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Journey Mapping

Add journey mapping to your solution toolbox.

• “Relationship Design” - creation of experiences that foster ongoing engagement, strengthening connections between people, companies, and communities
• Journey Mapping is a told to help make this happen.
• Steps or activities a customer/user takes to accomplish a goal
• Challenges they face accomplishing it
• People they interact with
• Touchpoints and channels (ex: devices, apps) they use as they accomplish a goal
• Feelings, thoughts, reactions during the journey
• Customer enrolls
• Customer calls in with a question, requesting service
• Service rep opens a request for service and sends them an email confirmation, then checks the customer’s service history
• Service rep provides the service
• Customer’s record is updated and reflected in an online portal, viewable by the customer
• For solutions based on Salesforce, admins, architects, designers, developers, marketers etc all have a stake in mapping out the customer journey for a new feature - workshops with a cross-functional team are necessary.
• Better team alignment - helps different teams (sales, service, design, etc) speak in a common language about customer
• Promotes strategic thinking - enabling conversations about best allocation of company resources for highest impact
• Deeper understanding of customer pain points - expose gaps in a flow, moments of vulnerability or dissatisfaction for customers
• Increase empathy for audience’s experience
• Strong case for innovation - discover what matters to customers and how to innovate to make that happen
• Guide to measuring impact - model how current customer experience will change, and analyze each change’s potential for impact, model new experiences before they are designed
• A journey map: illustrates the customer’s experience and challenges when accomplishing tasks using your product/service.
• A journey map helps with cross-team alignment and increases empathy.

Define Intention and Audience

• Business Objectives - ie, “why you’re doing it”
• Impacted Audience - ie, who will be most impacted or best served by the experience
• Create a differentiated customer experience
• Acquire new customers
• Increase customer’s use of a product/service
• Integrate a new feature/service
• Increase efficiency/effectiveness of product/service
• Improve completion rate of a specific task/goal
• Improve service quality and reduce calls to support/service
• Example of correct scope: I want to purchase a technology solution that helps us automate service processes
• Segment of customers (customers with field service fleets)
• Employees and partners (job applicants, consultants supporting new product line)
• Customer’s customers (retail customers ordering online)
• Submit an application
• Speak with a recruiter
• Have interviews with hiring manager/team
• Wait for the offer
• Receive the offer
• Negotiate the offer
• Accept the offer
• Attend first day orientation
• Onboard for first 90 days
• Access new hire support for first 180 days
• Only build a journey map if you have a clear understanding of the customer/user, built on research
• Important to find the right scope for a journey map because it helps ensure you can track success with reasonable metrics, and it helps set the right boundaries to protect everyone’s time
• When deciding whose journey to focus on, you should consider who’s involved in meeting the business objective and who influences the experience.

Start Your Journey Map

• Phases - distinct stages of an experience. Ex: awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, advocacy
• Actions - what the customer/user does
• Thoughts - what the customer/user thinks
• Feelings - how the customer/user is feeling
• Touchpoints - where your brand, product or service comes into play. Times where the organization and the user get in touch
• Context - environmental, social, and time factors important to the customer/user’s ability to reach their goal
• Opportunities - where and how you can have the most impact by reducing pain or reinforcing strength
• Write down all your ideas, specifically each activity and decision point, on individual notes
• Group activities into phases based on mindset or context change
• Bring in collaborators - many teams make an impact on the customer at different points their interaction. Make sure stakeholders from all teams are represented.
• Know your customer, are generative (enjoy brainstorming), are optimists and realists, bring diversity
• Virtual Workshop Logistics - four sessions, 2 hours each. Prompt participants to do prep work ahead of time. Use a virtual whiteboarding tool
• In-Person Workshop Logistics - entire day of collaboration. Find a quiet place where participants will not be distracted.
• Plan to have many multi-colored sticky notes, markers, foam core boards, voting dots, colored tape to create grids
• The business challenge
• Users/customers you’re serving
• Work done so far
• Description of the participant’s role as collaborators in the journey mapping process
• Set of boards that are needed: #1 Journey map itself #2-n. Drill down into each section
• Its best practice not to draft a full journey map before getting feedback. Instead, it should be created collaboratively from the get-go.
• Its best to invite people who like coming up with new ideas to the journey mapping workshop.

Run a Journey Mapping Workshop

• Do the phases and actions resonate as true to life?
• Did we miss anything?
• Did we include anything unnecessary?
• Participants should review research material for relevant customer quotes, feedback and other insights
• Step 1: Cluster - group insights based on similar or related themes and ideas.
• At this stage, any ideas/solutions for the opportunities section should be noted in a “parking lot” - a blank board in the corner typically.
• Does it read as a coherent story? Can you picture a real person having this experience? Which parts are most important to the customer? Do any feel extraneous/misplaced?
• Ex: “Visualize the shipping route and package tracking,” “Engage in social media with strategic purpose”
• Moments that matter most to the customer
• Metrics you can improve
• Places where your organization can contribute to the community/world
• How well they satisfy business objectives using current capabilities
• Eliminate opportunities that represent short-term gains at the expense of long-term relationships; they’re ultimately bad for your business
• You synthesize ideas by clustering insights based on related themes and ideas and draft phases based on these clusters
• Opportunities can be a mix of vague and specific goals

Craft Your Journey Map

• At this point all the pieces are in place: customer research, draft of phases and activities, insights of colleagues
• What’s a one-sentence intro?
• What’s a summary?
• What’s your point of view on the best steps to take first?
• What do you want people to take away from it?
• What if they see it when you’re not available to explain it?
• What if they only have a few minutes to spend with it?

• In journey above, note customer’s picture and story added to the top along with Persona Key Facts.
• What are the security, reliability, support, and accessibility implications?
• What could this idea mean for wellbeing/relationships?
• What would it mean if everyone in the world were using it? Could there be negative broad societal impact?
• The idea of a consequence scan is to help ensure that any innovation is responsible and builds strong relationships with your customers and community, both of which are foundational to business success.
• Adding story and visual elements to your journey map helps make it more readable
• A consequence scan helps improve your journey map by helping you uncover unintended consequences and how to mitigate them

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every interaction a customer has with a brand along their customer journey. It tells the story of the customer’s experience as they progress through all the touchpoints between customer and organisation, from initial contact and purchasing to the ultimate goal of long-term brand loyalty.

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What we will cover:

Why is customer journey mapping so important for the customer experience, what are the benefits of a customer journey map, steps for getting started with customer journey mapping, what to consider when building a customer journey map, how is a customer journey map used, why customer journey mapping is worth the time investment.

• What is Customer Journey Mapping?: Key Facts & FAQs

On the surface, a customer’s journey may appear straightforward: your company offers a product or service, the customer hears about it and buys it. Once you dig deeper, however, customer journeys can quickly become complex. There are a number of stages within a customer journey , starting with awareness and ending, if all goes well, with the customer becoming an advocate for your brand.

Where it gets tricky is that each stage is likely to have a number of customer touchpoints, including:

• Social media campaigns
• Word-of-mouth referrals
• Customer service enquiries
• Above-the-line campaigns

Each touchpoint is a potential “customer moment of truth”: a key moment in the customer journey where the brand has the opportunity to make a positive impression.

A customer journey map is a powerful tool for helping companies evaluate the quality of the experience the customer receives at each touchpoint. To ensure that no interaction or potential customer slips through the net, it is important for every touchpoint and interaction to be mapped.

With the above in mind, here are a few of the advantages that customer journey mapping can offer your organisation:

• Achieving an objective perspective on your sales process.
• Identifying discrepancies between the customer experience desired by your customers and the one they actually receive.
• Understanding where and how different groups of customers interact with your brand as they move through the sales funnel.
• Helping you determine whether the customer journey is logically ordered.
• Gaining an understanding of how broader internal circumstances impact on the customer’s experience.

An objective, thorough, and comprehensive customer journey will give you a solid foundation for customer service success. 

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While many brands are aware of the concept of customer journey mapping as a way of capturing customer experience across touchpoints, many smaller businesses are reticent to actually attempt it. They perceive it as something abstract and overwhelming, when in reality, it involves a series of logical steps based on understanding your customer and collecting relevant data.

Step 1: Gather Existing Research

Effective research is the foundation you need to build an accurate customer journey map. Now, you might be wondering why this is necessary, since you probably already have plenty of information about your users or customers. The research aspect of creating a customer journey map is often met with resistance within an organisation, which is why compiling existing research can be a good and broadly agreeable starting point. The next step is to figure out how relevant this research really is, which requires you to drill down into your audience.

Step 2: Use the Customer Persona as a Starting Point

Dividing your target audience into separate personas can help you gain a more nuanced view of how each moment of truth will affect a customer’s brand perception. Begin by selecting a segment of your audience that is particularly pivotal to your business goals and try to answer some key questions: 1) Where is the person in his or her customer lifecycle (acquisition, onboarding, retention, advocacy)?

2) Within this stage, can you pinpoint precisely what you need from the customer (e.g. sharing a piece of content)? You could also look at broader questions, such as the customer’s daily routine, challenges, professional background and preferred content types.

Once you’ve answered these, you’re in a position to begin crafting the story.

Step 3: Collect Relevant Data

Armed with the knowledge above, you can set about collecting data with confidence. How, when and where does your persona engage with certain content? Your objective is to draw up a comprehensive picture of how they interact with your brand. There are two ways of doing this: analytical and anecdotal research:  

Analytical research :  The most obvious source of data about users is website analytics, which can reveal how a user was referred to you, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed, and which links they clicked on your website. Where applicable, it can also reveal where they gave up.

However, be sure to understand this data for what it really means; for example, a lot of clicks might not indicate a happy user, but rather one who finds your website uninve.

