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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.

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

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What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

• Consideration

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

• Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

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Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 21 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, request demo.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

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1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

In business, as in life, it's the customer's journey that makes the company's destination worth all the trouble. No customer wants to jump through several different hoops to get to your product: they want it fast and they want it now.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you improve your user's experience (UX) to create a product they love interacting with, ensures you stay ahead of key workflow tasks, and keeps stakeholders aligned. But a misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

Last updated

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This article walks you through the eight key stages of great customer journey mapping, and shows you how to adapt each to your unique business and product to optimize the customer experience from start to finish. 

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

Hotjar's Observe and Ask tools let you go ‘behind the scenes’ to understand your users’ product experiences and improve their customer journey.

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Mapping out the customer journey gives you insights into your buyers’ behavior to help you make changes that improve your website and the user flow between touchpoints. This helps you increase online sales and turn users into loyal customers and brand advocates.

Follow these eight proven steps to understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

Note: every business is distinct, so be sure to adapt these steps to your particular user and business needs. 

1. Define your purpose

The first step to creating a successful customer journey map is to define your product's vision or purpose. Without a clear purpose, your actions will be misguided and you won’t know what you want users to achieve during their journey on your website, product page, or web app. 

To define your purpose, consider your company’s mission statement and incorporate your specific user pain points as much as possible. 

Make your purpose specific to your company’s needs and goals—for example, the purpose of an ecommerce brand looking to help users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

2. Make sure your team is aligned and roles are clear

Cross-functional collaboration is essential when mapping out your brand's or product’s user journey. Get insights from different teams within your organization to find out exactly how users engage with key touchpoints to derive a holistic sense of the user experience (UX), which will help you improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Lisa Schuck , marketing lead at Airship , emphasizes the importance of keeping “anybody that has a touchpoint with a customer” involved. She advises teams to “figure out how to align your external marketing and sales with your internal operations and service.”

Although sales, product, and marketing departments are often the key players in customer journey mapping, also involve your operations and design teams that are responsible for creating the user flow. 

If you have a SaaS company, for example, marketing creatives, sales teams, product owners and designers, and your customer experience department all need to participate in the process. Clearly define who’s responsible for different aspects of the map, and regularly check in to make sure your final map isn’t missing any important perspectives.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Highlights feature to collect and organize key product experience (PX) insights and data on user behavior from teams across your organization to help you build your customer journey map. Then use Hotjar’s Slack integration to quickly share learnings with your relevant stakeholders to get buy-in and ensure everyone is aligned.

Hotjar’s Slack integration Slack lets teams discuss insights in the moment, so they’re up to date with critical issues 

3. Create user personas

Once you’ve defined your purpose and involved all relevant stakeholders, it’s time to design your user personas . Use resources like UXPressia and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to help you design various product personas . 

Create a range of user personas to understand what each type of buyer needs to curate a journey that’s easy and enjoyable for every customer. This is an important early step in the customer journey mapping process—because if you don’t understand your users, you won’t be able to fully comprehend how they interact with your brand to better it.

Create user personas for all your product’s possible buyers—for example, to map out a B2B customer journey for a company in the hospitality business means developing personas for a range of different customers, from large chain hotel managers to small vacation rental owners. 

4. Understand your user goals

Once you’ve designed your user personas, it’s time to define their jobs to be done . What do your users hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

In a SaaS customer journey , perhaps users are looking for helpful comparisons of product features on your website, or want to easily sign up for a trial account in the hopes that your product will solve their problems. But you won’t know until you ask . 

Once you have users or test users, get direct insights from them with Hotjar's Feedback tools and Surveys to ask buyers exactly what their goals are as they browse different pages of your website or interact with product features.

Since user goals are at the center of your customer journey map, define them early on—but keep speaking to your users throughout the entire process to make sure you’re up to date with their needs.

5. Identify customer touchpoints

After you understand your users and what their goals are, it’s time to identify the ways they interact with your company and your product. 

"Touchpoints are the moments the customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or customer support. The quality of these experiences affects the overall customer experience, which is why it’s important to be aware of them. Consider what happens before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase or uses your product."

Key customer journey touchpoints for a website or product include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, CTA buttons, sign-up forms, social media accounts, and paid ads. 

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. Include insights from different teams and stakeholders —your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints. 

Post-purchase touchpoints can help turn users into loyal customers and even advocates for your brand. 

In the words of Lisa Schuck, "When you create a raving fan, or a brand advocate, who goes out and tells the world how wonderful you are, you get social credibility and validity. It’s becoming more and more important to have advocates."

Pro tip : speak with your users regularly to get direct voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights on what they love and what frustrates them on their journey. Place Hotjar Feedback widgets and Surveys at key website touchpoints like your homepage and landing pages to get valuable user insights on what you can improve. Use Hotjar’s survey templates to get inspiration for your survey questions. 

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

Once your user and product research are complete and all roles are distributed, it’s time to map out the full customer journey.

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts. 

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions. 

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip : it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention ?

7. Test the customer journey

Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to take it for a spin. You can’t understand how your users move through customer touchpoints unless you test out the user flow yourself. 

Start with an informational Google search, then visit your website, check out your social media pages, and simulate the purchase process. This will help you get a better sense of how users interact with each touchpoint and how easy it is to move between them. 

Be sure to try out the journey from the standpoint of every relevant user persona. For an enterprise software company, this could mean looking at how decision-makers move through the user flow vs. the employees who’ll use your software day to day. 

By walking through the customer journey yourself, you can identify issues and difficulties that users may have to address them proactively. 

Try out the user flow with test users to get a realistic perspective of the user experience. Be sure to use focus groups that represent every one of your user personas. 

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

Continuously map out, analyze, and evaluate the customer journey by observing users and getting their feedback. Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you understand how your users are experiencing the customer journey on your website: create heatmaps to see whether users are clicking on CTAs or key buttons, and watch recordings to find out how they navigate once they reach your homepage.

Then, use Google Analytics to get an overview of your website traffic and understand how customers from different channels move through the user journey. 

Finally, once you have these combined user insights, use them to make changes on your website and create a user journey that is more intuitive and enjoyable.

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels , and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

Take a data-informed approach: don’t assume you already know your users —test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data. 

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

Take the time to understand your business goals and users, involve the right teams, and test frequently to consistently improve your customer journey and make the decisions that will help you map out an experience that will get you happy and loyal customers.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping helps you visualize how users interact with your business and product, from the moment they find it until long after they make their first purchase. 

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the buyer's journey to create a more enjoyable, streamlined, and intuitive experience for your customers.

What are the benefits of following a customer journey mapping process?

The main benefits of a customer journey mapping process are: : 

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

What happens if you don’t follow key steps in customer journey mapping?

If you don’t follow key steps when mapping out the customer journey, your map likely won’t give you the insights you need to enhance the experience users have with your most important touchpoints —like your homepage, landing pages, CTAs, and product pages. 

This can result in high bounce rates, low conversion, and unsatisfied users who fail to become loyal customers.

CJM benefits

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Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: August 07, 2018

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

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The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

Customer journey maps are visual representations of customer experiences with an organization. They provide a 360-degree view of how customers engage with a brand over time and across all channels. Product teams use these maps to uncover customer needs and their routes to reach a product or service. Using this information, you can identify pain points and opportunities to enhance customer experience and boost customer retention.

“ Data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.” — Paul Boag, UX designer, service design consultant & digital transformation expert

In this video, Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how you can include journey maps in your design process.

• Transcript loading…

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

Customer journey maps are research-based tools. They show common customer experiences over time To help brands learn more about their target audience. 

Maps are incredibly effective communication tools. See how maps simplify complex spaces and create shared understanding.

Unlike navigation maps, customer journey maps have an extra dimension—time. Design teams examine tasks and questions (e.g., what-ifs) regarding how a design meets or fails to meet customers’ needs over time when encountering a product or service. 

Customer journey maps should have comprehensive timelines that show the most essential sub-tasks and events. Over this timeline framework, you add insights into customers' thoughts and feelings when proceeding along the timeline. The map should include: 

A timescale - A defined journey period (e.g., one week). This timeframe should include the entire journey, from awareness to conversion to retention.

Scenarios - The context and sequence of events where a user/customer must achieve a goal. An example could be a user who wants to buy a ticket on the phone. Scenarios are events from the first actions (recognizing a problem) to the last activities (e.g., subscription renewal).

Channels – Where do they perform actions (e.g., Facebook)?

Touchpoints – How does the customer interact with the product or service? What actions do they perform?

Thoughts and feelings – The customer's thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map helps you understand how customer experience evolves over time. It allows you to identify possible problems and improve the design. This enables you to design products that are more likely to exceed customers’ expectations in the future state. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

Before creating a customer journey map, you must ask yourself why you're making one in the first place. Clarify who will use it and what user experience it will address.

Conduct Research

Use customer research to determine customer experiences at all touchpoints. Get analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence. Leverage customer interviews, surveys, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

Watch user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen talk about how user research fits your design process and when you should do different studies. 

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

List customer touchpoints (e.g., paying a bill) and channels (e.g., online). Look for more touchpoints or channels to include.

Make an Empathy Map

Pinpoint what the customer does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a given situation. Then, determine their needs and how they feel throughout the experience. Focus on barriers and sources of annoyance.

Sketch the Journey

Piece everything—touchpoints, timescale, empathy map output, new ideas, etc.). Show a customer’s course of motion through touchpoints and channels across the timescale, including their feelings at every touchpoint.

Iterate and Refine

Revise and transform your sketch into the best-looking version of the ideal customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders

Ensure all stakeholders understand your map and appreciate how its use will benefit customers and the organization.

Buyer Journey vs User Journey vs Customer Journey: What's the Difference?

You must know the differences between buyer, user, and customer journeys to optimize customer experiences. A customer journey map is often synonymous with a user flow diagram or buyer journey map. However, each journey gives unique insights and needs different plans.

Customer Journey

The customer journey, or lifecycle, outlines the stages a customer goes through with a business. This journey can vary across organizations but includes five key steps:

1. Awareness : This is the first stage of the customer journey, where the customers realize they have a problem. The customer becomes aware of your brand or product at this stage, usually due to marketing efforts.

2. Consideration : Once customers know about your product or service, they start their research and compare brands.

3. Purchase : This is the stage where the customer has chosen a solution and is ready to buy your product or service.

4. Retention : After the purchase, it's about retaining that customer and nurturing a relationship. This is where good customer service comes in.

5. Advocacy : Also called the loyalty stage, this is when the customer not only continues to buy your product but also recommends it to others.

The journey doesn't end when the customer buys and recommends your solution to others. Customer journey strategies are cyclical and repetitive. After the advocacy stage, ideally, you continue to attract and retain the customers, keeping them in the cycle. 

There is no standard format for a customer journey map. The key is to create one that works best for your team and product or service. Get started with customer journey mapping with our template:

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

The buyer's journey involves the buyer's path towards purchasing. This includes some of the steps we saw in the customer journey but is specific to purchasing :

1. Awareness Stage : This is when a prospective buyer realizes they have a problem. However, they aren't yet fully aware of the solutions available to them.

2. Consideration Stage : After identifying their problem, the buyer researches and investigates different solutions with more intent. They compare different products, services, brands, or strategies here.

3. Decision Stage : The buyer then decides which solution will solve their problem at the right price. This is where the actual purchasing action takes place.  

4. Post-Purchase Evaluation : Although not always included, this stage is critical. It's where the buyer assesses their satisfaction with the purchase. It includes customer service interactions, quality assessment, and attitudinal loyalty to the brand.

All these stages can involve many touchpoints, including online research, social media interactions, and even direct, in-person interactions. Different buyers may move through these stages at different speeds and through various channels, depending on a wide range of factors.

User Journey

The user journey focuses on people's experience with digital platforms like websites or software. Key stages include:

1. Discovery : In this stage, users become aware of your product, site, or service, often due to marketing efforts, word-of-mouth, or organic search. It also includes their initial reactions or first impressions.

2. Research/Consideration : Here, users dig deeper, exploring features, comparing with alternatives, and evaluating if your offering suits their needs and preferences.

3. Interaction/Use : Users actively engage with your product or service. They first-hand experience your solution's functionality, usability, and usefulness to achieve their goal.

4. Problem-solving : If they encounter any issues, how they seek help and resolve their issues fall into this stage. It covers user support, troubleshooting, and other assistance.

5. Retention/Loyalty : This stage involves how users stay engaged over time. Do they continue using your product, reduce usage, or stop altogether? It includes their repeated interactions, purchases, and long-term engagement over time.

6. Advocacy/Referral : This is when users are so satisfied they begin to advocate for your product, leaving positive reviews and referring others to your service.

Download this user journey map template featuring an example of a user’s routine. 

Understanding these stages can help optimize the user experience, providing value at each stage and making the journey seamless and enjoyable. 

Always remember the journey is as important as the destination. Customer relationships start from the first website visit or interaction with marketing materials. These initial touchpoints can influence the ongoing relationship with your customers.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

All customer interactions, pre and post-purchase.

Pre-purchase stages: awareness, consideration, conversion.

Subset of interactions in digital platforms.

Start/End Point

From marketing to end of customer relationship.

From awareness to conversion stages.

From user entry to exit on a digital platform.

All types of products and services—software and non—software interactions.

Decision-making before a purchase

Primarily digital platform interactions.

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is valuable yet has limitations and potential drawbacks. Recognize these challenges and create more practical and realistic journey maps.

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

Customer journey maps often risk simplifying complex customer experiences . They may depict varied and unpredictable customer behaviors as straightforward and linear. This simplification can lead to misunderstandings about your customers' needs and wants. As a result, you might overlook customers' diverse and unique paths. 

