionally, I’ve suffered already, and I’m still suffering … but I’ll be ok.”

The singer is asking the Don’t Stop Believin’ band’s fans to vote on how the group should move forward after the forgettable Rio show.

“So here’s the deal here now,” he wrote. “I am offering you a chance now (especially those who’s hated me and never liked me from the very beginning) to simply text GO or STAY right here.

“If GO reaches 1million … I’m stepping out for good … are you game folks?”

He thanked “all of the fans and friends” who believed in him since Day 1.

Journey guitarist Neal Schon discovered Pineda on YouTube years ago. He encouraged his bandmate to forget the haters.

“Arnel dont listen to these blogs,” he wrote online. “They are all bought. You’ve kicked ass!”

The band’s original lead singer Steve Perry — known as “The Voice” — left the band for good in the late 1990s.

Journey, whose others major hits include Faithfully , Open Arms and Wheel in the Sky , recruited Steve Augeri as the new frontman and he left in 2006 due to vocal issues.

Pineda was flown to the U.S. from Manila to join the band in 2007.

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