Search data reveals what they are most often looking for, while social analytics tools can track what users are saying about your brand. You could also track information such as email workflows and open rates for email campaigns.

Anecdotal (qualitative) research : Anecdotes of user experiences are the other side of the story. Sometimes, they might be required to round out your analytical research; other times, they could provide a starting point for selecting the most right analytical studies (e.g. for explaining a certain user reaction).

If you can’t get customers to sit down and talk, there are other ways of accessing their opinions - analysing reviews or online comments, for example, which can be highly insightful.

You could also interview the people who have the most regular contact with them, such as salespeople and support staff; however, keep in mind that no one individual will see the entire journey, and as such, no one person’s opinion should be allowed to “steamroll” others into submission.

Focusing on your primary customer persona(s) and making educated guesses for the rest will help to save time and costs, though you should never lose sight of what is an assumption and what is supported by fact. Once you are confident that your research has provided you with a solid base, the easiest way to kick off the practical part of the process is to hold an internal workshop.

Step 4: Initiate an Internal Workshop

It is important that the workshop is viewed as a practical tool for determining what customers want, not a training exercise. Employees must be prepared to think like a customer, and should be introduced to this concept in advance. Both the analytical data and customer input play an important role in the workshop context, since they prevent staff members from presenting their perceptions as hard facts and engendering an “inside looking out” bias. Ultimately, the aim of the internal workshop is to look at all the data you’ve gathered and summarise and represent it as a series of stages or steps. Once you’ve got your customer journey on paper, you can start thinking about how best to represent it visually.

A customer journey map has no set form, and there are no rights or wrongs. It could be an infographic with a timeline of the user’s experience, a storyboard or video. The important thing is to focus on function over form. Use whatever form most clearly communicates your particular customer story.

• While all touchpoints are important, some are more important than others. For example, print media may likely be a more important part of the “awareness” stage for an insurance company than social media. In turn, print media may not form part of the “awareness” stage for a digital service at all. This will affect the ways these two customer journeys are presented.
• The map should always be kept relatively simple and should always contain statistical and anecdotal evidence to highlight user questions and feelings at each stage.
• Avoid getting bogged down in the many variations of a route a user might take; it’s not supposed to be a detailed study.
• Use tools that show the journey clearly . You can also consider getting a graphic designer to make sure that the information is presented clearly and the key touchpoints are visible at-a-glance.

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As mentioned above, one of the key benefits of a customer journey map is to help you identify gaps in the customer experience that are disjointed or challenging for the customer. These could include gaps between...

• Devices where the user is prevented from switching seamlessly between phone, desktop computer, laptop and tablet when completing a task
• Departments  which might cause a user to give up on the purchase completely
• Channels where context might not be preserved when moving from social media to email, for example

This information can, in turn, be used to enable your organisation to establish effective development priorities, concentrating your expenditure where it will have the greatest positive impact. Sealing these gaps will allow the customer to achieve what they want more quickly and prevent the brand being viewed as a siloed organisation - which is increasingly important as customers grow accustomed to interconnectedness in other areas of their lives. There are many other ways to use customer journey maps to create customer benefits, including identifying discrepancies between promised and actual customer experiences and safeguarding your future in an increasingly digital and complex world .

That’s a lot of info!

Here’s what you should take away from this article:.

• What is a customer journey? A customer journey is the complete set of experiences that customers go through when interacting with an organisation.
• What is customer journey mapping? Customer journey mapping is the process of describing the customer journey in visual format.
• Why is customer journey mapping so important? A customer journey map helps companies evaluate the quality of the experience their customers receive at each touchpoint. This provides better understanding of what your customers expect, and the reality they encounter. 
• What are the benefits of customer journey mapping? Customer journey mapping provides an objective view of your sale process and helps identify process gaps that affect customer experience.  
• How to start with customer journey mapping? Start by collecting the right data. Use personas together with analytical and anecdotal research to start mapping touchpoints and interactions. 
• How do you use a customer journey map? Use your customer journey map to identify gaps in customer experience across devices, departments and channels. Initiate change to seal those gaps.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a customer journey map, why do we need customer journey mapping, how do you create a customer journey map, get started with a free trial.

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Journey Mapping in Design Thinking: Best Practices & Tools

Table of contents, what is journey mapping, the importance of journey mapping in design thinking, start with clear objectives, gather qualitative and quantitative data, involve a cross-section of stakeholders, visualize the entire user journey, focus on the emotional journey, use clear, accessible visuals, iterate and evolve, translate insights into actionable strategies, share and communicate findings, reflect and learn, tools and techniques for journey mapping, incomplete or biased data, stakeholder alignment, overwhelming complexity, keeping the journey map updated, translating insights into action.

Ever wondered what it feels like to walk a mile in your users’ shoes? 

Journey mapping, a cornerstone of design thinking, offers just that opportunity, providing a vivid narrative of the user’s experience from their perspective. This immersive tool goes beyond traditional data analysis, inviting designers and stakeholders into the user’s world, where every interaction, emotion, and decision is mapped out in detail. By charting the user’s course from initial engagement to long-term loyalty, journey mapping reveals not just the what and how of user interactions, but more importantly, the why. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the best practices and how to create journey maps that not only illuminate the user experience but also inspire innovative solutions that truly meet user needs. Let’s dig in!

At its core, journey mapping is a strategic framework that captures the story of a user’s experience with a product or service from start to finish. This narrative is not a mere chronological account but a rich tapestry woven from the user’s interactions, emotions, and decisions at various touchpoints. 

Through visualizing the user’s journey, this tool illuminates the critical moments that define the user experience, offering a unique lens through which to view the product or service. It’s a tool that transcends traditional analytics, providing a holistic view of the user experience that is both insightful and actionable.

There are typically four types of journey maps:

• Current State: These maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience with your company, ideal for ongoing improvement.
• Day in the Life: This type offers a broader lens into customers’ daily lives, identifying potential unmet needs.
• Future State: These maps help visualize potential future interactions with your company, aiding in strategic planning.
• Service Blueprint: Starting with a simplified journey map, this type layers on the factors responsible for delivering the experience, such as people, policies, and technologies

Journey mapping is more than a tool; it’s a compass that guides the design thinking process towards user-centric solutions. It brings to light the intricate web of needs, desires, and frustrations that shape user behavior, offering a foundation upon which to build empathetic and effective design strategies. 

A Forrester study highlighted the significance of customer experience, showing that companies excelling in this area outperform their counterparts, with CX leaders experiencing significantly higher stock price growth and total returns compared to CX laggards and even the S&P 500 index over a one-year period.

The insights gleaned from these journey maps extend beyond mere problem-solving, fostering a culture of innovation that places the user at the heart of every decision. This alignment of cross-functional teams around a shared understanding of the user experience is a catalyst for change, driving the development of products and services that resonate on a deeply personal level.

Best Practices for Journey Mapping

To ensure your journey mapping efforts are both effective and efficient, consider the following best practices as your guide:

Before diving into journey mapping, it’s crucial to define what you aim to achieve. Are you looking to enhance the user experience, streamline the user journey, or identify new service opportunities? Employ frameworks like SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals to provide a structured approach to defining what you want to achieve. This clarity ensures your journey mapping efforts are aligned with broader business goals and provides a concrete starting point for your project.

A journey map is only as good as the data it’s based on. To create an effective journey map, it’s crucial to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. As per insights from the Nielsen Norman Group , this combination enriches your understanding of user behavior and motivations by blending numerical data with the nuanced context of personal user experiences. Collect a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to gain a well-rounded understanding of the user experience. User interviews, ethnographic research, and direct observations provide deep insights into user emotions and motivations, while analytics and usage data offer objective measures of user behavior and interaction patterns.

Involving a diverse group of stakeholders can significantly enhance the quality of your journey map. Case studies, such as those from the Project Management Institute , illustrate how diverse stakeholder involvement leads to more successful outcomes by incorporating a range of perspectives and expertise. This collaborative approach ensures that the journey map reflects a holistic understanding of the user experience.

Map out the entire user journey, from initial awareness through to post-purchase behavior and long-term loyalty. Consider the concept of “micro-moments” introduced by Google. This comprehensive view helps identify not only the immediate pain points and delights but also the broader context of the user experience, revealing deeper insights into user needs and opportunities for innovation.

Beyond the physical or digital steps a user takes, pay close attention to the emotional journey. It is as important as the physical or digital steps a user takes. Documenting how users feel at each stage of their journey can uncover hidden pain points and moments of delight that might not be obvious from actions alone. These emotional insights are often the key to creating truly engaging and satisfying user experiences.

Your journey map should be easy to understand at a glance, with a clear structure and visual cues that guide the viewer through the user journey. Utilize user-friendly visualization tools like Lucidchart or Adobe XD to create your journey maps. These tools offer features that facilitate clear, intuitive representations of the user journey, making your maps accessible to stakeholders with varying levels of expertise.

A journey map is not a one-time project but a living document that should evolve as you gather more data and as your product or service changes. Regularly revisiting and updating the journey map ensures that it remains relevant and continues to provide valuable insights into the user experience.

To translate journey map insights into actionable strategies, consider using prioritization methodologies like the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) scoring system. This helps in deciding which insights to act upon first, based on their potential impact, your confidence in achieving them, and the ease of implementation.

Share your journey map and its findings with the broader team and stakeholders to ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of the user experience. Use the journey map as a communication tool to foster empathy for users and to align team efforts around user-centric goals.

Finally, use the journey mapping process as an opportunity to reflect on your design thinking practices and learn from both the successes and challenges. Each journey map can provide valuable lessons that inform not only the current project but also future initiatives.