Always remember that real customer experiences are more complex than any map. When you recognize this, you steer clear of decisions based on simple models.

Resource Intensity

Creating detailed customer journey maps requires a lot of resources and time. You must gather extensive data and update the maps to keep them relevant. This process can strain small businesses or those with limited resources. 

You need to balance the need for comprehensive mapping with available resources. Efficient resource management and prioritization are crucial to maintaining effective journey maps.

Risk of Bias

Creating customer journey maps carries the inherent risk of biases . These biases can arise from various sources. They can impact the accuracy and effectiveness of the maps. 

Alan Dix, an expert in HCI, discusses bias in more detail in this video.  

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

Assumption Bias: When teams make decisions based on preconceived notions rather than customer data.

Selection Bias: When the data doesn’t represent the entire customer base..

Confirmation Bias : When you focus on information that supports existing beliefs and preferences. Simultaneously, you tend to ignore or dismiss data that contradicts those beliefs.

Anchoring Bias : Relying on the first information encountered (anchor) when making decisions.

Overconfidence Bias : Placing too much trust in the accuracy of the journey map. You may overlook its potential flaws.

These biases may misguide the team, and design decisions based on these maps might not be effective.

To address these biases, review and update journey maps with real user research data. Engage with different customer segments and gather a wide range of feedback to help create a more accurate and representative map. This approach ensures the journey map aligns with actual customer experiences and behaviors.

Evolving Customer Behaviors

Customer behaviors and preferences change with time. A journey map relevant today can become outdated. You need to update and adapt your maps to reflect these changes. This requires you to perform market research and stay updated with trends and customer feedback. 

Getting fresh data ensures your journey map stays relevant and effective. You must adapt to evolving customer behaviors to maintain accurate and valuable customer journey maps.

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

Capturing emotions accurately in customer journey maps poses a significant challenge. Emotions influence customer decisions, yet you may find it difficult to quantify and represent them in maps. Most journey maps emphasize actions and touchpoints, often neglecting the emotional journey. 

You must integrate emotional insights into these maps to understand customer experiences. This integration enhances the effectiveness of customer engagement strategies. You can include user quotes, symbols such as emojis, or even graphs to capture the ups and downs of the users’ emotions..

Misalignment with Customer Needs

Misalignments in customer journey maps can manifest in various ways. It can impact the effectiveness of your strategies. Common misalignments include:

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

Not seeing or serving the varied needs of different customer types.

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

Engage with your customers to understand their needs and preferences if you want to address these misalignments. Incorporate their direct feedback into the journey map. This approach leads to more effective customer engagement and satisfaction.

Over-Reliance on the Map

Relying too much on customer journey maps can lead to problems. These maps should serve as tools rather than definitive guides. Viewing them as perfect can restrict your responsiveness to customer feedback and market changes. Treat journey maps as evolving documents that complement direct customer interactions and feedback. 

Make sure you get regular updates and maintain flexibility in your approach. Balance the insights from the map with ongoing customer engagement. This approach keeps your business agile and responsive to evolving customer needs.

Data Privacy Concerns

Collecting customer data for journey mapping poses significant privacy concerns. Thus, you need to create a balance. You must adhere to data protection laws and gather enough information for mapping. 

You need a careful strategy to ensure customer data security. Stay vigilant to adapt to evolving privacy regulations and customer expectations. This vigilance helps maintain trust and compliance.

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

Take our Journey Mapping course to gain insights into the how and why of journey mapping. Learn practical methods to create experience maps , customer journey maps, and service blueprints for immediate application.

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer journey map requires visually representing the customer's experience with your product or company. Harness the strength of visual reasoning to understand and present this journey succinctly. Instead of detailing a lengthy narrative, like a book, a well-crafted map allows stakeholders, whether designers or not, to grasp the journey quickly. It's a democratized tool that disseminates information, unifies teams, and aids decision-making by illuminating previously unnoticed or misunderstood aspects of the customer's journey.

The customer journey encompasses five distinct stages that guide a customer's interaction with a brand or product:

Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a need or problem.

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

Purchase: The customer decides on a solution and makes a purchase.

Retention: Post-purchase, the customer uses the product and forms an opinion.

Advocacy: Satisfied customers become brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences.

For a comprehensive understanding of these stages and how they intertwine with customer touchpoints, refer to Interaction-Design.org's in-depth article .

A perspective grid workshop is a activity that brings together stakeholders from various departments, such as product design, marketing, growth, and customer support, to align on a shared understanding of the customer's journey. These stakeholders contribute unique insights about customer needs and how they interact with a product or service. The workshop entails:

Creating a matrix to identify customers' jobs and requirements, not initially linked to specific features.

Identifying the gaps, barriers, pains, and risks associated with unmet needs, and constructing a narrative for the journey.

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

Discuss the implied technical and non-technical capabilities required to deliver this value.

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

The ultimate aim is to foster alignment within the organization and produce a user journey map based on shared knowledge. 

Learn more from this insightful video:

Customer journey mapping is vital as it harnesses our visual reasoning capabilities to articulate a customer's broad, intricate journey with a brand. Such a depiction would otherwise require extensive documentation, like a book. This tool offers a cost-effective method to convey information succinctly, ensuring understanding of whether one is a designer or lacks the time for extensive reading. It also helps the team to develop a shared vision and to encourage collaboration.  Businesses can better comprehend and address interaction points by using a journey map, facilitating informed decision-making and revealing insights that might otherwise remain obscured. Learn more about the power of visualizing the customer journey in this video.

Pain points in a customer journey map represent customers' challenges or frustrations while interacting with a product or service. They can arise from unmet needs, gaps in service, or barriers faced during the user experience. Identifying these pain points is crucial as they highlight areas for improvement, allowing businesses to enhance the customer experience and meet their needs more effectively. Pain points can relate to various aspects, including product usability, communication gaps, or post-purchase concerns. Explore the detailed article on customer journey maps at Interaction Design Foundation for a deeper understanding and real-world examples.

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting areas for improvement. This ensures that products or services meet users' needs effectively.

The process fosters team alignment, ensuring everyone understands and prioritizes the customer's perspective.

It helps identify pain points, revealing opportunities to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

This visualization allows businesses to make informed decisions, ensuring resources target the most impactful areas.

To delve deeper into the advantages and insights on journey mapping, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on key takeaways from the IXDF journey mapping course .

In design thinking, a customer journey map visually represents a user's interactions with a product or service over time. It provides a detailed look at a user's experience, from initial contact to long-term engagement. Focusing on the user's perspective highlights their needs, emotions, pain points, and moments of delight. This tool aids in understanding and empathizing with users, a core principle of design thinking. When used effectively, it bridges gaps between design thinking and marketing, ensuring user-centric solutions align with business goals. For a comprehensive understanding of how it fits within design thinking and its relation to marketing, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on resolving conflicts between design thinking and marketing .

A customer journey map and a user journey map are tools to understand the experience of users or customers with a product or service.

A customer journey map is a broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It considers physical and digital channels, multiple user personas, and emotional and qualitative aspects.

A user journey map is a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service. It only considers digital channels, one user persona, and functional and quantitative aspects.

Both are useful to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. However, they have different scopes, perspectives, and purposes. A customer journey map provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience across multiple channels and stages. A user journey map provides a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service.

While user journeys might emphasize specific tasks or pain points, customer journeys encapsulate the entire experience, from research and comparison to purchasing and retention. 

Customer journey maps and service blueprints are tools to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. A customer journey map shows the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It focuses on the front stage of the service, which is what the customers see and experience. It considers different user personas and emotional aspects.

A service blueprint shows how a service is delivered and operated by an organization. It focuses on the back stage of the service, which is what the customers do not see or experience. It considers one user persona and functional aspects. What are the steps that the customer takes to complete a specific task or goal within the service? What are the channels and devices that the customer interacts with at each step?

For an immersive dive into customer journey mapping, consider enrolling in the Interaction Design Foundation's specialized course . This course offers hands-on lessons, expert guidance, and actionable tools. Furthermore, to grasp the course's essence, the article “4 Takeaways from the IXDF Journey Mapping Course” sheds light on the core learnings, offering a snapshot of what to expect. These resources are tailored by industry leaders, ensuring you're equipped with the best knowledge to craft impactful customer journey maps.

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Why do designers create customer journey maps?

• To document internal company processes and designer feedback
• To replace other forms of customer feedback
• To visualize customer experiences and identify pain points

In which stage do customers first recognize they have a problem?

What element is essential in a customer journey map?

• Competitor analysis
• Customer's thoughts and feelings
• Empathy maps and user stories

Why are scenarios included in a customer journey map?

• To exemplify the design thinking process
• To list product features
• To show the context and sequence of events

Why should designers iterate and refine customer journey maps?

• To ensure it remains relevant and accurate
• To keep the map visually appealing
• To reduce the number of customer interactions

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Literature on Customer Journey Maps

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Journey Maps by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

Take a deep dive into Customer Journey Maps with our course Journey Mapping .

This course will show you how to use journey mapping to turn your own complex design challenges into simple, delightful user experiences . If you want to design a great shopping experience, an efficient signup flow or an app that brings users delight over time, journey mapping is a critical addition to your toolbox. 

We will begin with a short introduction to mapping — why it is so powerful, and why it is so useful in UX. Then we will get familiar with the three most common types of journey map — experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints — and how to recognize, read and use each one. Then you will learn how to collect and analyze data as a part of a journey mapping process. Next you will learn how to create each type of journey map , and in the final lesson you will learn how to run a journey mapping workshop that will help to turn your journey mapping insights into actual products and services. 

This course will provide you with practical methods that you can start using immediately in your own design projects, as well as downloadable templates that can give you a head start in your own journey mapping projects. 

The “Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project” includes three practical exercises where you can practice the methods you learn, solidify your knowledge and if you choose, create a journey mapping case study that you can add to your portfolio to demonstrate your journey mapping skills to future employers, freelance customers and your peers. 

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

Indi Young will provide wisdom on how to gather the right data as part of your journey mapping process. She has written two books,  Practical Empathy  and  Mental Models . Currently she conducts live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was a founder of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was an early innovator in journey mapping. 

Kai Wang will walk us through his very practical process for creating a service blueprint, and share how he makes journey mapping a critical part of an organization’s success. Kai is a talented UX pro who has designed complex experiences for companies such as CarMax and CapitalOne. 

Matt Snyder will help us think about journey mapping as a powerful and cost-effective tool for building successful products. He will also teach you how to use a tool called a perspective grid that can help a data-rich journey mapping process go more smoothly. In 2020 Matt left his role as the Sr. Director of Product Design at Lucid Software to become Head of Product & Design at Hivewire. 

Christian Briggs will be your tour guide for this course. He is a Senior Product Designer and Design Educator at the Interaction Design Foundation. He has been designing digital products for many years, and has been using methods like journey mapping for most of those years.  

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

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How to define customer journey map stages

Customer journey map stages are the bedrock upon which your maps are built, giving a firm foundation for understanding and improving the customer experience. They are what you visualize on your map after creating a customer persona . 

However, a customer journey that your customers, buyers, employees, or representatives of any other target audience segments take is often more akin to a flowing river than a series of distinct steps. And it may not always be readily apparent how to neatly divide the journey into customer journey map stages.

Now, let's explore several approaches to defining and mapping your customer journey map stages, enabling you to outline them on your customer journey map effectively. By considering these strategies, you can create a robust and tailored framework that accurately represents your customers' unique path, enhancing your ability to analyze, optimize, and deliver exceptional experiences at each stage.

• 1.1 Awareness stage
• 1.2 Consideration stage
• 1.3 Evaluation stage
• 1.4 Purchase stage
• 1.5 Onboarding stage
• 1.6 Engagement stage
• 1.7 Retention stage
• 1.8 Advocacy stage
• 2 Define the scope
• 3.1 Example: A customer journey with a travel agency
• 3.2 Example of turning touchpoints into stages:
• 4 Determine customer goals
• 5 Take advantage of affinity mapping
• 6 Analyze tasks
• 7 How can you improve each customer journey stage?
• 8 Avoid these mistakes
• 9 Check out UXPressia’s ready-to-go templates
• 10 Wrapping up

Customer journey map stages: definition 

The customer journey mapping process involves customer journey map stages. Those are the customer journey phases a customer persona goes through when interacting with a business or brand. These stages are a sum of various touchpoints, actions, and emotions experienced by the customer as they progress from the initial awareness stage to post-purchase activities.

While the exact stages may differ depending on the business and industry, a typical journey map often encompasses the following stages:

Awareness stage

The customer becomes aware of the brand or product through advertising, social media, word-of-mouth, or other channels .

Consideration stage

The customer starts considering the brand or product as a potential solution to their needs. They may research different options, compare options, and seek recommendations.

Evaluation stage

Customers narrow their choices and evaluate the brand or product's features, benefits, and pricing. They may read reviews, gather more information, or interact with sales representatives.

Purchase stage

The customer decides to make the purchase. Activities at this stage may include completing the transaction, selecting payment options, and receiving order confirmation.

Onboarding stage

After the purchase, the customer enters the onboarding stage, where they learn how to use the product or service effectively. It might involve setup, tutorials, or assistance from customer support.

Engagement stage

The customer actively engages with the products or services, utilizing their features and deriving value from them. Substages may include regular usage, interactions with customer support, participation in loyalty programs, and so on.

Retention stage

The customer remains satisfied with the brand or product, leading to repeat purchases and loyalty. Efforts like personalized offers, proactive customer support, or rewards programs are vital at this stage.

Advocacy stage

Satisfied customers become advocates for the brand, sharing positive experiences on the Internet, referring others, or providing testimonials. This stage can contribute to brand growth and attract new customers.