Now that we’ve explored the best practices for journey mapping, let’s delve into the tools and techniques that can facilitate this process. 

The choice of tools can significantly impact the efficiency and effectiveness of your journey mapping efforts, enabling you to capture and analyze user experiences in more depth.

• Digital Mapping Software: Platforms like UXPressia and Miro offer collaborative features and multimedia integration, making it easier to create, share, and iterate on journey maps.
• Workshops and Brainstorming: Engage cross-functional teams in interactive sessions using whiteboards or digital platforms to collectively map out user journeys, fostering creativity and team alignment.
• User Narratives and Storytelling: Craft compelling stories around user personas based on real interviews and research to bring the user experience to life for stakeholders.
• Customer Feedback: Utilize surveys and interviews to gather direct insights from users, enriching your journey map with authentic user perspectives.
• Analytics: Leverage tools like Google Analytics to obtain quantitative data on user behavior, identifying patterns and pain points in the user journey.
• Empathy Mapping: Complement journey maps with empathy maps to delve deeper into users’ thoughts and feelings, enhancing your understanding of their experiences.

By integrating these tools and techniques, you can create more nuanced and actionable journey maps, driving towards solutions that genuinely meet user needs.

Overcoming Common Challenges in Journey Mapping

The path to an effective journey map is fraught with challenges, from the elusive nature of complete data to the inherent biases that color our perceptions. Overcoming these obstacles requires a combination of rigor, openness, and creativity, ensuring that the journey map is not just a reflection of what we think we know, but a true representation of the user experience. 

One of the most significant challenges in journey mapping is ensuring the completeness and objectivity of the data collected. Relying on limited data sources or allowing personal biases to influence the mapping process can lead to an inaccurate representation of the user journey.

• Solution: Incorporating various data sources, such as customer feedback, surveys, analytics, and customer service records, can provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience. This approach enables the identification of pain points and opportunities for improvement, ensuring a more accurate representation of the customer journey

Getting all stakeholders on board and aligned with the findings and implications of the journey map can be challenging, especially in larger organizations with diverse interests.

• Solution: Engaging stakeholders early in the journey mapping process and maintaining clear communication about the benefits and findings of the journey mapping can foster alignment and buy-in across departments. Involving representatives from sales, marketing, customer service, and product development ensures that all perspectives are considered, making the journey map a collaborative effort that reflects the comprehensive customer experience .

The user journey can be incredibly complex, with numerous touchpoints and variables. Capturing and representing this complexity in a way that is both comprehensive and comprehensible can be daunting.

• Solution: Focusing on key stages and touchpoints that significantly impact the user experience is essential. Employing clear visuals and annotations can help convey complex information in an accessible manner, making it easier for teams to understand and act upon the insights gathered from the journey map​ .

As products, services, and user behaviors evolve, keeping the journey map current can be challenging, risking the map becoming outdated and less relevant.

• Solution: Treat the journey map as a living document that is regularly reviewed and updated. Establish a schedule for revisiting the journey map and adjusting it based on new insights, changes in the product/service, or shifts in user behavior.

Identifying insights from the journey map is one thing; translating these insights into actionable design improvements and strategic decisions is another.

• Solution: Prioritize insights based on their potential impact on the user experience and the organization’s strategic goals. Develop clear action plans for addressing these insights, assigning responsibility and setting timelines to ensure implementation.

Acknowledging and addressing these challenges can maximize the value of journey mapping in your design thinking process, leading to more insightful, user-centered design solutions.

As we venture forth, armed with the tools and techniques of journey mapping, we are reminded of the transformative power of walking in another’s shoes, of seeing the world through their eyes. It is in this profound connection that the true essence of design thinking is realized—not merely in the solutions we craft, but in the lives we touch and the experiences we enrich. 

Let this guide be a compass in your journey, illuminating paths not just to better products, but to a deeper understanding of the human experience itself.

• How detailed should a journey map be?

The level of detail in a journey map should strike a balance between comprehensiveness and clarity. While it’s important to capture the nuances of the user experience, the map should remain accessible and actionable, avoiding information overload that can obscure key insights.

• How do you choose which user persona to map?

Choosing a user persona for mapping involves identifying the segments of your audience that are most critical to your project’s success or those that represent significant opportunities or challenges. The selection process should be guided by strategic objectives, ensuring that the journey map focuses on areas of greatest impact.

• Can journey maps be used for services and digital products alike?

Journey maps are a versatile tool that can be applied across a wide range of contexts, from physical products and services to digital experiences. The fundamental principles of journey mapping—empathy, insight, and action—remain constant, regardless of the medium.

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Customer journey mapping: what, why, and how (+ free templates).

Hiking is a great form of exercise. 

I personally love going on a little jaunt through the woods, following a trail around a pond, and landing back at my car in a reasonable amount of time. 

In fact, most legitimate hiking trails come with a starting sign giving you basic information on how long the trail is, terrain difficulty, and usually includes a cute little map of the surrounding area. 

When you start off on your adventure, you follow a well-groomed path, with signs which point you in the right direction as you go, reminders of how much you've accomplished and how much is left to do.

All this information is aggregated and designed by helpful park management to ensure that everyone from casual walkers to experienced hikers knows what they're getting into so they stay aware of the situation. 

We've all seen the news report of the hiker that went off trail, got lost in the woods for a week, and was nearly eaten by a bear. 

The same guiding principles apply to SaaS companies. 

Teams map out the path their customers take with their product to ensure they have the tools and resources necessary to successfully finish their product hike. 

No one wants a prospect to end up lost and call up the support team for an emergency rescue from product failure.

No one ends up happy, and it's more likely than not that those customers will never return to your product. 

In this post, we'll break down what a customer journey map is, why it matters, and how you can make one to help users stay on a safe product trail.

Best of all, we put together some templates to help you blaze your own trail! 

What is a Customer Journey?

What is the path someone takes from never hearing about your company to becoming a power user, advocate, and growing LTV account?

The path they take is what we call the Customer Journey.

This includes everything from the initial awareness of your company to understanding your offering and how it benefits them through the sales and signing process, working with the success team, and expanding their product utilization.

You need to look at every interaction, across any channel, including every touchpoint and milestone, along the customer lifecycle.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

So, what exactly are customer journey maps? 

Simply put, they are visual representations of a customer's various interactions and touch points with a company or brand. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can understand their customers' needs, expectations, and pain points at each journey stage. This allows them to identify opportunities for improvement and create a more seamless and satisfying experience for the customer.

But customer journey maps aren't just about understanding the past - they also play a crucial role in planning for the future. With the help of customer journey analytics, businesses can use their journey maps to make data-driven decisions about where to focus their efforts and resources. And by creating customer personas, businesses can further tailor their approach to their target audience's specific needs and preferences.

In short, customer journey maps are a powerful tool for any business looking to drive digital transformation and improve the customer experience. By understanding and optimizing the journey, businesses can not only retain their current customers, but also attract new ones. So, it is really important to optimize a blog post on "What are Customer Journey Maps" to get to the #1 slot in search engines.

A customer journey visualizes the journey described above and how people interact with your brand, product, and/or service. 

At each stage in your map, you should ask these questions:

• What is the customer feeling (or thinking)?
• What actions are they taking? 
• What or where are they getting information?
• How do we move them to the next stage?

All touch points with your company - product, service, email, live chat, calls, social media, etc. - should be covered. 

This exercise aims to outline their motivations, key interactions prospects have, and the existing and potential product friction areas that arise.

How Does the Customer Journey Impact Customer Experience?

Although they're closely related, customer journey and  customer experience  are different. 

The customer journey is based on what customers  do  at each stage of their lifecycle, whereas customer experience refers to what they  feel  at each stage.

How does this actually play out in SaaS? 

Let's say you have a SaaS business offering a social media marketing tool for other businesses. 

The act of someone finding your website, doing a trial and/or getting a demo from sales, purchasing the tool, and getting the value of it would all be part of their   journey . 

Finding your website informative and easy to navigate, your trial and/or demo providing you the experience of the product's value, and the onboarding process that includes customer service and success teams that makes them feel valued would be part of their   experience .

What's the Difference Between the Customer Journey and the Customer Lifecycle?

Customer Journey and  Customer Lifecycle  are also closely related but distinct. 

The lifecycle is a pre-defined set of stages that all users and prospects pass. It identifies their interactions with your company and product, from first becoming aware to expansion or churn. 

This differs from a journey insofar as the former is a tool for statistical analysis (rates of conversion from one stage to the next), whereas the latter is a visual tool that helps teams build a better product experience. 

The lifecycle will often dictate a lot of  marketing strategy , especially when a Product-Led Growth GTM motion is in place.

These concepts will often look identical in touch points and stages, so having your Customer Lifecycle well-defined before creating your map will make the process much smoother. 

What Role Does Customer Lifecycle Play in Customer Journey Mapping?

As mentioned above, these two concepts are very similar, though they differ in how they are presented and for what purpose. 

It is crucial, however, to ensure that the stages in your lifecycle align with your map. 

There are several models for defining lifecycle stages - one being the "traditional" model and one emerging as the preferred option for companies that take a product-led approach. 

The "Traditional" Stages:

• Acquisition

Stages in the AARRR Model:

The stages in the AARRR model differ in number and naming convention:

• A cquisition (and/or Awareness)
• A ctivation

These two models differ in their ultimate goals. Whereas AARRR is focused on the end goal of increasing revenue, the traditional model focuses more on customer engagement and satisfaction. 

The AARRR model has become favored with the advent of increased visibility into customer insights and product usage data. 

Tools like Google Analytics were the predominant way of tracking behavior; these tools only looked at website engagement. 