It's important to note that the number of customer journey phases and their specific definitions may vary based on a business's unique characteristics and customer journey. The stages you end up with will serve as a framework for understanding and improving the customer experience, identifying pain points, and developing targeted strategies for each phase of the customer journey.

But where should one start?

Define the scope

It's crucial to determine the specific part of the customer journey you want to focus on.

You can get a bird's-eye view of the end-to-end journey by concentrating on high-level client journey stages, such as awareness, consideration, preference, action, and loyalty . This perspective lets you understand the whole journey from initial discovery to ongoing engagement after the purchase.

Alternatively, you can delve deeper and focus on specific aspects of the customer journey, identifying and analyzing areas that require immediate attention or those where you have significant knowledge. 

For example, if you have a retail store, you can zoom in on the delivery stage, carefully mapping it out to uncover customers’ pain points or opportunities for improvement.

By focusing on a specific stage, you can gain valuable insights into the customer experience at that particular touchpoint. Doing that lets you identify opportunities to optimize processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and foster loyalty. This focused approach enables you to address critical areas of your business while still considering the broader context of the entire customer journey.

Group customer journey map stages by touchpoints

Now that you've established the scope of your map, the next step is to identify its client journey stages. One effective approach is to closely examine a customer’s various touchpoints throughout their journey and categorize them into groups based on their similarities.

For this purpose, analyze the customer interactions and touchpoints from the initial point of contact to the final engagement. Look for patterns, recurring themes, and commonalities among these touchpoints. For example, you may find out that certain touchpoints involve information gathering or decision-making, while others focus on transactional or post-purchase activities.

By identifying these touchpoint groups, you can start to shape the stages of your customer journey map. These stages reflect the logical progression of the customer's experience and help you understand their key milestones and transitions.

Example: A customer journey with a travel agency

To illustrate the process, let's consider a customer journey within the context of a travel agency . Put yourself in the shoes of a customer seeking a vacation destination. Now, think about all the potential touchpoints you are likely to encounter when utilizing the travel agency’s services. By envisioning this scenario, you can generate a comprehensive list of touchpoints, which will aid in determining the stages of the customer journey.

The touchpoints in this example could include: 

• doing initial research on the agency's website or social media platforms;
• engaging with customer reviews;
• reaching out to the agency via phone or email for inquiries;
• interacting with a travel agent;
• exploring various vacation options; 
• receiving personalized travel recommendations;
• discussing and finalizing the itinerary; 
• making reservations;
• receiving travel documents; 
• experiencing the trip itself; 
• and providing feedback or testimonials.

Once you have compiled this list of touchpoints, you can easily derive suitable names for the customer journey stages. For instance, the stages may include "Discovery and Research," "Consultation and Personalization," "Booking and Reservation," "Preparation and Documentation," "Travel Experience," and "Post-Trip Evaluation."

Example of turning touchpoints into stages:

• Checking out searching results, watching Google ads → Research
• Visiting the agency’s home page, pricing, and other pages → Choosing
• Meeting the company’s staff, sending emails, filling-out contact form → First contact
• Reading trip proposals, getting booklets and brochures → Selecting a trip
• Filling in the payment form, signing the contract → Paying for the service
• Getting the list of necessary docs → Collecting the docs
• Chatting with a customer support agent → Support
• Typing in the feedback form, sending a review email → Feedback

Determine customer goals

Another approach to defining stages is by analyzing customer goals. Each stage of the journey map is like a series of subgoals that customers strive to accomplish to fulfill their ultimate objective—the reason why they opted to use your products or services. To effectively identify these subgoals, it can be helpful to put yourself in your customers' shoes and consider things from their perspective. 

What are the specific objectives or subgoals they seek to accomplish with your help? For example, in the travel agency context, customers may have subgoals such as finding the perfect destination, securing the best deals, quickly getting through the booking process, and ultimately experiencing a memorable and enjoyable vacation.

By understanding these subgoals, you can align your customer journey map stages more precisely with your customers' needs and desires. Doing so enables you to tailor your product or service offerings to better address the subgoals, ultimately increasing customers' satisfaction and loyalty.

In our example, once customers have selected a travel agency, their next subgoal is to choose a suitable trip package, marking the commencement of a new stage in the customer journey. Here, customers may explore various vacation options, compare destinations, consider factors such as budget, duration, and activities, and evaluate the benefits of different packages.

Take advantage of affinity mapping

An affinity map is a tool for organizing and making sense of complex data by grouping related ideas and concepts. It serves as a visual framework that helps structure a broad range of ideas, enabling more effective analysis and understanding. When it comes to drafting customer journey map stages, affinity maps can be a powerful asset.

To utilize an affinity map for customer journey mapping purposes, follow these steps:

1. Brainstorm. Think of all the real or hypothetical actions that customers will perform while pursuing their end goal.

2. Record. Write down each customer action on a separate sticky note. Randomly spread notes on a large work surface so all notes are visible to everyone.

3. Analyze. Look for actions that seem related in some way and place them side by side.

4. Categorize. Once you have defined a sufficient number of relations, start grouping them based on their similarities or related themes. Look for patterns, commonalities, or connections between the ideas. As you group them, you can start identifying overarching themes or emerging categories.

Voilà, these grouped clusters will serve as the foundation for defining your customer journey map stages. 

Pro tip: Affinity maps not only help you organize and make sense of the data but also encourage collaboration and input from stakeholders. They provide a visual representation that facilitates discussions and allows us to consider everyone's viewpoints when defining the customer journey map stages.

Analyze tasks

To identify customer journey map stages, you can utilize a fundamental technique from the user experience design. This technique helps understand how users interact with a system or interface to accomplish specific tasks. It breaks down complex tasks into smaller, manageable steps to identify user goals, actions, and decision points to create more intuitive and efficient interfaces.

To conduct task analysis, you need to take several steps: 

• Firstly, define the scope and purpose of the analysis. This involves identifying the specific tasks users need to perform within the system or interface under attention. For example, for an e-commerce website, tasks may include finding the desired products, adding items to the shopping cart, and completing the checkout process. Sounds like customer journey map stages, doesn’t it?
• Once you define those, the next step is to observe and gather data on how users currently perform those tasks. For example, by running user interview sessions, making direct observations, or collecting existing data from analytics tools. The goal is to capture the sequence of actions, decision points, and potential difficulties users encounter while completing each task.
• Having collected the data, identify patterns and key insights. How? Break down the tasks into smaller steps and document them in a structured way. Each step should include the user's action(s), the system's response, and any decision points that arise. It's essential to accurately capture the user's perspective and the system's behavior.

Seems like this methodology is more about a user journey map, but it’s totally applicable to other types of customer journey maps, too, as today almost every business has a website as part of their customer journeys.

Pro tip: You can always turn a subtask into a substage of your journey map to focus on it. 

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

To get the most out of each step in the customer journey and optimize the client journey mapping process, it's essential to pay attention to and anticipate any issues or expectations that may come up. By identifying them in advance, you can address and fix them in earlier stages.

One way to impress your customers is by introducing new features or offering extra value. These can greatly improve their experience and leave a positive impression, leading to higher customer retention in the end.

Another way to improve stages is to evaluate the channels used in the customer journey. Are there any missing channels that should be included? Are there too many channels that aren't effective? By optimizing the channels, you can enhance the customer experience and ensure more effective communication.

Consistency is key. Make sure that you deliver on your brand promises throughout the customer journey. Regularly monitor and assess each stage to make sure you're not only meeting expectations but exceeding them.

For instance, at the purchase stage, current and potential customers expect a smooth and efficient process. By offering incentives like free shipping or exclusive discounts, you can impress them and create a positive impression. Clear and concise communication and timely updates on the purchase status also enhance the overall experience.

Avoid these mistakes

When creating journey map stages, some common mistakes can occur:

• Oversimplifying the stages. One mistake is reducing the journey to only customer journey stages that seem essential from the business perspective. As a result, you may overlook important customer interactions and experiences. It's crucial to capture the nuances of the customer experience by breaking it down into more detailed stages that align with specific touchpoints and interactions.
• Focusing only on customer actions. While it's important to understand the actions customers take throughout their journey, it's equally vital to consider their emotional and cognitive states. Neglecting the customers' thoughts, feelings, and motivations at each stage can result in an incomplete understanding of their experience.
• Ignoring variations and personas. Every customer is unique, and their buying journey may differ based on factors such as demographics, preferences, and previous experiences. Neglecting these variations and creating a one-size-fits-all journey map may not accurately represent the experiences of all customer segments. It's essential to account for different personas and their unique needs and behaviors.

• Relying solely on internal perspectives. To do customer journey mapping, you need to gather data that will help you to determine accurate stages. It's crucial to gather insights from both internal stakeholders and actual customers. Relying solely on internal assumptions and perspectives may lead to biases and misinterpretations of the customer experience. Include customer feedback, surveys, interviews, and any other relevant sources to ensure an accurate representation of their journey.
• Failure to iterate and validate. Journey stages may change over time, particularly as customer expectations change or new touchpoints emerge. Failing to revisit and update with the new info your journey stages can result in outdated customer journey maps that no longer reflect the current customer experience.

Check out UXPressia’s ready-to-go templates

To help you identify customer journey map stages, we have created a dedicated page with a variety of ready-to-go and free-to-download CJM templates designed for different types of businesses. Each template already includes a set of stages that offer valuable insights and inspiration for creating your own journey maps. And each is fully adaptable to your case. 

SEE ALL TEMPLATES

Wrapping up

Mapping out customer journey stages is essential for understanding and improving the customer experience. By considering different approaches, such as defining the map scope, grouping stages by touchpoints, using customers' goals, affinity mapping, and task analysis, businesses can effectively outline the stages of their customer journeys. And thus, to approach the goal of improving customer, employee, user, or any other experience.

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Have heard of two out of three approaches, but the one with using goals to define customer journey phases is a fresh idea. Do you have any advice on how to figure out the right goals and not confuse them with actions?

Hi Tallulah, great question! You can try the five-whys method. Start by formulating an action statement and then ask “Why?”, as in “Why does this persona want to …?”. Take the answer and repeat the process four more times to understand what underlining goals and benefits are hidden beneath. Then, following the technique in the blog post, you should be able to determine the stages of a customer journey.

Great tips! We usually define customer journey stages in a team workshop: get together and write out everything that the customer does on sticky notes, and then rearrange them on a white board and try to group accordingly.

I really liked how you broke down the customer journey into stages we can actually work with, and those real-life tips are super handy

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User Journey Map Guide with Examples & FREE Templates

18 April, 2024

Senior UX Researcher

Customer journey mapping is also a popular workshop task to align user understanding within teams. If backed up by user data and research, they can be a high-level inventory that helps discover strategic oversights, knowledge gaps, and future opportunities.

Yet, if you ask two different people, you will likely get at least three different opinions as to what a user journey looks like and whether it is worth the hassle. Read on if you want to understand whether a UX journey map is what you currently need and how to create one.

You can get the templates here:

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of this template.

What is user journey mapping?

Imagine your product is a supermarket and your user is the person wanting to refill their fridge. They need to: 

Decide what to buy, and in what supermarket will they be able to find and afford it

Remember to bring their coupons

Park there 

Find everything

Save the new coupons for the next shopping trip

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3 ways to understand user journey maps

Now, there are at least three ways to look at the customer journey.

1. Workflow maps for usability optimization 

Some imagine a user journey map as a wireframe or detailed analysis of  specific flows in their app . This could be, for example, a sign-up flow or the flow for inviting others to a document. In our supermarket example, it’s a closer look at what they do inside your supermarket, maybe even only in the frozen section. Or you could define what you want them to do in the frozen aisle.

.css-61w915{margin-right:8px;margin-top:8px;max-height:30px;}@media screen and (min-width: 768px){.css-61w915{margin-right:38px;max-height:unset;}} The focus here is on getting the details of the execution right, not how it fits into the bigger picture of what the user needs.

It is more or less a wireframe from a user perspective. Such a product-focused understanding is not what we want to discuss in this article, though many examples for the best user journey maps you might come across are exactly this. There are good reasons to do such an analysis as well, since it helps you smooth out usability for the people who have already found their way into your supermarket because of your excellent ice cream selection. Workflow maps won’t help you notice that your lack of parking spots is one of the reasons why you are missing out on potential customers in the first place. By only looking at what they do inside the supermarket, you might also miss out on an opportunity for user retention: You could help them get their ice cream home before it melts.

2. Holistic user journey maps for strategic insights

With a more holistic view of what people experience when trying to achieve a goal, product makers gain strategic insights on how their product fits into the big picture and what could be in the future. Because this journey document covers so much ground, it is usually a linear simplification of what all the steps would look like if they were completed. Going back to our supermarket example, it would start from the moment the person starts planning to fill the fridge and ends when the fridge is full again — even if the supermarket building is only relevant in a few phases of this journey. Creating this version of a user journey map requires quite some time and research effort. But it can be an invaluable tool for product and business strategy. It is an inventory of user needs that can help you discover knowledge gaps and future opportunities.  Service blueprints   are the most comprehensive version of a user journey map  since they also lay out the behind-the-scenes of a service, usually called backstage. In our supermarket example, that could be:

the advertising efforts

logistics required to keep all shelves stocked

protocols the staffers follow when communicating with customers

3. Journey mapping workshops as an alignment method

In a user journey mapping workshop, stakeholders and team members share their knowledge and assumptions about the users. Some of these assumptions might need to be challenged — which is part of the process. The goal is not the perfect output, but rather to get everyone into one room and work out a common understanding of the users they are building products for. It forces everyone to organize their thoughts, spell out what they know and assumed was common knowledge — and ideally meet real users as part of the workshop. If done right, this establishes a more comprehensive understanding of what users go through and helps overcome the very superficial ideas one might have about the lives and needs of people outside their own social bubble.

Hence, such a workshop helps create aha moments and gives the consequences of great and poor product decisions a face. So at the end of the day, it is one of many methods to evangelize user-centricity in an organization.

What are the benefits of user experience (UX) mapping?

We already discussed the benefits and shortcomings of workflow maps, but what are the reasons you should consider a UX journey map and/or a journey mapping workshop ?

1. Switching perspectives

Empathy:  Like any other UX method and user research output, user journey maps are supposed to foster empathy and help product makers put themselves into the shoes of a user. Awareness:  It creates awareness of why users do all the things they do. And it challenges product makers to resist the temptation of building something because it’s feasible, not because it’s needed that way.

2. Aligned understanding

Given the team is involved in creating the user experience map (either as a workshop, in expert interviews, observing the user research, or at least as a results presentation), it forces a conversation and offers a shared mental model and terminology — the foundation for a shared vision. 

3. Seeing the big picture

Imagine the vastly different perceptions Sales reps, Customer Support teams, C-level, and backend engineers might have since they all meet very different segments at very different stages of their journey. Day-to-day, it makes sense to be an expert in the stages of a user journey you are responsible for. A journey map helps to step back from this and see the bigger picture, where your work fits in, and where assumptions about the majority of users were wrong. It might even help define KPIs across teams that don’t cancel each other out.

4. Uncovering blind spots and opportunities

A user journey map gives you a structured and comprehensive overview of which user needs are already tackled by your product and which ones are either underserved or solved with other tools and touchpoints. Which moments of truth do not get enough attention yet? These are the opportunities and blind spots you can work on in the future.

When is customer journey mapping just a waste of time?

In all honesty, there are also moments when creating a user journey map or running a journey mapping workshop is destined to fail and should better be put on hold. It’s a lot of work, so don’t let this energy go to waste.  User journey maps only make sense when there is an intention to collaboratively work on and with them.  Here are some of the scenarios and indicators that it’s the wrong moment for a journey map:

No buy-in for the workshop: The requirements of a successful journey workshop are not met, e.g., there is not enough time (60 minutes over lunch won’t do the trick), only a few team members are willing to attend, and/or key stakeholders refuse to have their assumptions challenged.

Isolated creation: The whole creation process of the user journey map happens isolated from the team, e.g., it is outsourced to an agency or an intern. Nobody from the team observes or runs the user research, or is consulted for input or feedback on the first drafts. There is no event or presentation planned that walks the team through the output. Finally, a very detailed, 10-foot-long poster appears in a hallway, and none of the team members ever find time to read, process, or discuss it with each other.

UX theater: For one reason or another, there is no time/resources allocated to user research or reviewing existing insights whilst creating the map (usability tests with non-users do not count in this case, though). Such an approach, also known as, can do more harm than good since the resulting user journey may only reinforce wrong assumptions and wishful thinking about your users.

Unclear objectives: The user journey map is only created because it is on your UX design checklist, but the purpose is unclear. If you are unsure what you or your stakeholders want to achieve with this journey map, clarify expectations and desired output before investing more energy into this. E.g., there is a chance you were only meant to do a usability review of a bumpy app workflow.

Lack of follow-through: Creating a user journey map is just the start. Without a plan to implement changes based on insights gathered, the map is merely a paper exercise. This lack of action can result from limited resources, lack of authority, or inertia. It's vital to establish a process for turning insights from the map into design improvements or strategy adjustments. This includes assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and defining success metrics to ensure the map drives real change and doesn't end up forgotten.

Overcomplication: Sometimes, to capture every nuance and detail of the user experience, teams can create an overly complex user journey map. This can make the map difficult to understand and use, particularly for team members who weren't involved in its creation. A good user journey map should balance detail and clarity, providing insightful and actionable information without overwhelming its users.

Failure to update: User expectations, behaviors, and the digital landscape constantly evolve. A user journey map that remains static will quickly become outdated. Regular reviews and updates are necessary to ensure that the map reflects the current state of user experiences. This requires a commitment to ongoing user research and a willingness to adjust your understanding of the user's path as new information becomes available.

The good news is: UX maturity in an organization can change rapidly, so even if you run into one of the obstacles above, it is worth revisiting the idea in the future. Once you’re good to go, you can get started with the user journey map examples and templates below.

User journey mapping: examples, templates & tools

There is more than one way to do it right and design a great user journey map. Every organization and industry has its own templates, tools and approaches to what elements are most important to them. The following examples and template will give you an idea of what a user journey map can look like if you decide to create one yourself. Make it your own, and change up the sections and design so they make sense for your product and use cases.

User journey map template and checklist

To give you a first orientation, you can use this user journey template and check the two fictional examples below to see how you could adapt it for two very different industries: instant meal delivery and healthcare.

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of the user journey map template. 

While there is no official standard, most other user journey maps contain the following elements or variations of them:

Key phases (or ‘stages’) start when users become aware of a problem they need to solve or a goal they want to achieve and may end when they evaluate whether they achieved their goal or enter a maintenance phase. E.g., user journeys for e-commerce could be structured along the classic funnel of:

Consideration

Delivery & use

Loyalty & advocacy

2. Jobs to be done

Whilst some other user journey templates might call this section ‘steps’ or ‘tasks’, it can be very beneficial to structure the stages into ‘jobs to be done’ (JTBD) instead. This framework helps you distinguish better between the actual goal of a user vs. the tasks required to get there . For example, safe online payments are never a goal of a user, this is just one of many jobs on the long way to get new sneakers on their feet. Ideally, users ‘hire’ your product/service to assist them with some of the JTBD on their journey. Phrase your JTBD as verb + object + context . Examples:

Install app on phone

Tip delivery driver

Buy new shoes

Naturally, the stages closest to your current (and future) solution require a more detailed understanding, so you might want to investigate and document deeper what JTBDs happen there.

3. Needs and pains

Users have needs and pains every step along the journey. Use this section to collect the most important needs and potential pains, even if not all apply in all cases. Ask:

What are the repeating themes, even the ones you are (currently) not able to solve with your product?

Phrase pains and needs as I- or me-statements from the user perspective, e.g., ‘I forgot my login details, ‘I am afraid to embarrass myself’ or ‘My day is too busy to wait for a delivery.’ 

Which are the pains and needs that are so severe that, if not solved, they can become real deal-breakers for your product or service?

On the last point, such deal-breaker and dealmaker situations, or ‘ moments of truth ’, require particular attention in your product decisions and could be visually highlighted in your journey. In a meal delivery, the taste and temperature of the food are such a moment of truth that can spoil the whole experience with your otherwise fantastic service.

4. Emotional curve

An emotional curve visualizes how happy or frustrated users are at certain stages of their journey. Emojis are commonly used to make it easy to understand and empathize with the emotional state of the user across the whole journey. It can be a surprising realization that users are not delighted with your witty microcopy, but you already did a great job by not annoying them. It is also a good reminder that what might personally excite you is perceived as stressful or overwhelming by most other users. Strong user quotes can be used for illustration.

5. Brand and product touchpoints

Here, you can list current and planned touchpoints with your brand and product, as well as. Whilst the touchpoints when using your product might be obvious, others early and late in the journey are probably less obvious to you but critical for the user experience and decision to use or return to your product. This is why it is worthwhile to include them in your map. Make sure your journey does not get outdated too soon, and don’t list one-off marketing campaigns or very detailed aspects of current workflows — just what you got in general so there is no major revision needed for a couple of years.

6. Opportunities for improvement

As you map out your user journey, it is important to not only identify the current touchpoints and experiences but also opportunities for improvement. This could include potential areas where users may become frustrated or confused, as well as areas where they may be delighted or pleasantly surprised.

By identifying these opportunities, you can prioritize making meaningful improvements to the user experience and ultimately creating a more positive, long-lasting relationship with your users.

7. Other tools and touchpoints

This may seem the least interesting aspect of your journey or a user interview, but it can tell you a lot about blind spots in your service or potential partnerships or APIs to extend your service. E.g., Google Maps or WhatsApp are common workaround tools for missing or poor in-app solutions.

User journey map example 1: health industry

The following example is for a fictional platform listing therapists for people in need of mental health support, helping them find, contact, schedule, and pay for therapy sessions. As you can see, the very long journey with recurring steps (repeated therapy sessions) is cut short to avoid repetition. 

At the same time, it generalizes very individual mental health experiences into a tangible summary. While it is fair to assume that the key phases happen in this chronological order, JTBD, timing, and the number of sessions are kept open so that it works for different types of patients.

You can also see how the journey covers several phases when the platform is not in active use. Yet, these phases are milestones in the patient’s road to recovery. Looking at a journey like this, you could, for example, realize that a ‘graduation’ feature could be beneficial for your users, even if it means they will stop using your platform because they are feeling better.

This user journey map is fictional but oriented on Johanne Miller’s UX case study  Designing a mental healthcare platform . 

User journey map example 2: delivery services

What the example above does not cover is the role of the therapist on the platform — most likely they are a second user type that has very different needs for the way they use the platform. This is why the second example shows the two parallel journeys of two different user roles and how they interact with each other. 

Nowadays, internal staff such as delivery drivers have dedicated apps and ideally have a designated UX team looking out for their needs, too. Creating a frictionless and respectful user experience for ‘internal users’ is just as critical for the success of a business as it is to please customers.

User journey map example: meal delivery. Please note that this fictional journey map is just an example for illustrative purposes and has not been backed up with user research.

For more inspiration, you can find collections with more real-life user journey examples and customer journey maps on  UXeria ,  eleken.co  &  userinterviews.com , or check out free templates provided by the design tools listed below.

Free UX journey mapping tools with templates

No matter whether you’re a design buff or feel more comfortable in spreadsheets, there are many templates available for free(mium) tools you might be already using. 

For example, there are good templates and tutorials available for  Canva ,  Miro  and even  Google Sheets . If you are more comfortable with regular design software, you can use the templates available for  Sketch  or one of these two from the  Figma (template 1 ,  template 2 ) community. There are also several dedicated journey map tools with free licenses or free trials, e.g.,  FlowMapp ,  Lucidchart  and  UXPressia , just to name a few.

Be aware that the first draft will require a lot of rearrangement and fiddling until you get to the final version. So it might help to pick where this feels easy for you. 

How do I collect data for my app user journey?

User journey maps need to be rooted in reality and based on what users really need and do (not what we wish they did) to add value to the product and business strategy. Hence, user insights are an inevitable step in the creation process.

However, it’s a huge pile of information that needs to be puzzled together and usually, one source of information is not enough to cover the whole experience — every research method has its own blind spots. But if you combine at least two or three of the approaches below, you can create a solid app user journey .

1. In-house expertise

The people working for and with your users are an incredible source of knowledge to start and finalize the journey. Whilst there might be a few overly optimistic or biased assumptions you need to set straight with your additional research, a user journey mapping workshop and/or  expert interviews  involving colleagues from very different (user-facing) teams such as:

customer service

business intelligence

customer insights

will help you collect a lot of insights and feedback. You can use these methods to build a preliminary skeleton for your journey but also to finalize the journey with their input and feedback.

2. Desk research

Next to this, it is fair to assume there is already a ton of preexisting documented knowledge about the users simply floating around in your company. Your  UX research repository  and even  industry reports  you can buy or find with a bit of googling will help. Go through them and pick the cherries that are relevant for your user journey. Almost anything can be interesting:

Old research reports and not-yet-analyzed context interviews from earlier user interviews

NPS scores & user satisfaction surveys

App store feedback

Customer support tickets

Product reviews written by journalists

Competitor user journeys in publicly available UX case studies

Ask your in-house experts if they know of additional resources you could check. And find out if there’s already a  long-forgotten old journey map  from a few years ago that you can use as a starting point (most organizations have those somewhere).

3. Qualitative user research

Qualitative research methods are your best shot to learn about all the things users experience, think, and desire before and after they touch your product.  In-depth interviews  and  focus groups  explore who they are and what drives them. You could show them a skeleton user journey for feedback or  co-creation . 

This could also be embedded into your user journey mapping workshop with the team. Alternatively, you can follow their actual journey in  diary studies ,  in-home visits  or  shadowing . However, in all these cases it is important that you talk to real users of your product or competitors to learn more about the real scenarios. This is why usability testing with non-users or fictional scenarios won’t help much for the user journey map.

4. Quantitative research

Once you know the rough cornerstones of your user journey map,  surveys  could be used to let users rate what needs and pains really matter to them. And what their mood is at certain phases of the journey. You can learn how they became aware of your product and ask them which of the motives you identified are common or exotic edge cases. Implementing micro-surveys such as  NPS surveys , CES , and  CSAT  embedded into your product experience can give additional insights.

5. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey

Customer satisfaction surveys (or CSATs for short) are important tools that measure your customers' satisfaction with your product or service. It is usually measured through surveys or feedback forms, asking customers to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 5. This metric can give valuable insights into the overall satisfaction of your customers and can help identify areas of improvement for your product.

CSAT surveys can be conducted at different customer journey stages, such as after purchase or using a specific feature. This allows you to gather feedback on different aspects of your product and make necessary changes to improve overall satisfaction.

The benefit of CSAT lies in understanding how satisfied customers are with your product and why. By including open-ended questions in the surveys, you can gather qualitative insights into what aspects of your product work well and what needs improvement.

5. User analytics

User analytics is a beautiful source of information, even if it has its limits. Depending on what tools you are using (e.g., Google Analytics, Firebase, Hubspot, UXCam), you can follow the digital footprints of your users before and when they were using the product. This may include  acquisition channels  (input for brand touchpoints and early journey phases),  search terms  that brought them to your product (input for needs and pains), and how they navigate your product. 