Today, product data can be tied with other customer data in the CRM, billing, and other systems to create a more robust and actionable model for segmentation.

What are the Different Types of Customer Journey Maps?

Four types of maps are most often utilized when customer journey mapping:

1. Current State

This is the most common type of journey map used by companies. They focus on current customers' actions, thinking, and feeling as they engage with your product. 

You can use this map to drive incremental change and improvements since this journey tracks the existing relationship and pain point your customers have with your product.

2. Day in the Life

A day in the life map also covers the current journey but focuses on only one area of a customer's life. 

This is a slightly wider lens than the current state because it includes everything a customer does in that area, with and without your product. So this highlights any generalized pain points around a process you can use to create solutions for your product.

3. Future State

This map is about what future customers will think, feel, and experience using your product. 

Use a future state map to communicate your product vision, how that relates to your product roadmap and customer services, and future process improvements you plan to improve the customer experience.

4. Service Blueprint

Blueprint maps are a much more holistic look at the entire customer journey from the customer's perspective. 

These start with a basic map for current or future customer journeys. From there, you build out all the associated people, services, tools, and systems in place that are needed to support and achieve that particular journey. 

Blueprint maps can help identify embedded structural issues with the existing customer journey or help design needed systems to support a future customer journey.

With tech advances and increasingly complex products, the average customer journey is more than just mapping points A to B. 

Depending on the scope of your product, journeys may be a bit more time-consuming and harder to map, encompassing multiple communication channels and tools. 

With this in mind, mapping infographics has shifted to encompass multiple customer workflows and journeys for different product goals, using Google docs, post-it notes, and custom mapping software. 

But no matter how you decide to do it, the most important thing is that your team can understand the finished product.

Why is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

Customer journey mapping is important because you can improve the process once you've identified what customers do to achieve goals. 

Whether you're decreasing product friction, adding additional documentation, or implementing more direct communication channels, taking the time to understand and improve the journey will positively impact the overall customer experience. 

Here are a few of the benefits:

1. Allows you to be more proactive

The customer journey map is a roadmap to understanding the customer experience. It gives you insight into areas known to be positive experiences and others that may cause friction and frustration. 

Knowing these spots ahead of time allows your team to proactively plan for success.

For example, say you have a new customer completing onboarding for a build-your-own web design product. 

If your journey map shows that post-onboarding, customers submit a high volume of support tickets for one feature, it may be time to create new documentation and ensure your CSMs direct new customers to it before onboarding completion.

That way, your team provides a proactive solution to existing friction points to keep customers happy and drive product engagement.

2. Improves customer retention

One of the most critical items to analyze through the customer journey map are events or stages with high churn rates or low retention rates. 

Churn is a reflection of the value that your product is providing to customers. It costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain one, so you should always be working to improve the customer journey to retain the customer you already have.

For instance, if you have a low-paying tier and most customers use the product for a few months and then don't renew their contract, there's a problem. 

It's time to use the journey map to understand what customers expect of your product in that tier, what they actually receive in terms of functionality, and close any existing gaps.

Improving this experience would increase customer retention and provide opportunities for upselling to increase your overall  customer lifetime value .

3. Creates a customer-centric process

A  customer-centric approach  to doing business focuses on providing a positive customer experience both at the point of sale and after the sale to drive profit and gain a competitive advantage. 

This approach relies on identifying pressing customer needs or challenges and building the solution that resolves that pain.

A customer journey map provides an outline of where customer needs exist so that your team and company know what items to prioritize and focus on. 

There's a massive benefit in that because customer-centric companies focus so heavily on creating the best  customer experience  possible, they typically see  higher customer loyalty rates , lower churn rates, and higher customer satisfaction scores.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

The time and energy required to create a customer journey map will depend on the scope of your product, the type of map you're developing, and the customer segment you're looking to understand. 

However, the basic process involves five key steps:

1. Set specific goals

Before starting the journey mapping project, it's important to ensure the team is on the same page and has a clear goal they hope to accomplish. With this goal in hand, the relevant stakeholders can continuously return to it throughout the mapping process. 

To define your goal or goals, ask some of these questions:

• What are you trying to learn and accomplish? 
• What aspects of the customer experience are you going to highlight? 
• Which type of map are you going to use? 
• Is there one or multiple products involved? 
• What are the traits of the person you want to understand?

2. Research your personas

It can be helpful to base your journey maps around a persona representing your average or a key customer segment. 

Starting with a targeted persona allows teams to follow one journey through the product, focusing teams on an explicit experience.

These personas can be created based on interviews or demographic data, but the information should come from active customers only so you can identify factors that influence their decision to engage with your product, buy it, use it, issues they've had with it, etc. 

The end result of this should include age, industry, job title, professional goals, and product and service expectations.

3. Identify touchpoints

Once you've identified the type of map and general persona, it's time to create a behavior line to follow. 

This is every interaction your target persona has with your website, product, and customer service teams. 

When are they engaging with your company, and why? How often do they reach out, and via what channels? Is the frequency more or less than expected?

One thing to note is that the number of touchpoints will vary widely based on your product and desired experience. 

More complicated, later-stage products will likely have more touchpoints since there's more product to research and learn about, while smaller, earlier companies will likely have fewer touchpoints because their footprint is inherently smaller. 

Of course, neither is better or worse; it's just a difference between the company stage and product development.

Finding the touchpoints allows your team to find new ways to make the customer journey more efficient. With all the online avenues for interactions, it's important to account for options outside the most obvious: email, phone call, FAQ and support documentation, live chat, check-ins with CSMs, your website, blog, reviews, marketing ads, and social media channels.

While writing out this long list of every touchpoint may seem daunting, it's worth it. 

You may end up slimming it down later, but you'll realize pretty quickly how much your customers are being asked to navigate your product.

4. Analyze the current map

The key factors you're looking to understand and pull out of that long list of touchpoints are related to:

• The actions that customers are taking.
• The motivations behind those actions.
• What they hope to achieve by taking those actions. 
• The pain-points associated with those actions. 

If you can slim down the number of actions required to achieve one goal, you're improving sentiment and increasing the chance of conversions.

Let's say you have someone on your website whose goal is to subscribe to your blog. 

If the only option for them is to click the subscribe button for your blog is buried behind a bunch of web pages and then requires customers to fill out all their demographic information, chances are they're going to stop trying before they ever click subscribe. 

The number of actions required to achieve the goal is too high for the payoff. 

You're losing conversions that should be easy to obtain. 

5. Make improvements

After analyzing your map of the existing customer journey and finding areas for improvement, it's time to take stock and determine how change can be implemented. 

• What were the key pain and friction points identified? 
• What were potential solutions identified? 
• What resources or teams are required to provide each solution? 
• Which items are considered the highest priority and most immediately impactful to the customer experience?

Going back to the earlier blog subscription example, what does improvement look like? 

The number of actions to the goal of subscribing from the main was identified as too many. You could include "subscribe to our blog" at the bottom of the main webpage and in each blog post so that people navigating articles off google have more direct access. 

Moreover, if conversion numbers from views to subscribers are still low, lowering the demographic requirements on the actual subscription link down to just an email input may be worth lowering. 

This way, prospective customers have less work for higher gain, and your blog, and once invested in your blog, are more likely to check out your product as a solution.

Once you've outlined the customer journey on the map, you have your reference point to come back to. 

Your team should review the map fairly regularly, such as every month or quarterly, so that you can continually improve.

As you receive new feedback related to different journey stages, update the map. It should act as a living document and guidepost for your company.

Customer Journey Map Template

There are many customer journey mapping tools out there, but there's no need to invest significant resources to create a completely functional one for yourself.

Leveraging free tools like Google Sheets or Slides works just fine. 

To make things easier, we've put together a set of Customer Journey Map templates for you that takes all the insights we've gone through above and lets you plug in your own answers.

This set of templates takes each of the four types of maps discussed above and provides a customer journey map example for you to work with.

Take an hour or two out of your day, look at the customer journey map examples that are provided, and think about how the experience user experience of your current customers and the process they went through from initial awareness through active usage. 

Put yourself in their shoes, and try to view their entire journey from their point of view.

Remember to understand the customer pain points as they exist today.

Leverage customer behavior in your product to identify these pain points, and look for signals that preceded things like churn or low CSAT and NPS scores.

But the journey mapping process is not only about the "current state" of things; you also have to think about your potential customer. 

At which customer touchpoint are they going to experience friction? How can you make it a better experience for them?

There's no better time to start than right now, so get after it! 

You can get your free customer journey map template here. 

Don't forget to share!

Mark Lerner

Head of Marketing @ Parative, the Customer Behavior Platform. SaaS enthusiast, B2B Marketing Specialist, Startup Survivalist. Dad x2.

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

When I was a kid, I remember watching my parents switch between different credit cards to get the best rewards for a particular purchase. They almost always pulled out the American Express first because (as they explained to me) the base reward rate was higher than even the sector-specific perks offered by other cards. Twenty years later, when I decided to get a high-end credit card, Amex was the first one that came to mind.

Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.

Table of contents: 

What is a customer journey map?

Think back to any recent purchase of your own, and try to trace your own customer journey:

When and where was your first contact with the product or service?

How many channels of communication with the company did you have available?

How was the contact you had, if any? Was it personal or formulaic?

Were your problems, if any, solved? If so, were they solved in a timely manner?

What do you now know about the brand besides the product or service itself?

The customer journey vs. the user journey vs. the buyer journey

What's the difference between the customer, user, and buyer journeys?

The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey. 

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Here are the main benefits of the customer journey mapping process:

Touchpoint optimization: With a clear understanding of what your touchpoints are and where they occur, you can track and adjust them based on how they perform.