Unlike a usability test, you can use  screen flows  and  heatmaps  to understand how your users behave naturally when they follow their own agenda at their own pace — and how often they are so frustrated that they just quit. Knowing this gives you pointers to negative user emotions at certain journey steps and even helps identify your product’s moments of truth. Whilst you cannot ask the users if your interpretations are correct, checking analytics already helps you prepare good questions and talking points for user interviews or surveys.

Curious to know how heatmaps will look in your app?  Try UXCam for free — with 100,000 monthly sessions and unlimited features.

How can I utilize UXCam to collect App User Journey data?

If you have UXCam set up in your mobile app, you can use it to support your user journey research. You can find many of the previously mentioned  user analytics  features ( screen flows  and  heatmaps , including  rage taps ) here as well. 

UXCam can also be an  invaluable asset for your qualitative research . Especially for niche products and B2B apps that normally have a lot of trouble  recruiting real users  via the usual user testing platforms. 

UXCam’s detailed segmentation options allow you to  identify exactly the users you want to interview  about their journey — and  reach out to them via either email or UXCam push notifications , which can include invitation links for your study, a survey or an additional screener.

Additionally, UXCam's session replay feature allows you to watch recordings of user sessions, providing valuable insights into how users interact with your app and where they may face challenges.

Where can I learn more about user journey map?

Don’t feel ready to get started? Here are a few additional resources that can help you dive deeper into user journey mapping and create the version that is best for your project.

Creating user journey maps & service blueprints:

Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach

Journey Mapping 101

How to create customer journey maps

Customer Journey Stages for Product Managers

The Perfect Customer Journey Map

Planning and running user journey mapping workshops:

Journey mapping workshop

Jobs to be done:

The Theory of Jobs To Be Done

Moments of truth in customer journeys:

Journey mapping MoTs

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a visual representation of the process that a user goes through to accomplish a goal with your product, service, or app.

What is a user journey?

A user journey refers to the series of steps a user takes to accomplish a specific goal within a product, service, or website. It represents the user's experience from their point of view as they interact with the product or service, starting from the initial contact or discovery, moving through various touchpoints, and leading to a final outcome or goal.

How do I use a user journey map in UX?

User journey maps are an essential tool in the UX design process, used to understand and address the user's needs and pain points.

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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

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Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

20+ User Journey Map Examples and Templates

12 min read

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

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

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

Let’s get started!

What is a user journey map?

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

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

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

User journey maps vs customer journey maps

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

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

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

Types of user and customer journey maps

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

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

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

User and customer journey map examples

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

1. Userpilot’s current user state journey map

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

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

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

2. Spotify’s music-sharing user journey map

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

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

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

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

3. Uber’s first experience user journey map

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

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

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

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

4. Dropbox’s customer journey map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Hubspot’s customer journey map

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

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

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

7. Netflix’s customer journey map

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

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

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

8. Canva’s user journey map

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

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

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

9. Zoom’s user journey map

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

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

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

10. HeartiCraft’s user journey map

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

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

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

11. Say Yeah!’s customer journey map

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

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

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

12. Gartner’s B2B customer buying journey map

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

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

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

13. Service blueprint map for technical support

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

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

Templates for user and customer journey mapping process

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

1. User journey map template in Figma

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

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

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

2. User empathy mapping template in Notion

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

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

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

3. Future state customer journey map template from Xtensio

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

This template includes space to add:

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

4. Service blueprint customer journey map template from Miro

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

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

5. Customer journey map template from Mural

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

Here you can:

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

6. Customer journey map template from Canva

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

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

7. Customer touchpoint map template from InVision

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

8. Customer journey mapping template from Slidesgo

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

9. B2B customer journey map template from UXPressia

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

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

10. Customer journey map template from Conceptboard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Mastering the User Journey Map: Best Practices and Examples

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Best practices and examples.

Journey Mapping the Digital-First Customer Experience

How modern feedback management can improve service delivery and simplify user journeys

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• On this page

Key Takeaways

What is a user journey map, importance of user journey mapping, key components of a user journey map, steps to create a user journey map, types of user journey maps, practical tips for effective user journey mapping, examples of user journey maps, tools and templates for user journey mapping.

• Call to Action

Frequently Asked Questions

•  User journey maps provide a visual representation of the entire user experience from initial contact to goal achievement, helping businesses improve customer satisfaction and product functionality.
•  Key components of a user journey map include personas, scenarios and goals, and actions and emotions, all of which are essential for accurately portraying the user journey and identifying areas for improvement.
•  Effective user journey mapping involves several steps including defining the scope, building personas, identifying touchpoints, mapping the journey stages, and validating and refining the map to ensure it reflects the true customer experience.

Scenarios and Goals

Actions and emotions.

Defining the scope

Constructing user personas

Identifying touchpoints

Mapping the journey stages

Validating and refining the map

Define the Scope

Build user personas, identify touchpoints.

•  Social media
•  Face-to-face interactions

Map the Journey Stages

Acquisition: Customers make their final purchasing decision through various channels such as online stores or social media storefronts.

Service: Post-purchase support, including help with orders, returns, and product understanding, falls under this stage.

Loyalty: Loyalty in e-commerce is marked by repeat purchases, leaving reviews, or recommending the product to others.

Validate and Refine

•  Current State Maps
•  Future State Maps
•  Day-in-the-Life Maps
•  Service Blueprints

Current State Maps

•  customer emotions
•  motivations
•  pain points
•  moments of delight

Future State Maps

Service blueprints.

•  Identify root causes of current customer journeys or steps for desired future journeys
•  Start with a simplified version of another map style and add layers such as organizational roles and interactions
•  Incorporate organizational processes and interactions
•  Offer a detailed view of how a service is delivered

Focus on Emotions

Eliminate unnecessary steps, leverage data analytics, e-commerce example.

•  anticipation in trying the product
•  frustration at deciding to exchange
•  satisfaction in choosing a product variant
•  patience during exchange delivery
•  relief upon receiving the exchanged product

SaaS Example

•  Onboarding
•  Customer support
•  Value realization
•  Churn rate control

Retail Example

Popular tools.

•  Gliffy, which is suitable for lightweight diagram needs
•  Custellence, which provides flexible map structures and image collections
•  OmniGraffle, which allows for precise mapping with a free trial
•  Smaply, which supports various visual details and integrations for journey maps.

Free Templates

Creating effective user journey maps: a step-by-step guide.

Instant insights, infinite possibilities

Journey mapping in UX design

Last updated

21 February 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Customers are essential to the success of a business. Without them, the company would cease to exist. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand the stages customers go through when interacting with a brand. You can use a journey map to visualize this across all digital channels over time.

If you’re looking to create user-friendly, intuitive experiences for your customers, journey mapping is a key part of UX design . Find out everything you need to know about journey mapping in this guide.

• What are the four stages of journey mapping?

A journey map should accurately represent your user’s experience from when they first find you and start to interact with you, through to them making a purchase and becoming a loyal customer.

The stages of a journey map will therefore depend on your product. The four stages of a customer’s buying cycle are:

During this stage, customers are looking for solutions to a problem. They become aware of your brand, services, or products via advertisements or other marketing vehicles.

Social media is a powerful tool that companies use to boost awareness. During the awareness stage, the brand should share pertinent information, such as business goals, ethics, and values.

Consideration

At this stage, customers consider the brand against similar companies offering the same products and services.

You need to give potential customers a deeper understanding of what you’re offering and why your brand is a better choice. They may engage with the business by signing up for a newsletter or visiting a brick-and-mortar store.

Customers have decided what they want and make a purchase. They have gathered the information they need before committing to a purchase. They may find this information in email confirmations, FAQs on billing and shipping, and online ordering pages.

Customer loyalty

This is the last stage, after customers have made their purchase and are evaluating the overall experience. This phase is about creating loyal, returning clients by offering membership programs and future discounts.

• How to make a simple journey map

Each customer journey is unique, so journey maps vary depending on the scenarios experienced by customers. Although the maps vary widely, the same steps are involved in creating them.

Let’s look at a step-by-step approach to making a simple journey map.

Step 1: Scope definition

The first step is to clearly define your goals. What are you hoping to achieve from this journey map? Do you want to make a particular aspect of the purchasing cycle more user-friendly? Or are you trying to find out why potential customers don’t follow through with a purchase?

Setting a goal will provide guide rails around the particular customer path you’re trying to understand. This will drive UX designers throughout the journey.

Step 2: Create user personas

Next, get a grasp of who your customers are. Gather information to create different personas to improve your knowledge of the different segments of your target audience. This helps you to:

Define your target market

Create better products and services

Appeal to them through your marketing

Step 3: List channels and touchpoints

Touchpoints are points of interaction between the user and the product. The channels may be through social media platforms, the path a user would take through your product, and other supporting applications or communication necessary to complete their goal.

List all the channels and touchpoints in the journey scenarios. Identify the touchpoints with higher engagement and those that need to be optimized.

Step 4: Collect customer feedback

Gathering customer feedback helps gauge how your users feel about your product or service. Methods used to gather information include:

Questionnaires

Rating systems

Your aim is to see your product through the eyes of your customers.

Step 5: Define pain points and points of friction

Using the customer feedback you gathered in the previous stage, identify gaps in the user journey that make it difficult to move through stages. Identify when they happen and what triggers them. 

This will help you to smooth out potential friction points in the customer journey.

Step 6: Improve and re-evaluate

The last step is to improve the overall experience of your customers. Once you have identified the pain points, opportunities, and goal metrics, brainstorm solutions to the identified flaws and implement necessary changes.

Regularly conduct further research and re-evaluate the customer journey.

• What are the elements of a journey map?

A journey map is made up of the following elements:

Persona (actor)

The persona is the one who experiences the journey; it may be a customer or a product user. Depending on the scenario, it could be a group or an individual.

The scenario is what the actor or persona is trying to achieve. A scenario describes the situation that the journey addresses. It primarily includes goals and expectations and can be real or imaginary.

Journey phase

Phases are the different stages of a journey, from awareness to purchasing and beyond. In each phase, try to visualize how you can meet the customer’s goals.

Thoughts and emotions

This refers to how the customer feels as they interact with your brand. Thoughts help the UX designer understand what the customer is experiencing, for example, relief, anxiousness, or frustration. Emotions allow the UX designer to focus on encouraging positive thoughts.

User actions

The action element details what the actor does in each phase to achieve their goal. It defines the actual steps taken by an actor throughout the journey.

Opportunities

This element offers the brand a chance to improve the customer's experience . They are insights gained from journey mapping and used to make informed decisions.

• Why are journey maps important?

Journey mapping brings the following benefits for a company.

Customer-centric philosophy

Using journey maps, UX designers can focus on how customers feel and think about the product being designed.

Journey maps help businesses understand their customers better, resulting in improved decision-making.

Broader business perspective

A journey map helps you to visualize situations experienced by a customer when interacting with your brand. The goal of a journey map is to remove obstacles and make the purchasing process intuitive and efficient.

Customer journey mapping helps a business owner gain an overview of their product or service from multiple viewpoints.

Improved customer experience

A journey map is the first step toward gaining a deeper understanding of customer engagement and fostering the flow of customer experience. It can help you to smooth out the customer experience and personalize it across all touchpoints.

Identification of opportunities

In complex business environments, gaps and breakdowns are common. Mapping out how a user interacts with your brand and/or product may reveal design flaws and areas that need change. 

By charting the entire process, a journey map helps identify gaps and opportunities for improvement that will enhance customer experience.

Competitive advantage

Journey mapping helps a company eliminate design flaws and make its product stand out. Once a UX designer has improved customer experience, this becomes a differentiation factor among competitors in the market.

• How does a customer journey map help?

A detailed and well-researched journey map will help you to: 

Build a customer-centric organization

Improve customer retention

Identify unmet opportunities that competitors may have missed

Understand the target audience

Align brand position with target market needs and expectations

Meet customer expectations

Understand different buyer personas

Optimize customer onboarding process

• How much does journey mapping cost?

The cost of journey mapping varies widely. The pricing depends on who’s doing it, how much research you want to do, and the complexity of the customer's journey.

• Designing journey maps

Journey maps are unique since they should represent whatever product or service they emulate. Variations of journey maps include:

Experience map

Empathy map

Service blueprint

You can use a third-party tool to build a well-designed journey map, such as:

Omnigraffle

However, there are no rules around what you use to build your journey map and can build it using a whiteboard, PDF format, and even Microsoft Paint. As long as it’s an accurate representation of the user’s journey, that’s what counts.

Experience maps

Experience maps are a zoom-out from journey maps. While journey maps represent a single persona’s behavior at each phase of the customer journey, experience maps can include multi-players that may interact with that user, additional products that customers typically use, or perhaps entirely different methods outside technology that users engage with to complete their goals.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps are used to understand customer personas . They do not follow a particular sequence of events along the journey. Empathy maps are divided into four parts and track what the customer does, thinks, says, and feels when using a product.

These can be helpful when defining who the persona is within your journey map.

Service blueprints

Service blueprints focus on how a brand delivers its products and services to customers rather than being customer-centric. In other words, they describe the behind-the-scenes details of the process.

They are mainly concerned with actions performed by every stakeholder in the purchase process. By focusing on service, gaps or friction points are identified and can be eliminated.

• Map your brand's path to success

Journey mapping offers many benefits to a company. Once your customer journey map is in place, you will fully understand your customers’ experience.

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The 5 Steps of Successful Customer Journey Mapping

May 28, 2017 2017-05-28

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One common frustration about the process of customer journey mapping is the lack of organization-wide or even industry-wide standardization. What are the key steps of journey mapping , and in what order should they be completed?

Effective customer journey mapping follows five key high-level steps:

• Aspiration and allies: Building a core cross disciplinary team and defining the scope of the mapping initiative
• Internal investigation: Gathering existing customer data and research that exists throughout the organization
• Assumption formulation:  Formulating a hypothesis of the current state of the journey and planning additional customer research
• External research: Collecting new user data to validate (or invalidate) the hypothesis journey map
• Narrative visualization: Combining existing insights and new research to create a visual narrative that depicts the customer journey in a sound way

In This Article:

Phase 1: aspiration and allies, phase 2: internal investigation, phase 3: assumption formulation, phase 4: external research, phase 5: narrative visualization.

The first phase in a customer journey process starts well before any research or visualization has taken place. This step is easily the most critical, because, no matter how many insights a map reveals, a journey-mapping engagement without focus or buy-in will not be effective in optimizing experience.

A. Establish a cross disciplinary team of allies

Throughout a journey-mapping endeavor, you must bring stakeholders along. Without a doubt, journey mapping will reveal gaps and opportunities within the user experience that, organizationally, are beyond the authority of the UX professional driving the mapping project. You must have buy-in and engagement from a cross disciplinary team, so that, when those issues and opportunities surface, stakeholders with decision-making authority are already convinced of the soundness of your method and apt to understand the importance of resolving the problems it found.

Creating a team of allies is easier than you might think. Before you begin mapping, identify stakeholders from multiple departments whose knowledge will be helpful to you along the way, and whose help you may need once opportunities begin to surface. You’ll need to explain the value of journey mapping and what you hope to accomplish, and ask these stakeholders to be sponsors for the project in their respective departments (e.g., marketing, R&D, business analytics, or other relevant areas). Acquiring allies may be a quick process or take a long time, depending on your situation: If you are working on a small project, it could simply be a 30-minute conversation with your team; conversely, it may be a long process if you work with a B2B client or engage in an enterprise-wide journey-mapping initiative.

B. Determine the scope

A scope, or point of view, for the map must also be established before the mapping activities begin. To create focus and clarity for the map, make sure you can answer these questions: “Whose experience will I map? What experience, or journey, will I depict?” Furthermore, make sure that you and your core team (your allies) share a mutual understanding about the answers to those questions. Typically, the “who” is a critical persona or audience segment, and the “what” is a prioritized journey or scenario that has impact on ROI or long-term customer retention and relationships.

Once your core team is established and your scope is determined, begin researching within your own organization. What does your company already know about the customer or user? Most organizations have bits and pieces of data spread throughout teams; this data can be useful when pieced together to create a holistic understanding of the current state of the journey.

A. Send out a search party

You don’t have to conduct this entire search on your own. Put your core team of allies to work. Together, generate a list of questions that you would like to answer, then send your allies back to their respective teams or departments to search for any available documentation or data that can help begin to answer those questions. Good places to start include:

• Market-research surveys
• Brand audits
• Call-center or customer-support logs
• Site surveys or VOC (voice of customer) feedback
• Outputs from client advisory board (CAB) meetings

B. Perform stakeholder interviews

With these first clues in hand, interview your stakeholders to get additional insights. Use the internal data you have found to shape the interviews. For example: Did the market-research survey reveal that there is lack of trust? Maybe the front-end sales team has insight into why. Put together role-specific interview guides that can bring clarity to your findings. A typical list of roles to interview might be:

• Sales-team members
• Marketing-team members
• Support-team members (e.g., technical-support representatives)
• R&D team members or product owners

Spread your research across typical organization silos, such as products, channels, or geographic regions. If you are short on time, conduct focus groups composed of 3–4 internal employees in similar positions.

By the time you finish phase 2, you will most likely have gathered enough insight to formulate a tentative hypothesis about how certain pieces of the customer journey look, and what pain points exist. Start laying out that hypothesis in a draft framework, called an assumption map or a hypothesis map.

A. Synthesize the internal research

First, bring the internal research together into a coherent story. Share synthesized insights with your core team, as well as with any other stakeholders who need to be involved. Conduct small research share-outs or informal brown-bag sessions (where anyone can bring a lunch and catch up on the research going on in the project).

B. Create a hypothesis map as a team

Once your team has a shared understanding of the insights gathered thus far, bring them together for a collective mapping activity. It’s useful to hold a short workshop session to map out the draft framework (or hypothesis map). You can even invite customers to this meeting so that their input shapes the early draft. Just remember: This is a draft, and it needs to be validated against external research.

When the draft map is complete using data and insights from your internal investigation, the next step is to validate it with customer research to fill in gaps.

A. Use the hypothesis map to shape your user research

The hypothesis map will most likely reveal large gaps within the customer journey that you are unable to visualize because there is no existing data. These areas are critical to explore in customer research, so that, at the end of the process, there are no holes in understanding. Additionally, you’ll need to validate (or invalidate) the hypothesis map.

B. Use qualitative research methods to validate and fill in gaps

Choose research methods that put you in direct line of observation with your customers or users. Use a multipronged approach — select and combine multiple methods in order to reveal insights from different angles. Depending on the context of your project, some relevant methods for journey-mapping research include:

• Customer interviews
• Direct observation
• Contextual inquiry
• Diary studies

If your budget or timeline is limited, a small sample size (6–8 research participants) is enough to get started. Remember to continue to involve your core team of stakeholders along the way by sharing research findings, so that they are not shell-shocked if something changes within the draft journey map that they have helped build.

The map itself is simply a tool that will help you share your research findings in an engaging way with others. At this point, you need to create a visual narrative that will communicate the journey and all the critical moments, pain points, and high points within it. A good method is to have another workshop with your core team. Having built context and common ground throughout your research process, bring them back together and evolve the hypothesis map based on your primary research findings.

From here, you can determine what to do next. If you have a small, engaged team, this collectively produced (probably unpolished, sticky-note, or virtual-whiteboard) version might be enough to move forward. If you are working with a client, or need to share your insights out in a formal way, you might need to create a polished visual.

Following these five high-level steps will ensure that you produce an output based in user research, that you make use of available data, and that, most importantly, at the end of your mapping initiative, you have a team of allies that are engaged and ready to act on the insights revealed during the process.

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Understanding the Customer Journey and How to Map It

Table of contents

What is the customer journey, what is customer journey mapping, how to map the customer journey: a step-by-step guide, why use snagit for customer journey mapping, best practices for effective customer journey mapping, ready to improve your customer journey mapping with snagit, subscribe to techsmith’s newsletter.

For organizations that wish to grow their businesses– which is most– there needs to be a shared understanding of the current customer journey. A customer journey is the series of steps that an individual prospect may take that ultimately lead them to purchase. 

It’s essential for organizations to have an understanding of their customers’ experiences, as that is going to be key to empowering prioritization and continued execution of optimization efforts, which should in turn help to facilitate growth.

A well-crafted customer journey map provides a visual narrative of every interaction a customer has with your brand, helping businesses align their strategies with customer needs. The journey encompasses all stages, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. For organizations that aim to grow, mapping the customer journey ensures alignment across departments, allowing teams to make data-driven decisions, optimize touchpoints, and ultimately enhance the customer experience.

A clear understanding of your customer’s journey allows for better prioritization of efforts that directly affect conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Without it, even the best optimization strategies may fall short, as they fail to address pain points or opportunities at critical touchpoints. By mapping the journey, organizations are better equipped to identify these areas and execute targeted improvements that resonate with their customers.

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While your team may have a general understanding of the various customer interactions that may occur, customer experience journey mapping is an incredibly useful exercise to align understanding around the specifics. Getting started can be daunting if you aren’t sure where to begin, but a tool like Snagit can help. With Snagit, you can capture screenshots of the different stages of the customer journey and add context and explanations with annotations, stamps, and more.

The customer journey aligns with what most organizations would refer to as their sales funnel. At the top of the funnel, you’ll be mapping the activity which is your potential customer’s first interaction(s) with your brand. Typically, there is always a desired next step for them to take. If they do, they will move on to the next interaction and the subsequent step in the customer journey, and so forth.

The key stages of the customer journey are Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy . Notice those last two steps are post-purchase, but still critical. Retention means keeping your existing customers satisfied, while advocacy goes a step further by turning customer loyalty into five-star ratings, positive reviews, and peer recommendations of your brand.

Understanding the customer journey helps businesses deliver personalized experiences, increase customer satisfaction both pre-sale and post-sale, boost sales, enhance retention rates, and foster customer advocacy. 

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating an accurate and actionable visual representation of the customer’s interactions with a brand across various touchpoints. A good customer journey map provides an overview of a customer’s experience. This should include the funnel stages and touchpoints for each, along with the emotions individuals may be experiencing and their pain points. This is going to help you optimize your marketing messaging in a way that addresses and solves those pain points. 

Conversely, if you didn’t have this granular understanding, your messaging may miss the mark, as it would potentially lack relevance and be easier to ignore.

One of the benefits of customer journey mapping is that it allows you to identify gaps in the customer experience. Are there things you may have missed addressing outright? This can involve your messaging or the user experience, such as friction in a process or a clunky transition to the desired next action. 

Another key benefit of customer journey mapping exercises is the improvement of customer engagement and retention by identifying various ways to optimize the experience. This might involve prioritizing efforts in areas where things are going particularly well and you wish to amplify that impact. Sometimes, this may involve identifying suboptimal experiences and brainstorming experimental ways to course-correct.

Thirdly, another significant benefit of customer experience journey mapping is creating better alignment between marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Typically, these different departments are all interacting with prospective and existing customers at unique points throughout that purchase path. Having a visual representation of the customer journey allows everyone to step back and view the big picture holistically, adding context and providing a shared understanding that can be applied to achieve business goals.

A screen capture tool like Snagit can be incredibly useful throughout this customer journey mapping process, as it democratizes the image creation process. You don’t have to be an expert to create professional-looking images. The markup tools in the program allow for annotating your screenshots with relevant data and visuals. 

Follow this step-by-step guide to create a comprehensive customer journey map that leads to actionable insights.

Step 1: Define customer personas

Customer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data and research. They help you identify key characteristics like demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, goals, and challenges. Developing accurate personas is the foundation of an effective customer journey map, as they allow you to focus on the customer’s unique needs.

Understanding your customers’ motivations helps you align your messaging and offerings, while knowing their goals ensures you are solving the right problems. You should also consider the challenges they face throughout their journey with your brand.

To assist in this process, use Snagit to capture and organize data from user research, interviews, surveys, and analytics. Snagit’s annotation features allow you to highlight key insights, while visuals can help create engaging, easily understandable customer personas. This way, stakeholders across your organization can quickly grasp who your customers are and what they care about.

Step 2: Identify key touchpoints

Next, identify the key touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, both online and offline. These touchpoints could include your website, social media, email, or interactions with customer support. Understanding where customers engage with your brand helps ensure your journey map covers all critical areas of interaction.

To create a more accurate and detailed customer journey map, use Snagit to visually capture these touchpoints. You can record screenshots of different customer interactions, highlight important steps in the customer experience, and annotate these touchpoints to give context. By creating a visual representation of these touchpoints, you’ll gain a clearer understanding of how each interaction impacts the overall journey.

Step 3: Outline customer goals and emotions

At every stage of the journey, customers are working towards achieving specific goals—whether it’s gathering information, making a purchase, or resolving an issue. Along the way, they experience a range of emotions, from excitement and satisfaction to frustration or confusion. Mapping these goals and emotions helps you understand what the customer is thinking and feeling at each stage.

Use Snagit to visually capture customer feedback from surveys or interviews, and annotate these visuals with key insights. You can also add emotion-based labels to illustrate how customers are feeling at different touchpoints, or simply use the built-in emoji stamps. This approach brings clarity to the emotional side of the journey, allowing you to address customer needs more effectively.

Step 4: Identify pain points and opportunities

Every customer journey has areas where friction or challenges arise—these are the pain points. Identifying these pain points is critical for understanding where customers struggle and how you can remove obstacles from their experience. At the same time, you’ll uncover opportunities to improve the journey by streamlining processes or enhancing interactions.

Capture customer feedback and data using Snagit to create a visual representation of these problem areas. By annotating screenshots or visuals with specific pain points, you can provide clear and actionable insights for improving the customer experience. This visual approach not only highlights where things are going wrong but also showcases potential opportunities for enhancing customer satisfaction.

Step 5: Visualize the customer journey

Finally, use Snagit to create a visual journey map that outlines each stage of the customer’s interaction with your brand. This map should clearly depict the stages of the journey, key touchpoints, customer goals, emotions, and pain points. Including visuals such as screenshots, diagrams, or feedback annotations will make the map more actionable and easier for stakeholders to understand.

Tips for enhancing your map with visuals:

• Use screenshots to show actual customer interactions.
• Add annotations to explain what’s happening at each touchpoint.
• Include diagrams that outline customer emotions or pain points at specific stages.
• Ensure the map is simple, clear, and focused on actionable insights.

By following these steps and using tools like Snagit to visually capture and organize data, you’ll create a customer journey map that is both comprehensive and highly useful for driving improvements in your customer experience.

Creating a comprehensive and actionable customer journey map requires the right tools to capture and communicate insights effectively. Snagit offers a range of features that make it an ideal choice for building accurate, insightful customer journey maps. Here are three key benefits of using Snagit in this process:

1. Easy visual captures for better mapping

One of the key benefits of using Snagit is its ability to easily capture visual content, such as screenshots, web pages, emails, and other touchpoints that represent real customer interactions. These visual captures provide a more accurate view of the customer’s journey by showing actual experiences and engagement points. Whether you’re highlighting a website interaction, an email response, or a social media message, Snagit makes it simple to incorporate real-world examples into your map.

By capturing visuals of customer interactions, you ensure that your journey map reflects how customers truly engage with your brand, rather than relying solely on assumptions or theoretical touchpoints.