Enhanced customer experience insights: Through customer profiling and a better overview of all the touchpoints that make a journey, you can acquire more precise and actionable customer experience insights.

Improved product development: Thoughtful and intentional journey planning creates more opportunities for meaningful customer feedback, which gives businesses better information to improve their product.

Customer journey map template

The customer journey map includes additional details within each phase (which I'll discuss in more detail later) to help you strategically plan your customers' touchpoints and move them closer to a purchase.

Below, we'll walk through each part of the customer journey map and how to use it. 

Parts of a journey map

If you're already familiar with journey mapping, you can start filling in the template right away. Otherwise, here's a quick walkthrough of what goes in each section.

What is the customer doing?

In this section, you'll jot down the main things that the prospect, lead, or customer is doing during this stage. For example, if you're a personal trainer, an awareness stage key step might include something like "Prospect wants to get in shape." Or if you offer an email newsletter app, an expansion and advocacy stage key step might be "Customer upgrades their plan." 

Each stage will likely have more than one key step or milestone—that's good. You should be specific enough to be able to create touchpoints, content, and marketing campaigns geared toward each milestone.

What is the customer thinking?

Next, put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what questions they might have at each stage. In the awareness stage, it might be things like "How can I do X better?" or "What is [your product name]?" In the consideration phase, questions like "Is this worth my time/money?" or "Will this help me solve my problem?" will come to the forefront. 

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

After you've outlined what your customer is thinking at each stage, align each question with the relevant touchpoint that could address each concern.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

When you have a question or milestone that doesn't have a corresponding touchpoint, you've found a gap in your customer journey. That means customers at this stage are going to be left with unmet needs and unanswered questions, and may look more seriously at competitor products as a result. It's essential to develop touchpoints to fill this gap and prevent losing potential customers at a key milestone.

Stages of the customer journey

The customer journey map can be split into five phases: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty.

Customers can't decide whether or not they want your product if they don't know that it exists. In the earliest phase of the customer journey, a business's goal is to reach the individual and, ultimately, attract them to the brand.

Consideration

Once potential customers are aware of your brand, the next phase they enter is called "consideration" or "research." This is when the customer's perspective shifts from simple awareness of your brand's existence to an understanding of the value that you have to offer them. 

Some businesses also include a mini-stage called "Intent" or "Onboarding," when the customer has decided they're interested in the product and is testing it out. The company's goal in this stage is simply to provide an exceptional user experience—they want to make sure the product works as intended and the customer's questions and requests are handled well.

A business can identify customers that are primed for conversion based on behavior in the consideration stage. Someone who signs up for a newsletter isn't a hot sales prospect quite yet, but when they start opening more emails and spending more time on the site, that's when brands know they're ready for a conversion push.

An abandoned cart email pushing a browsing shopper to complete a purchase

A physical mail offer pushing a potential customer to open an account

A seasonal campaign highlighting why a product is perfect for a particular holiday, celebration, or event

When a conversion is successful, a potential buyer becomes an actual customer. The goal in the retention stage is to demonstrate to the customer why they were right to make their purchase, and set them up to make more purchases or renew services in the future.

The retention stage is also where the user experience or user journey begins. The company's job in this phase, then, is to provide the best possible user experience. Easy installation, frictionless customer service, and—this part should be obvious—a product or service that works well and provides the user what they need are all key components to improved customer retention.

Brand loyalty

In the final customer journey phase, users go from run-of-the-mill satisfied customers to active advocates for your business. 

Keep in mind: a customer doesn't need to be a zealot for your company to be an unintentional brand advocate. One of the biggest reasons I made the decision to apply for Amex's high-end card is because my best friend has it. She didn't specifically recommend it to me, but I became interested after experiencing a lot of the card benefits vicariously through her. 

Advanced customer journey mapping tips

Everything we've covered up to this point will only get you as far as a basic customer journey map. That doesn't mean, however, that your customer journey map will be good . Once you have the basic journey mapping structure down, you'll want to take steps to continually improve your map's effectiveness.

Survey your customers and customer teams

Talk to your customer-facing employees, too. The people who work directly with customers day-to-day will have more accurate information about how to interact with them.

Automate customer data collection

Tweak for b2b, b2c, and saas industries.

The nature of the customer journey is different for SaaS, B2B, and B2C companies. A B2B company's interactions with prospects might include in-person conferences, while a SaaS company's touchpoints will be mostly digital. Companies that sell to consumers will need to think through individual people's experiences in a way that B2B companies don't. A company whose products are designed for emergencies will need to think through crisis scenarios instead of day-to-day customer experiences.

Tweak your customer journey categories to fit your company, product, and industry. Using a generalized or poorly-fitting customer journey map will result in vague and unhelpful interactions with your brand.

Create multiple maps for different journeys

When people refer to the customer journey, they're typically talking about the overarching journey from awareness to brand loyalty that we outlined above. However, you can map any part of the customer journey and experience. 

Do you target college students? Replace the five stages with four academic quarters and map their experience over the course of a year. 

Is your product designed to be used in the car? Map the customer journey through each hour of a long road trip. 

Zooming in to create detailed maps of different aspects of the customer journey will help you create even more specifically tailored customer experiences.

Types of journey maps

The template above follows the standard stages of the customer journey, but it's not the only way to do your customer journey mapping.

Two other commonly-used journey maps are the "Day in a life" journey map and the customer support journey map. We've provided the key elements of both below, as well as customer journey map templates for each.

Day/week/month in the life map

This map includes space for you to record the buyer persona's name, occupation, and motto, but these are really just shorthand for key persona characteristics. If you're selling baby diapers, for instance, your persona's occupation would be "parent," even if the person in question is also an accountant. 

The "motto" should be a condensed version of your persona's primary mindset with regard to their wants, needs, and pain points. The motto for an expecting first-time parent might be, "I'm excited but nervous—I have to make sure I'm prepared for anything."

Use the column headers to set your time frame. If you're marketing to expecting parents, the time frame might be the nine months of a pregnancy, or you might map an expectant mother's experiences through a single day in her third trimester. At each stage, ask yourself the same questions:

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand? Alternatively: how could our brand provide value at each stage?

A day in the life customer journey map will not only help you zoom in to develop more tailored experiences, but it will also give you insights into what might be useful to add or improve in your product or service.

Support experience map

This journey map is a bit different in that it doesn't just map touchpoints; it maps functional interactions between the customer and customer service representatives as well as the behind-the-scenes activities necessary to support the customer-facing team.

This map starts when the support ticket is opened and ends when the customer's issue is resolved. The top row of the map is simple: what is the customer doing at each stage in the support process?

​​Next, you'll record the corresponding actions of your customer-facing, or "frontstage" team. This includes both employees' actions and the systems engaged in the support process. For example, if the first step of your customer support process is handled by a chatbot or automatic phone system, these will go in the technology row. If the customer moves forward to request to speak with a representative, then the second stage is where your "employee actions" row will come into play.

Finally, the bottom row is for behind-the-scenes activity performed by employees who don't interact with the customer at all. For example, if the customer representative needs to get information from another department to answer the customer's questions, the other department's involvement will be recorded in the "backstage actions" section of the map.

Customer journey mapping example

To put it all together, here's an example customer journey map for a gym. 

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

"I can't go up a flight of stairs without getting winded; I need to get my health and fitness on track."

"I wish I knew someone who could recommend this gym." 

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

Success stories on social media in a front-and-center location, like a saved Instagram Stories collection or a pinned post 

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

"This gym looks clean and modern from the photos."

"I hate calling the gym, but I'd like to learn more about personal training or class options."

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

A live chat box on the gym's website for prospective customers to ask questions about the facility or membership options before visiting 

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

"The staff was friendly and it was easy to sign up."

"I wish I could see what classes they offer and weekly schedules without having to visit the gym."

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

A mobile app where members can track their progress, access class schedules, book personal trainer sessions, and receive personalized workout recommendations

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

"I wish I knew someone who could work out with me."

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

Community-building events like workshops or challenges to foster a sense of community and support among members and staff

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

"My coworker would love this gym since it's so close to work." 

"I love that teacher. I'm going to try some of her other classes."

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

A loyalty rewards program for members' continued commitment and engagement that offers exclusive discounts, merchandise, or access to premium services 

Related reading:

This article was originally published in May 2021 by Nick Djurovic. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• Sales & business development
• Small business

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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?

Washington man advocates for accessibility in journey across Missouri on Katy Trail

HOLTS SUMMIT, Mo. — Ian Mackay, a C2 quadriplegic and founder of Ian's Ride , was searching for his next trek to raise awareness about accessible trail systems. He found an optimal one in the Katy Trail.

Mackay and supporters were at the North Jefferson Trailhead south of Holts Summit on Monday to start the next leg of their journey. The trip from St. Louis to Kansas City on the Katy Trail started Friday and goes through Thursday. The leg Monday will see Mackay make it to Rocheport. Mackay is from Port Angeles, Washington, and takes trail journeys each year.

He first learned of the Katy Trail in 2022. Some of Mackay's journeys previous journeys would put him on streets and near highways, so he switched his focus to rail trails. Mackay continues to advocate for trail connections from streets and other pathways so that people in wheelchairs have mobility options to keep them away from busy streets, where possible.

The Katy Trail "is a great piece of infrastructure. ... This is doable for people of all abilities. Access to wild spaces for someone with a severe disability can be few and far between," he said, adding that in some journeys he's taken in Washington back to 2016, about 10 to 20 miles will be on a trail, but then the ends up having to ride along a roadway for upward of 30 miles. There have been some changes in the intervening years.

"First a trail is a commuting option. I have a trail near my house and I'm able to commute to therapy appointments, the store or down and enjoy trivia at my local pub. It allows me to live an independent life," he said.