2. Annotation and editing for clarity

Snagit’s powerful annotation and editing tools make it easy to enhance your customer journey map with clarity and precision. You can add arrows, callouts, text, and other annotations to highlight key insights, identify pain points, and emphasize opportunities for improvement. These annotations bring context to the visuals, making it easier to communicate the significance of different stages and interactions in the customer journey.

For example, you can use arrows to point out areas where customers experience friction or add text callouts to summarize feedback from user research. By visually marking up the journey map, you can ensure stakeholders quickly grasp the most important insights without sifting through raw data.

3. Seamless sharing and collaboration

Effective customer journey mapping requires input and collaboration from cross-functional teams. Snagit’s seamless sharing capabilities allow you to easily share visuals, annotated maps, and customer insights with team members and stakeholders across departments. Whether you’re sending a quick visual update or collaborating on a full journey map, Snagit ensures everyone stays aligned and can contribute to the discussion.

Sharing options make it simple to distribute customer journey maps via email, chat tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or through Screencast , enabling continuous feedback and iteration. This fosters better collaboration between marketing, sales, customer support, and other teams, ensuring the map is both comprehensive and actionable.

By following these best practices, you can ensure that your map effectively captures the complexities of customer behavior and helps guide strategic decisions.

1. Involve cross-functional teams

An effective customer journey map isn’t the responsibility of one department alone. It’s essential to involve cross-functional teams—including marketing, sales, and customer support—to gain a comprehensive view of the customer’s journey. Each department interacts with customers in unique ways, contributing valuable insights into different stages of the customer lifecycle.

For example, marketing teams can provide information on how prospects first engage with your brand, while sales teams offer insights into the decision-making process. Customer support teams, on the other hand, understand the post-purchase experience and ongoing service needs. Collaboration between these teams helps ensure that your customer journey map is holistic and reflects real-world experiences rather than siloed assumptions.

Video messages > meetings

Record your screen and camera with Snagit for quick updates and feedback.

2. Regularly update your customer journey map

Customer behavior is constantly evolving. Preferences, technology, and market trends shift over time, meaning that what was once an accurate representation of the customer’s experience can quickly become outdated. To ensure your customer journey map stays relevant and actionable, it’s crucial to regularly revisit and update it.

By periodically reviewing your map, you can identify changes in customer behavior, uncover new pain points, and adjust your strategies accordingly. Regular updates also help align the map with business changes, such as new product launches, updated marketing tactics, or shifts in customer demographics.

3. Use visuals to enhance your map

Customer journey maps can be complex, often containing a wealth of data and touchpoints. To make this information more accessible and engaging for stakeholders, use visuals to simplify and highlight key aspects of the journey.

Tools like Snagit can help capture visuals, whether you’re annotating charts, illustrating touchpoints, or creating step-by-step guides. Visuals not only make your map easier to understand, but they also make it more compelling, increasing stakeholder engagement and ensuring the map is actively used as a decision-making tool.

Hopefully, you’re feeling inspired to start your organization’s customer experience journey mapping. The good news is that you can get Snagit today to begin capturing and visualizing data for your customer journey map. Download the fully functioning, free 14-day trial and get immediate access.

Check out Snagit’s full library of tutorials to browse all of the available help content and get you up and running with the tool. For customer journey mapping specifically, there are some how-to resources we can recommend:

• The Capture, Edit & Share an Image with Snagit collection
• The Snagit Tools collection
• The Find and Manage Captures collection

Additional Resources

How to have effective one-on-one meetings, mastering written communication at work, 2024 video statistics for trainers and educators.

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• Case Studies

What is a User Journey Map? A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating One

You’ve probably spent hours trying to figure out how to make your Shopify store stand out. You’ve invested in ads, optimized your product pages, and even dabbled in email marketing. But, here's the thing: if you’re not mapping your user journey , you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to boost sales and improve customer retention.

In this blog, we’re going deep. We’re talking about creating a user journey map that not only helps you understand the flow of your customers but also allows you to fine-tune every step they take. And no, this isn’t just another “nice to have.” Shopify stores that map out their user journeys are crushing it , leaving competitors in the dust.

So, if you want to be in the game—and more importantly, win it—understanding how your users behave from landing on your site to hitting that ‘Buy Now’ button is everything.

The Role of User Journey Mapping in E-commerce

Now, why does this matter so much in 2024? Glad you asked. With Google’s latest algorithm updates earlier this year, websites that deliver better user experiences are now prioritized in rankings. What does that mean for you? If your site is clunky or hard to navigate, Google’s gonna push you down the results page faster than you can say “SEO.”

User journey mapping is the tool that helps you understand where your users are getting stuck and how you can make their path to purchase as smooth as butter. Imagine being able to see exactly where they bounce, why they abandon their carts , and what makes them convert.

By understanding this, you're not only creating a more seamless experience for your customers but also improving your SEO . Win-win, right?

Why Your Shopify Store Needs a User Journey Map

If you want to reduce cart abandonment , boost conversions , and create loyal customers , then a user journey map is your secret weapon. Think of it like this: it’s the blueprint to your customers' behavior. When you have that blueprint, you can fix the pain points that are costing you sales.

Whether it's a glitchy checkout page or a confusing product description, journey mapping shows you where the problems are—so you can fix them and drive up revenue.

But let’s not forget: this isn’t just about getting that one-time sale. It’s about creating a memorable experience that keeps your customers coming back. Shopify stores with optimized user journeys see higher conversion rates , better customer retention , and a big ol' boost in customer lifetime value . At the end of the day, this is about building relationships —not just racking up transactions.

What is a User Journey Map?

In simple terms, a user journey map is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes to achieve a specific goal while interacting with a product, service, or brand. It helps you understand what users experience at each touchpoint—from discovering your brand to making a purchase or becoming a loyal customer. Think of it as a roadmap that traces the emotions, motivations, and behaviors a user experiences throughout their interaction.

Breaking down this concept further, the map typically includes phases such as awareness, consideration, decision-making, and post-purchase, helping you grasp a full spectrum of the user's experience. The more detailed you make this map, the better you can understand the needs and pain points that customers encounter on their journey.

Why It’s Important?

A user journey map is essential because it allows you to identify potential roadblocks and areas of friction that users may experience on your site. It goes beyond surface-level data and dives into how users feel and react at various touchpoints, helping you make decisions that can improve user experience.

On platforms like Shopify, understanding your user's journey can help you optimize conversion rates, reduce cart abandonment, and create more meaningful interactions with your audience.

Studies have shown that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for better customer experience . If your store offers a smooth and intuitive journey, your brand is more likely to succeed.

User Journey Map vs. User Flow

It’s easy to confuse user journey maps with user flows , but they serve different purposes.

User journey maps focus on the entire experience a user has when interacting with your brand, from the very first touchpoint to becoming a repeat customer. It’s all about the experience and the emotional journey.

User flows , on the other hand, are more task-oriented. They break down specific actions, like signing up for an account or completing a checkout process. It’s about mapping the most efficient way to guide a user through a specific task.

In short, while both help you understand user behavior, user journey maps give you a big-picture view of the user’s experience, and user flows focus on optimizing specific tasks within that journey.

Let’s visualize a basic user journey map. Imagine you’re an online retailer selling premium workout gear. Your user journey map might look something like this:

• Awareness Phase : User discovers your brand through social media ads.
• Consideration Phase : User browses your Shopify store, comparing products.
• Decision Phase : User adds items to their cart, reviews shipping options.
• Purchase Phase : User completes the checkout process.
• Post-Purchase Phase : User receives email updates and considers leaving a review.

This map allows you to see the entire journey, pinpoint where users may be dropping off, and strategize improvements—whether that’s simplifying the checkout process or enhancing your post-purchase engagement.

Benefits of Using a User Journey Map

Customer experience optimization.

A user journey map gives brands a clear picture of the customer experience from start to finish. By understanding exactly where users are encountering friction, brands can refine processes and eliminate pain points. The ability to visualize every touchpoint—whether it's a slow-loading product page or confusing navigation—helps store owners optimize each step for a smoother, more intuitive experience.

A Forrester report notes that companies that focus on improving the customer journey see a 20% increase in customer satisfaction and 15% reduction in customer churn .

Boost Conversions

Identifying critical drop-off points through journey mapping allows you to address the areas where users abandon their carts, lose interest, or hesitate. By eliminating these friction points, you can effectively boost conversion rates .

For example, if a user abandons the cart during the checkout process, mapping the journey can highlight a cumbersome payment system or unexpected shipping costs as the culprit, providing you with actionable data to fix these roadblocks and improve checkout completion rates.

Enhanced Engagement & Retention

When you tailor the customer journey to match user expectations, you foster deeper engagement and improve retention. User journey maps allow you to understand not just what your users are doing, but why they’re doing it, allowing you to craft personalized experiences that increase customer loyalty and reduce churn.

McKinsey reports that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that don’t focus on customer experience . Enhancing this experience through targeted engagement is key to turning one-time shoppers into repeat buyers.

SEO Benefits

In 2024, Google’s algorithm places a high priority on websites that offer an intuitive, seamless user experience. User journey mapping directly impacts your SEO performance by improving core metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and user engagement.

A more optimized journey means that users spend more time on your site, engage with your content, and are more likely to return—all factors that boost your rankings in search results. According to a study by SEMrush, websites with better user experiences have 50% higher engagement metrics , leading to improved organic visibility .

Data-Driven Insights

At its core, user journey mapping is a data-driven exercise. It’s not just about creating a visual of the journey; it’s about using real-time behavioral data to understand how users interact with your brand.

By tracking metrics such as page views, cart abandonment rates, and conversion paths, store owners can make informed decisions about where to invest in improvements. These insights offer a clear roadmap for growth , ensuring that you’re optimizing your store based on actual user behavior rather than assumptions.

Essential Elements of a User Journey Map

Buyer persona creation.

The foundation of any successful user journey map starts with creating detailed buyer personas . These personas represent your target audience, reflecting their demographics, behaviors, goals, and challenges.

To effectively map the customer journey, you must first understand who your customers are. Start by gathering data through surveys, analytics, and interviews. Ask questions like: 

What are their pain points? What motivates them to make a purchase?

According to HubSpot, 71% of companies that exceed their revenue and lead goals use personas to guide their marketing strategies. By using this data, you can develop personas that drive your marketing and user experience strategies.

Stages of the Journey

A user journey map typically covers five major stages: Awareness , Consideration , Purchase , Post-Purchase , and Retention .

• Awareness : The stage where the user becomes aware of a problem or need. At this point, they're conducting research and exploring options.
• Consideration : Here, users evaluate different solutions, compare prices, and look for reviews. They weigh the pros and cons before making a decision.
• Purchase : The user takes action—whether it's completing an online purchase, signing up for a service, or making a direct inquiry.
• Post-Purchase : At this stage, the goal is to ensure that users are satisfied, reducing buyer's remorse. Follow-up emails, feedback requests, and loyalty programs play a role here.
• Retention : Finally, keeping the customer engaged long after their first purchase, through content, personalized offers, or exclusive rewards, builds long-term loyalty.

Breaking down these stages helps you anticipate user actions, emotions, and the information they might seek at each step. Knowing these stages also allows you to create content tailored for each phase.

Touchpoints

A touchpoint refers to any interaction or encounter that a user has with your brand. For e-commerce businesses, these can range from website visits, social media ads, emails, customer service, or even word-of-mouth recommendations. Mapping these critical touchpoints across the user journey ensures that you meet your users wherever they are.

If a customer engages with your social media but has difficulty navigating your website, that disconnect could cost you conversions. A well-mapped journey allows for a seamless experience across all touchpoints, aligning your messaging and branding consistently.

Emotions and Pain Points

Understanding the emotions and frustrations of your customers is critical for designing a successful user journey. Every stage of the journey is loaded with emotional triggers, whether it’s excitement during the consideration phase or frustration at a complicated checkout process.

Identifying these emotions helps you recognize pain points —the places where the experience breaks down, leading to drop-offs, cart abandonment, or low engagement. For instance, a study by the Baymard Institute shows that 69% of online shopping carts are abandoned, often due to a complicated or unclear checkout process.

User Goals & Motivations

Your customers have specific goals and motivations that drive them to engage with your brand. Whether they’re seeking a solution to a problem or trying to fulfill a need, understanding these goals allows you to align your products, services, and marketing efforts with their desires.

For example, if a user’s goal is to find a quick, affordable solution, but your site is loaded with unnecessary information or upsell prompts, you’re likely to lose them. Understanding your audience's motivations and focusing on how to meet those needs efficiently is key to keeping them engaged.

Creating a User Journey Map for Shopify Stores

Step 1: research & data collection.

Before diving into user journey mapping, the first essential step is collecting accurate customer data . This data gives you a clear picture of how visitors interact with your Shopify store. Tools like Google Analytics offer insights into user behavior, such as which pages users visit most, how long they stay on each page, and where they drop off.

Heatmaps from services like Hotjar help visualize where users are clicking, scrolling, or getting stuck. Additionally, customer feedback surveys are invaluable for getting firsthand insights into frustrations or positive experiences. A data-driven approach ensures that your user journey map is grounded in reality, not assumptions, and can highlight gaps or opportunities that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Step 2: Identify Key Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the specific interactions a customer has with your Shopify store, both online and offline. Identifying these touchpoints is crucial for creating a comprehensive user journey map . For Shopify stores, these touchpoints may include:

• Website interactions : Landing pages, product pages, checkout flow, and post-purchase experiences.
• Email marketing : Automated emails, abandoned cart reminders, or order confirmations.
• Social media : Ads, organic posts, and engagement with customer support via direct messages.
• Customer support : Live chat, phone support, or FAQs.

Don’t forget offline touchpoints, such as in-store experiences (if applicable) or events. Consistency across all touchpoints is key for maintaining brand trust and delivering a unified experience.