As Mackay takes his journey Monday, he is supported by Jimmy Quenelle and Josh Blaustein, who ride bikes just behind him and Mackay's fiance, Celina Smith, is in a support van, which meets them at the various trail heads. Mackay on hot days like Monday wears an ice vest, and Quenelle and Blaustein help him stay cool, such as through spritzing him with water since he no longer can sweat, and provide him water to drink.

"Nature is the best medicine. Community is everything and we are stronger together," Mackay said, adding riding his chair on a trail "is a lot more fun that sitting and watching TV."

"I hope that Missouri is able to continue to expand infrastructure. I'm really excited to hear about the Rock Island Trail and the potential that has" as a tourist destination, he continued.

Mackay's story

Mackay was a student at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2008 when the course of his life changed.

"I really loved riding my bike. I rode it everywhere. I picked up my groceries, rode to school and rode to work that way. Then one day I was riding my bike and was going a little fast, hit some sand in the path and lost control and went head first into a tree," he said.

He was wearing a helmet and never lost consciousness, but he injured his spinal cord at his second cervical spinal bone, meaning he now is paralyzed from the neck down.

"I spent the next three months in a hospital learning how to live as a paralyzed man. I then moved up to Port Angeles, Washington, from California. Those next few years were brutal. I couldn't see what future I held. I felt like I had a useless body. My excitement and my dreams had just vanished," he said.

He eventually would start spending time outside on a local rail trail, the Olympic Discovery Trail . His passion started to grow and his exploration of the trail grew.

"I thought maybe I can do a really long bike tour again, but in my wheelchair," Mackay said. He called up his old chemistry professor, who took the journey with him in 2016, he added. This was the founding of Ian's Ride.

Celebrating Missouri's trails

Ahead of Mackay's journey Monday, he had an opportunity to speak on the importance of trail accessibility, including two state representatives, Bruce Sassmann, R-Bland, and Dave Griffith, R-Jefferson City, and the director of Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Dru Buntin, which oversees Missouri State Parks and trails.

Others at the North Jefferson Trailhead to see Mackay off included representatives of Rails to Trails Conservancy , Conservation Federation of Missouri and Jefferson City Mayor Ron Fitzwater among others.

More than 450,000 utilize Katy Trail State Park annually. Sassman's district includes portions of the Rock Island Trail, which was purchased by the state in 2021, and has a connection to the Katy Trail at Windsor up to Kansas City. One of his bills this year related to appropriations for the Rock Island Trail. The section of the trail from Windsor east to Beaufort is in development, per Rails to Trails Conservancy reporting . Griffith's district includes a section of the Katy Trail.

Griffith is of an age where he can remember where conversations were held on the Katy Trail's development, he said, noting landowners at the time were reticent about having a trail system running adjacent or even through their property.

"Just the opposite has happened," he said, referencing investments the Missouri General Assembly has made in trails and parks. These investment messages were echoed by Buntin.

More: Collage artist's focus on mid-Missouri earns Columbia Office of Cultural Affairs honor

"Part of our heritage is built into the Katy and it connects with many of our rural communities. Missouri State Parks takes pride in the accessibility of our parks system and historic sites," he said, noting the Katy Trail is national recognized for its accessibility.

Within the last year, Missouri State Parks has purchased 18 new accessible beach chairs for swim beaches at state park and added three track chairs for guest use on trails and at historic sites, Buntin said, eliciting looks of appreciation from Mackay.

"Ian, we thank you for advocating and supporting those who have mobility concerns. It's important to us as well. I look forward to visiting with you when you get done with this trip to get any feedback on ways that we can be better," Buntin said.

More: These 17 unique Missouri roadside attractions are worth venturing off the beaten path

Charles Dunlap covers local government, community stories and other general subjects for the Tribune. You can reach him at [email protected] or @CD_CDT on X, formerly Twitter. Subscribe to support vital local journalism.

Freight train derails in Chicago suburb, triggering evacuations over suspected leak

A freight train derailed in a Chicago suburb on Thursday, briefly sparking evacuations of nearby homes and businesses.

The train derailed at 217th Street and Main in Matteson, NBC Chicago reported. A mandatory evacuation was underway amid a suspected leak from the derailed cars.

The evacuation affected people and businesses within a quarter-mile east, 1 mile west and 1 mile south of the site, according to the station. The evacuation in the area was lifted Thursday afternoon except for areas very close to the derailment site.

Canadian National Railway said in a statement that the derailment involved about 25 cars “carrying various substances.” There were no fires or reports of injuries, a spokesperson said.

Two cars containing residue liquified petroleum gas leaked a limited amount, the spokesperson said, adding that it has since been contained.

"The other railcars that derailed but did not leak any product include non-dangerous goods, Caustic Soda and railcars containing residue of LPG," the spokesperson said.

“There is no danger to public safety,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “A precautionary evacuation was ordered but has since been lifted except for properties immediately adjacent to the site.”

The cause of the derailment is under investigation.

Matteson police said additional information will be released later Thursday.

Matteson is a village in Cook County, Illinois, about 30 miles south of downtown Chicago.

Minyvonne Burke is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News.

Bangor Daily News

Maine news, sports, politics, election results, and obituaries

Escape Acadia’s crowds on hot days with this great loop hike

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I had two goals: Hike in Acadia National Park without becoming frustrated by crowds; and exercise my dog, Juno, without her overheating.

The day was sunny and sticky, with temperatures hovering in the 80s. Juno, with her thick coat, doesn’t tolerate heat well, but after two days of rain, she was practically vibrating with pent-up energy. To garner attention, she’d started tossing her toys at me by whipping her head around and releasing them from her mouth mid-whip. Things were getting dangerous.

My solution was to take a hike. Hiking is my solution for many things.

Selecting the perfect hike is a skill that’s developed over time. Having intimate knowledge of local trails helps. So does the ability to read a trail map. Hiking experience, including a few mistakes, can help inform your decision too.

In this case, a scary mishap with Juno caused me to exercise caution. Last September, I led her up the open ridge of Acadia’s Penobscot Mountain  on a particularly hot, sunny day and she overheated. She was panting heavily, lethargic and constantly seeking shade to lie down in.

As soon as I noticed this unusual behavior, we turned around and slowly descended the mountain, stopping frequently for breaks and water. She was OK, but I often think about that experience when planning an adventure with her during the warmer months.

I’ve hiked most of the trails in Acadia, but looking at a detailed map always helps jog my memory. Map Adventures , a small business owned and operated by a husband-wife duo out of Portland, makes my favorite map of Acadia. It includes trail names, the mileage of trail sections, contour lines and other key details that can help you decide on a route.

Acadia National Park covers much of Mount Desert Island. Looking at the map, I moved to the “quiet side of the island,” which is the west side. Then I looked for water, shade and trails suitable for dogs.

The park provides an online list of trails that are off-limits to dogs  due to steep grades and obstacles like ladders and metal rungs. It also offers a list of trails that are “not recommended” for pets due to their difficulty. While Juno is quite the little mountain goat, I usually try to stay off those as well.

I finally ended up with a suitable route. We’d start at the parking area at the south end of Long Pond, hike west on Cold Brook Trail, then hike up Mansell Mountain on the Razorback Trail.

From there, we’d descend on Great Notch Trail, then turn onto Long Pond Trail to travel along the west shore of the lake, where the mountain would shield us from the afternoon sun. The loop was 4.7 miles.

Many bodies of water in Acadia are closed to swimming  (and wading dogs), but Long Pond is an interesting case. Swimming is only prohibited within 1,000 feet of the intake on the southern end of the pond. Therefore, I didn’t need to feel guilty about Juno cooling off in the water when we reached it over a mile from the south end.

I carried a collapsible dog bowl and water for Juno, but didn’t need it. Throughout the hike, the trail visited a number of small brooks, the water clear and ice-cold as it flowed off the mountain. Juno was drawn to each and every one, and I allowed her as much time as she wanted to splash and drink.

Though more than a dozen cars lined the road at the trailhead, our hike was fairly quiet. We passed three small groups, as well as a solo hiker. And along the Long Lake Trail, we passed a few picnickers. We also came across a small sailboat anchored off the rocky shore, its white sail snapping in the breeze and its captain nowhere to be found.

Sheep laurel was in bloom. Lining the trail on the upper reaches of the mountain, these dense bushes were dotted with small, vibrant pink flowers that I look forward to seeing each year.

Butterflies were also out in abundance. Most of them fluttered away before I could photograph them, but I did manage to snap a shot of a red admiral butterfly perched on the branch of a white cedar tree. With black and red-orange wings, they are quite large and flashy.

For much of the hike, trees sheltered us from the sun. But there was a stretch of open bedrock near the top of the mountain where we couldn’t hide from the sun’s hot rays. Despite the breeze, I sweated through my shirt in no time. It’s remarkable how much cooler it can be in the shade.

Much of the hike was gradual, though there were plenty of rocks, tree roots and stone steps to navigate. Near the top, a few steep sections caused Juno to pause, but with a little encouragement, she scrambled right up.

The trail network of Acadia is made up of many intersecting paths, which can make navigating tricky if you aren’t paying attention and using a trail map. While I’d hiked Mansell Mountain before, the loop was a new route to me. I had never walked the Long Pond Trail. To stay on course, I checked my map at every intersection.

The Long Pond Trail ended up being the perfect final leg of our hike. The path was mostly smooth and flat with just a few short sections of rocky terrain. In many places, our footfalls were cushioned by pine needles. The air smelled of evergreen sap.

By the end of the hike, I was proud of my route selection. It ended up being the perfect adventure for a hot day, and Juno has stopped throwing toys at me. For now.

More articles from the BDN

Aislinn sarnacki.

Aislinn Sarnacki is a Maine outdoors writer and the author of three Maine hiking guidebooks including “Family Friendly Hikes in Maine.” Find her on Twitter and Facebook @1minhikegirl. You can also... More by Aislinn Sarnacki

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

How to run a journey-mapping workshop: a step-by-step case study.

July 5, 2020 2020-07-05

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When journey maps are used in the right way — as a means to address a specific, known business goal — the benefits are vast. Our earlier research on practitioners’ journey-mapping activities identified several advantages, including aligning stakeholders around common goals and vision, enabling focus on customer needs, and helping team members establish a personal connection with the end users.

One of the biggest practitioner pain points revealed during the same research, however, is that many people are unclear about the specifics of the actual journey-mapping process. While we’ve previously provided a 5-step process for journey mapping , this article is a more detailed guide to one of those steps: the journey-mapping workshop.

Because the structure of a workshop is dependent on the skill level and preferred methods of the facilitator, there are many ways to lead a journey-mapping workshop. This article provides an overview of one way—a case study with examples from a recent workshop—but there could be many variations of the activities listed that could also be productive.

In This Article:

Before the journey-mapping workshop, during the journey-mapping workshop, after the journey-mapping workshop.

Before getting everyone together in the same room, take these steps to ensure that all contributors are engaged, prepared, and that they understand the purpose and scope of the workshop.

Step 1. Build a team: Journey mapping is a collaborative process. If you create your map in a silo without involving others, you run the risk that the people whose support you need to get things done post mapping will not believe in it or be passionate about your findings. Create a crossfunctional team of allies who can help you advertise the process and build buy-in for your recommendations. They will also be your workshop participants.

Step 2. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor ) and what journey (the scenario ) you’ll be mapping ahead of time. You should focus on one actor and one scenario per map , but that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one scenario or journey map per workshop. You’ll just have to allow for extra time and figure out logistics (e.g., splitting up into small groups) to accommodate the additional complexity. If necessary, plan how you’ll split up teams before the workshop. Know who’s coming and assign each person to the most appropriate journey. (You wouldn’t want the designer of a small-business product working on the journey for consumer products.)

Step 3. Gather and share existing research: It’s often beneficial to start with what you already have. Gather and review any existing UX, marketing, analytics, or customer support data related to your journey, consolidate relevant insights, and identify knowledge gaps. Create a shared repository so everyone on the team has access to the artifacts you’ve gathered, which may include previous experience maps , research reports, data from diary studies , or brand or experience guidelines .

Step 4. Assign “homework”: Provide attendees with background reading ahead of the workshop. No matter how much you feel like you have shared, briefed, and campaigned, prime participants one last time before the workshop. Provide relevant background reading, existing research takeaways, and a few open-ended thought-starter questions to mentally prepare participants.

This particular journey-mapping workshop structure incorporates activities to lead participants through:

• Creating a current-state hypothesis map
• Evolving the current-state journey map based on customer input
• Prioritizing pain points within the journey
• Brainstorming new ideas and potential solutions with customers
• Creating a future-state vision through sketching and design-studio activities

It’s divided into three parts:

• Part I: Laying the foundation: Review of basic concepts and inputs for mapping
• Part II: Current-state mapping: Creation of an assumption map, review and evolution of the map with customers, and prioritization of pain points
• Part III: Future-state visioning: Brainstorming future-state ideas and interactions through sketching

Depending on the number of workshop attendees and the number of prioritized scenarios and actors, this workshop could be structured over a period of a couple to several days.

Part I: Laying the Foundation

The activities within the first segment of the workshop ensure that participants share the  mental model and the language of journey mapping, understand existing research, and agree on the workshop inputs — specifically, the journey-map stages, actor(s) and scenario(s) that will be used.

Step 1. Refresh and educate: Here’s something you may find shocking: Some participants may not even open your thoughtfully prepared workshop homework! That means you’ll have to find a creative way to ensure that attendees understand core concepts while not putting those who did diligently prepare to sleep. Blend teaching opportunities into methods for gaging the room’s level of preparedness with an activity such as trivia based on your provided background reading. Bonus: Trivia also acts as an energizer to start the day. Split the room into small groups so that those who were sincerely unable to prepare are not singled out and the vibe remains fun.

Step 2. Review actors and scenarios: Though you will have decided which actor(s) and scenario(s) to focus on before walking into the room, give your participants a chance to feel ownership over them (and ensure they understand these concepts). For example, enabling discussion over a quick interactive quiz like the one below helps participants connect with the narrative of the scenario and reinforces buy-in for the scenario.

Step 3. Review the research (again): Even if you consolidated and shared existing research with the team before the workshop, it’s possible that not everyone took the time to pore over it like you did. You should dedicate time within the workshop agenda to review the key findings. And even if the team is familiar with the research, it’s still better for everyone to be aligned on the takeaways as a group and for those takeaways to be fresh in everyone’s heads. The research review could take the form of one or two people simply presenting recent research findings, or it could be something more interactive.

For a recent journey-mapping workshop for a team very familiar with existing research, we did a quick postup of “what we know” about the journey. Participants worked in small groups to generate one research insight per sticky note, cluster them into groups, and then shared their themes back to the larger group. This approach has the bonus of providing an artifact that the team can hang and reference in their workspace as they begin mapping

Step 4. Provide facilitation training for participants: If customers will join your workshop, help your participants prepare. As the workshop facilitator, you’ll likely have more small groups than you can actively lead, so you’ll need to empower your attendees. Remember: This is a crossfunctional team, so not everyone is familiar with user research! Provide some guidance. I prefer to do two things: First, plan a training segment within the workshop to review facilitation guidelines . Secondly, provide teams with printed interview guides with suggested lines of inquiry related to their scenario.

Part II: Current-State Mapping

In the second segment of the workshop, teams go through a series of activities to create a draft map, update the map based on customer input, and identify pain points.

Step 1. Map the current state: Here, each team concentrates its collective knowledge into a map specific to its assigned scenario. It’s helpful to remind participants that they are creating an assumption map, meaning that there may be gaps or unknowns. At this point in time, it’s okay to make some assumptions, because they’ll continue to adapt the map and make adjustments with additional research. That’s why we make maps with sticky notes — so we can tear them off or scribble over them with Sharpies as learning evolves!

Step 2. Interview customers: The act of consolidating what the team knows from existing research creates a current-state assumption map. At this point, customers who align to each group’s primary actor or persona join the teams. Recruit your customers based on relevant screening criteria . (For example, for journeys related to opening a new credit card, it’s ideal to recruit participants who are actively looking for a new credit card or who have recently opened a credit card.) Using the provided facilitation guide, small groups interview the customers, asking open-ended questions about their experience with the journey they are assigned.

Step 3. Evolve the map: Once customers have shared experiences without seeing their team’s assumptions, the discussion moves to the wall. Teams walk customers through their assumption maps, continuing to ask open-ended questions and encouraging customers to share stories. It can be useful to provide some tangible tools to customers to lower their barrier to engagement. For example, in this journey-mapping workshop, we gave customers stickers to represent agreement or disagreement, and asked them to physically contribute to the map to reflect their experience and help us validate or evolve our assumptions.

Step 4. Generate and prioritize pain points: After time for in-depth discussion and map adaptation, allow the groups to focus on frustrations that occur throughout the journey. These frustrations, also called pain points, will serve as an input for the future-state visioning. Make pain-point generation easier for attendees by providing a fill-in-the-blank structure for them to fill in:

• I need ______ in order to ______.
• I need ______ so that ______.

Example: “I need a simple way to compare options so that I don't get overwhelmed.”

Give participants a time limit to silently generate needs statements on sticky notes, have them place the stickies on the pain-points swim lane of the map, and then discuss and affinity diagram them. After discussion, use dot voting to identify which pain points are most critical.

Part III: Future-State Visioning

The workshop concludes with a third segment: future-state visioning. Here, participants brainstorm ideas with customers, then use rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique to create future-state flows.

Step 1. Generate “big ideas”: Using the identified pain points as catalysts, both internal workshop participants and customers come up with abstract ideas that align to known frustrations within the journey. It’s useful to encourage the teams to think big and use metaphors to express their ideas so that they don’t jump to specific solutions (e.g., features) too soon. Use a time limit and provide a quantity goal (e.g., try to generate at least 5 ideas in 5 minutes) to keep participants from over-censoring their ideas. After this round of idea generation, participants post up and present their ideas to the rest of the team.

In this workshop, we followed the presentation of ideas with a round of impact and effort voting. Customers and internal participants whose primary job responsibility was user research voted on the most impactful ideas by placing a set number of gold stars on the corresponding stickies. Remaining internal team members voted on the most feasible ideas by placing the same number of green dots on the ideas. The result was a visual ranking of the ideas that takes both feasibility and impact into account. This is a good time to break, thank customers for their time, and continue the workshop with internal participants only.

Step 2. Sketch individual future-state flows: Armed with the ranked “big ideas,” internal participants begin the task of translating the ideas into a set of interactions using the design-studio technique of timed rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique. First, individuals silently sketch flows based on the most feasible and impactful big ideas. Next, they present their ideas back to their team for critique. In the example below, we used tangibles (i.e., sticky notes) to capture the critique discussion: The team members called out aspects of the sketches they thought were particularly powerful or well-aligned to known frustrations on green sticky notes (green = good). For aspects of the individual flows that could be improved, they wrote comments on yellow sticky notes (yellow = ideas). These sticky notes were placed directly on the sketches for reference.

Step 3. Create consolidated future-state flows: In the final workshop activity, small groups combine the most powerful ideas and strongest aspects of their individual sketches into one group sketch, reflecting a future-state journey for their scenario. Small groups then present their consolidated journey back to the entire workshop team.

Move quickly after the workshop in order to maintain momentum and make use of the excitement generated in the workshop.

Step 1. Share takeaways: Capture the workshop outputs by taking photos of each artifact and action shots of internal participants and customers working through the activities. (Of course, make sure you have consent ahead of time.) Share these artifacts in a central repository for reference, and capture and share next steps and action items in one place for the entire team.

Step 2. Bring the ideas life: The team members left the workshop with several strong flows and new interactions captured in sketches. Now, they can use iterative design to create low-fidelity prototypes of these flows and test them with customers, continuing to make adaptations based on user feedback.

Step 3. Keep refining the process: As you apply the workshop structure to additional journeys, continue to tweak and refine the activities to be the most successful and productive for your team.

This article provides guidance on a specific set of activities; however, there are many ways to run a journey-mapping workshop. The overall structure and activities are a starting place, created for one specific context. Use this as a starting place and adapt it based on your needs, scope, and limitations.

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Learning Objectives

Get to know the journey builder dashboard, explore the journey builder canvas, view an existing journey.

• Challenge +100 points

Get Started with Journey Builder

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Navigate to the Journey Builder app.
• Describe key features of the Journey Builder dashboard.
• Describe key features and functionality of the Journey Builder canvas.

Marketers use Journey Builder to create and manage a variety of responsive, automated, multi-channel marketing campaigns, including:

• Welcome campaigns for new customers who subscribe or opt-in
• Promotional campaigns for new products, services, sales, or special events
• Reengagement campaigns for customers who abandon their cart or search
• Retention campaigns for customer birthdays, anniversaries, or renewal dates

Before we dive into the application, it’s important to understand that while Journey Builder is powerful and effective, it’s not a standalone product. Journey Builder uses the content and audiences you created in Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Advertising Studio, Content Builder, and Contact Builder within Marketing Cloud Engagement in order to do its work.  

To begin using the Journey Builder application, log in with your Marketing Cloud Engagement username and password. If you’re not a Marketing Cloud Engagement customer or Journey Builder is not enabled in your account, don’t worry. In this and subsequent modules, we show you lots of screenshots and give you step-by-step instructions so you can see just how easy it is to navigate and use Journey Builder.

• Go to mc.exacttarget.com .
• Enter your Username.
• Enter your Password.
• Click Log In .
• In Marketing Cloud Engagement, hover over Journey Builder in the top navigation bar.
• Click Journey Builder .

You’ve arrived! Now, let’s explore the components of the Journey Builder dashboard.

• Journey Folders : Store journeys in folders so they’re easy to find. You can organize your journeys immediately after creating and saving them, or you can add journeys to folders from the Journey Builder dashboard at any time.
• Journey : View a list of all journeys or the journeys available within each folder. This list includes status, performance, and when the journey was last modified.
• Search Journeys : Looks at journey titles and descriptions to help you find specific journeys.
• Create New Journey : This is your starting point to create a new journey from scratch or a template.
• Entry Sources : View the entry sources previously used for your journeys. Entry sources can be unique or shared among journeys. From here, you can also test, copy, or delete entry sources.
• Journey History : Use the Contact Key to view a contact’s path through a journey or journey version.
• Journey Templates : Contains predefined, editable journeys that show in-context guidance based on common use cases and marketing best practices. Get a head start creating your journey with Journey Templates.

More detailed Journey Analytics are available to customers who enable the Google Analytics 360 Integration to their Marketing Cloud Engagement account. Contact your account representative for more information.

Now that you’ve toured the Journey Builder dashboard, let’s take a look at the Journey Builder canvas. The canvas looks slightly different depending on the status of the journey. Let’s start by looking at a journey in draft status. Click Create New Journey or click an existing journey draft. We discuss how to create a single-send journey later in this module, and you can learn about building more complex journeys in Journey Builder Campaigns . Right now, let’s focus on what’s available on the canvas.  

The canvas has four components:

• Journey title and description
• Entry sources and canvas activities
• Journey Canvas
• Journey Builder toolbar

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Journey Title : The first thing you notice is the title and a description of the journey you’re viewing. If you are creating a new journey, add a title and description here. You will also see which version of the journey you’re viewing. If there is more than one version, you can click to see other versions. We talk more about journey versions later. 

Entry Source : This tells Journey Builder the data source for a particular journey. Entry sources include Data Extensions, API events, audiences, CloudPages, Salesforce data, or events. All journeys must begin with an entry source.

Canvas Activities : These are available message actions, decision points, updates, or a combination of these elements that guide the customer journey until the customer reaches a goal or the endpoint of the journey. 

• Message Activity : Includes email, SMS, push notifications, or any other form of content sent to your contacts.
• Advertising Activities : Ad Audience allows you to build an advertising audience in Journey Builder. Ad Campaign lets you create an advertising audience and a simple Facebook advertising campaign without leaving Journey Builder.

• A Wait activity pauses your customer between activities for a certain amount of time before they move to the next activity. During Wait activities, Journey Builder evaluates customers to see if they have met a goal, reached criteria for a decision split, or engaged with a message.
• Use Split activities to customize the path a customer takes based on their interactions with messages or other actions, either randomly or by using Einstein.
• A Join activity returns contacts to the original path after they’ve gone through a split activity that separated them from the original path.
• Use the Wait Until  activity to pause your customer between activities for a period of time set by you.

• Customer Updates : This activity prompts the Marketing Cloud Engagement system to update a contact’s information in a data extension.

• Sales & Service Cloud Activities : Use these activities to interact with Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud within Journey Builder. These activities are only available in accounts that have the Marketing Cloud Connector installed.

Journey Canvas : The Journey Canvas is where you drag and drop canvas activities to build the customer journey—in other words, where the magic happens. We go into more detail when we create a journey in the Journey Builder Campaigns trail.

Journey Builder Toolbar : Finally, the toolbar shows the status of the journey you’re viewing. This is also where you manage the journey you’ve created.

• Undo, redo, copy, and paste actions related to the journey plan.
• Toggle open or close the sidebar containing canvas activities.
• Turn on guidance.
• Set a goal.
• Define exit criteria.
• Edit settings.
• Save, validate, test, and activate the journey.

We go into more detail when we create a journey in the Journey Builder Campaigns module. 

Now let’s take a look at the journey canvas when a journey is running or stopped. 

The primary difference between a stopped journey and a running one is that your builder containing entry event and canvas activity options is hidden. However, now you can see how many contacts completed each step in the journey (1). The toolbar (2) now provides the option to stop the journey if it is running, or start a new version of the journey. You also have the ability to check the overall health of your journey.

Now that you’re familiar with the Journey Builder app, you can begin putting the principles you learned in the Customer Journey Basics module to work.

• Salesforce Help : Analytics and History
• Salesforce Help : Google Analytics 360 Integration for Marketing Cloud Engagement
• Salesforce Help : Activities Reference
• Salesforce Help : Einstein Splits
• Salesforce Help : Update a Contact
• Salesforce Help : Sales and Service Cloud Activities

Rights of ALBERT EINSTEIN are used with permission of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Represented exclusively by Greenlight.

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Who is ahead in 2024 presidential polls right now?

Welcome to The Washington Post’s presidential polling averages. We have gathered the best available national and state-level polling data, and factored how citizens in each state voted in the last two presidential elections, to calculate whom voters currently favor in the presidential race.

We’ll update our polling averages regularly. Remember this isn’t a presidential forecast, but instead a snapshot of the state of public opinion.

Want to know more about how our polling averages work? Read our methodology .

The state polls driving our averages

All polls vary. Polling averages help us incorporate polls that point in different directions and let us easily compare trends. Here is a look at the results of all of the polls from the past six months that we’ve included in our averages.

How the national polls have changed since January

The presidential election isn’t decided by the national popular vote, which is why we rely heavily on state polls in our polling averages. However, national polls are still useful for understanding the overall state of the race. They tend to pick up changes in the overall environment quicker than state level polls and our polling averages do draw on national polls, especially in states where we don’t have a lot of high-quality polls. Here’s how the presidential race has changed in national polls since January.

What could change between now and Election Day?

Our polling averages are an informed best guess for who is leading the presidential race. A lot could change before Election Day.

The polls could underestimate Biden’s or Trump’s support

A polling average is the best way to understand the state of play in a presidential race, but as we know from previous presidential cycles, the polls aren’t always right. Take a look at how polling errors in the last three presidential elections would affect our current 2024 polling averages.

The economy could get better — or worse

There are many things that could change between now and Election Day that could affect the polls, but one of the biggest factors is the economy.

It’s one of the most important issues for voters this cycle. If we take a look at how the economy has affected previous elections, we can see that when the economy improves, the incumbent president — in this case Biden — does better. If the economy gets worse, then the challenger — in this case Trump — fares better. (We’re specifically looking at two factors: consumer sentiment, or how optimistic people feel about the economy, and gross domestic product per capita growth, or the rate at which the economy is growing.)

There’s a fair amount of uncertainty in these estimates, however, as there are a lot of ways the economy could change. But as we get closer to Election Day, the uncertainty around our estimates will shrink.

Explore our polling averages in each battleground state

About this story.

Polling averages by Lenny Bronner and Diane Napolitano . Design and development by Kati Perry and Luis Melgar . Engineering support from John Campbell and Stewart Bishop. Polling research by Scott Clement , Emily Guskin and Jakob Bowen . Editing by Reuben Fischer-Baum and Sarah Frostenson . Project management by Rachel Van Dongen and Ashlyn Still . Copy editing by Anne Kenderdine . Originally published June 26, 2024.