Step 3: Mapping the Customer’s Emotions and Actions

The emotional state of the customer at each touchpoint is as important as their physical action. Each stage of the customer journey evokes different emotions, and these can either enhance or hinder their experience. Here’s a simplified framework:

• Awareness stage : Customers might feel curiosity or uncertainty as they discover your brand.
• Consideration stage : Excitement or confusion as they weigh their options.
• Purchase stage : A mix of confidence or hesitation , depending on the clarity and ease of the checkout process.
• Post-purchase : They may feel delight if the product arrives on time, but frustration if it doesn’t meet expectations.

Document these emotions and pair them with the specific actions the customer is taking. For example, during checkout, they might be comparing prices or reading reviews, while feeling nervous about whether your store is trustworthy.

Step 4: Visualizing the Journey

Once you have your touchpoints and customer emotions mapped out, the next step is visualizing the entire journey . You want the map to be clear, intuitive, and accessible, especially if you're using it to communicate with your team. Tools like Lucidchart or UXPressia offer templates that make it easy to create a user-friendly map .

Start by dividing the map into each stage of the journey (Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, etc.), and under each stage, list the touchpoints, customer emotions, actions, and any key challenges or opportunities. This visual representation will give you a holistic view of the user's path, making it easier to spot areas that need improvement or optimization.

Step 5: Analysis and Action

A user journey map is only as useful as the insights and actions you derive from it. Once your map is complete, it's time to analyze the gaps, opportunities, and bottlenecks in the customer experience. Are users abandoning their carts at checkout? Is your product page missing key information that leads to hesitation? Maybe your post-purchase communication lacks follow-up, affecting retention.

Once you've identified these weak points, take actionable steps to optimize them. If users consistently drop off at the checkout , for example, consider simplifying the process or offering a guest checkout option. In 2024, optimizing these key touchpoints is crucial for boosting conversions and enhancing the overall user experience.

Common Pitfalls When Creating a User Journey Map

Focusing too much on the product.

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when creating a user journey map is over-focusing on their product rather than the entire customer experience. While your product is essential, understanding your customer’s broader needs, challenges, and goals is even more crucial. Brands that zero in on product features tend to overlook the emotional, informational, and contextual elements that drive a customer to make a purchase.

A successful journey map needs to consider the user's holistic experience , from how they find your brand to how they interact with customer service post-purchase. Shopify store owners, in particular, must realize that customers aren’t just looking for a product—they're seeking solutions, trust, and a seamless experience.

For instance, if your Shopify store sells apparel, focusing exclusively on the fabric and design of your products misses the point. Instead, look at the customer's journey: What made them land on your site? What concerns might they have about fit, return policies, or delivery times?

Focusing on their overall purchase motivations rather than just the product allows you to create a more effective and user-centric journey map.

Ignoring Emotional Touchpoints

In e-commerce, emotions drive purchasing decisions . According to a study in 2024, 95% of purchasing decisions are influenced by subconscious emotional reactions. Ignoring how your users feel at every stage of the journey can lead to a disjointed or even frustrating experience.

If your Shopify store fails to address emotional touchpoints—whether that’s building excitement in the discovery phase or offering reassurance at checkout—you could be losing potential sales.

Think about the user's emotional journey: from excitement during the product search, to anxiety before entering payment details, to satisfaction (or disappointment) after the product is received.

Mapping out emotional highs and lows is crucial for understanding pain points and areas where you need to offer better support, reassurance, or delight.

Lack of Continuity Across Channels

Another common pitfall is inconsistent messaging and experience across different touchpoints, such as your website, email campaigns, social media, and customer service interactions. In today’s digital landscape, users engage with your brand across multiple platforms and expect a seamless experience throughout.

If your Shopify store promotes fast delivery on your website but your post-purchase emails fail to reflect that, users may feel confused or mistrustful.

Maintaining continuity means that your brand messaging, tone, and service levels must remain consistent whether the user is interacting with your Instagram post, reading your product description, or responding to your customer support.

This continuity fosters trust and reduces friction, ultimately improving conversions. A 2024 Salesforce study revealed that 76% of consumers expect consistent interactions across departments and platforms. When building a user journey map, it’s critical to account for every platform where your brand engages with customers, ensuring they receive a uniform experience.

How to Continuously Optimize Your User Journey Map

Data-driven adjustments.

In 2024, data is more important than ever in refining the user experience, and your user journey map is no exception. The process of creating an effective user journey map doesn’t end once it's plotted out—it’s a dynamic tool that must evolve as your business and your customers change.

Shopify store owners need to rely heavily on real-time analytics from tools like Google Analytics , Hotjar , or even Shopify’s built-in analytics dashboard to track user behavior and engagement. This allows you to continually gather insights on how users are navigating your store, what’s converting, and where they drop off.

When analyzing data, focus on key metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, time on site, and user flow paths . These metrics offer a wealth of information that can inform which areas of the customer journey need tweaking. Regularly analyzing these numbers allows you to adjust the map to reflect new behavior patterns, ensuring that your customer journey remains smooth and optimized for conversions.

Customer Feedback Loops

Another critical factor in keeping your user journey map updated and optimized is listening to your customers through feedback loops . Direct customer feedback offers first-hand insights into the pain points and highlights in your store's experience that even your data might miss. Set up post-purchase surveys, NPS (Net Promoter Score) ratings, live chat reviews, or simple email follow-ups to capture this invaluable feedback.

Collecting and integrating this data ensures you stay in sync with customer expectations, helping you build a more intuitive and streamlined user journey. Shopify’s native email and app integrations make it easy to automate these feedback loops. Tools like Klaviyo or Typeform are great for triggering feedback requests at key touchpoints, giving you real-time insights into what's working and what isn't.

Regular Audits

It's essential to conduct regular audits of your user journey map. Why? Because customer behavior evolves, especially in the fast-moving world of e-commerce.

Your Shopify store may introduce new products, your target audience may shift, or external factors like Google’s algorithm updates could affect how customers interact with your site. As a result, your user journey map can quickly become outdated if not regularly reviewed and optimized.

A comprehensive audit should involve reviewing all customer touchpoints—such as landing pages, checkout flows, and support channels—and ensuring they align with the latest SEO best practices , business objectives, and customer needs.

Furthermore, these audits help uncover friction points that might have been overlooked during the initial mapping process, giving you an opportunity to improve the experience.

A/B Testing

Finally, one of the most effective ways to continuously optimize your user journey map is through A/B testing . This process involves running controlled experiments to test specific elements of the customer journey, such as email subject lines, homepage layouts, product descriptions, or checkout page designs.

By creating two variations of a page or touchpoint and testing them against each other, you can determine which version performs better in terms of conversion, engagement, or retention.

For example, testing two versions of your Shopify cart abandonment email can reveal which subject line leads to higher open rates, or which call-to-action gets more customers to complete their purchase.

Tools like Optimizely  make A/B testing simple and scalable, allowing Shopify store owners to test and improve user journey elements continually.

Regular A/B testing ensures you aren’t relying on assumptions and can base decisions on hard data, continually fine-tuning each touchpoint for maximum efficiency.

Why Every Shopify Store Owner Needs a User Journey Map in 2024

In today’s hyper-competitive e-commerce landscape, having a user journey map is not just a "nice-to-have"—it’s essential. A well-constructed user journey map allows Shopify store owners to deeply understand how their customers interact with their brand at every touchpoint.

From the first time a customer visits your site to when they complete a purchase (and beyond), a user journey map gives invaluable insights that can drive better business outcomes.

Why does this matter in 2024? Because customer experience has become the differentiator. Google’s March 2024 algorithm updates make it clear: user experience is king . A smooth, intuitive, and optimized user journey doesn’t just boost your site’s SEO ranking; it directly leads to higher conversions, better engagement, and improved retention .

When you reduce friction and make the buying process seamless, customers are more likely to complete their purchases, leave positive reviews, and return for repeat business.

Whether you’re a brand owner or running a Shopify store, investing in user journey mapping helps you spot pain points, understand your customers on a deeper level, and ultimately create a more profitable business.

As Shopify continues to grow as a platform for brands to thrive, building that seamless experience will become a crucial part of staying competitive.

Ready to Optimize Your Shopify Store?

Take the first step in transforming your store’s customer experience by reaching out to Ecom Experts . Our Shopify specialists can help you create or optimize your user journey map, ensuring every touchpoint delivers maximum value for your business.

Q1. What is a User Journey Map, and why is it important for Shopify stores? A1. A User Journey Map visually represents the steps your customers take from discovering your Shopify store to making a purchase. It’s crucial because it helps you understand user behavior, optimize their experience, and identify roadblocks that could prevent conversions. For Shopify stores, this can significantly boost customer satisfaction and drive higher sales.

Q2. How do I create a User Journey Map for my Shopify store? A2. Creating a User Journey Map involves several steps: start by collecting data on customer behavior using tools like Google Analytics, identify key touchpoints (website, social media, emails), map out customer emotions and actions, and visualize the journey using tools like Lucidchart. Continuously analyze and optimize to refine the customer experience.

Q3. What are the benefits of using a User Journey Map for e-commerce? A3. A User Journey Map helps e-commerce businesses, including Shopify stores, optimize the customer experience , boost conversion rates , and enhance engagement and retention. Additionally, it provides valuable data-driven insights that help improve marketing strategies and product offerings, all while aligning with Google's SEO emphasis on user experience.

Q4. What’s the difference between a User Journey Map and a User Flow? A4. While both are important for Shopify stores, a User Journey Map focuses on the overall customer experience, including their emotions and motivations at each touchpoint. A User Flow , on the other hand, details the specific steps a user takes to complete a task, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

Q5. How can a User Journey Map improve SEO for my Shopify store? A5. Improving the user journey directly impacts SEO . Google’s 2024 algorithm favors websites that offer seamless and intuitive user experiences. By reducing bounce rates, increasing time on site, and offering a smoother navigation experience, a well-crafted user journey map can enhance your Shopify store's search engine ranking and drive more organic traffic.

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Lesson 6 of 7 By Sachin Satish

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In a scenario where every individual/user has a different lifestyle, challenges, needs, and priorities, how can a company assess its place in a customer's life? Customer journey mapping is the solution. It educates about the importance and necessity of a brand and its product in a customer’s life, offering an opportunity to improve their experience. 

To add a perspective, in a survey by Khoros , 67% of customers communicated their bad experiences to their knowns, and 65% switched to another brand. Another study by Salesforce Research states that 89% of customers might make another purchase with a positive customer service experience. 

Are you willing to obtain positive results by implementing customer journey mapping? You might wonder where or how to begin. In this article, you will learn about customer journey mapping, the tools you need, process and more. Let’s start! 

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What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Let’s begin by understanding what a customer journey map is. A Customer Journey Map is a visual guiding tool highlighting customer interactions with the organization or its offerings. It helps provide insights into customers’ points of view, needs, and experiences with the company. The process of physical mapping, i.e., customer journey mapping, aids in uncovering all the steps customers take while interacting with the business.  

Some of the key aspects assessed via customer journey mapping include: 

• Understanding customer segmentation and behavior 
• Knowing the perspective of the customer about the company, product or service and overall experience with the company 
• Knowing their first or common mode of interaction with your brand 
• Identifying something that deters them or a negative viewpoint that may lead them to switch to competitors (it should be what customers themselves haven’t recognized yet)

Importance of Customer Journey Mapping

Since it offers insights into customer’s perception, the importance it serves is: 

• Know customers' challenges: Customer journey mapping lets companies understand any challenges customers face or any aspect that may lead them to competitors. Resolving these points can enhance customer satisfaction. 
• Know company staff better: The reasons for customers' excellent or poor experience can be attributed to the staff they interact with. The company can identify its best-performing staff and improve others with such insights. 
• Ensures customer-first approach: Keeping the customer’s viewpoints in every aspect of business planning tells about the company’s priority. It develops a customer-centric approach among all its members in different departments such as development, operations, sales and others. With this, the customer experience is subconsciously specific and needs to be prioritized and improved while also enhancing the company’s reputation. 
• Increase customer retention: Improving the customer experience and taking appropriate actions to ensure their seamless journey with your company will likely earn customer loyalty and trust. Owing to quality deliveries and services, customers are certain to come back for other products and services. 
• Improve marketing planning: Customer journey mapping offers insights into the standard mode of interaction with the customer, their perspective on it and the method or quality of displaying ads. Hence, it can help plan effective ad pitches. 

Key Components of Customer Journey Mapping

On your way to know and understand the customer, here are certain components that will surely be a part of the map:

Customer Persona

A customer persona is a fictional representation of a group of customers that offers deep insights into the ideal customer or user’s life. It will include demographics and customer habits, needs, goals, pain points, preferences and challenges. It is created based on research data. On the customer journey map, the customer persona can be a summary of key points. 

Touchpoints 

One of the essential things to know about the customer experience is when they interacted and how the overall flow went. Touchpoints refer to all the encounters between the customer and the brand. They include components like promotion mail, website or contact with customer service representatives. The touchpoints will tell you which of both online and offline interactions to focus on and hence improve. 

Phases/Stages of Customer Journey 

It comprises different parts: awareness, consideration, purchase and retention. This will help understand when the viewers turn into customers, when they are being led away from the brand and their loyalty and satisfaction status. Thus, it helps recognize the aspects or parts of the customer requiring emphasis. 

Customer’s Emotions, Thoughts and Actions 

It is another crucial key component to include in customer journey mapping. It can help you address customers' pain points, get to know them better, understand their perceptions, derive suggestions and recommendations from them and much more. 

Opportunities 

Companies can analyze their information, such as pain points and negative experiences, using visual representations. They can look for patterns and trends in the public data on various distinct parameters and know the off points or aspects needing improvement. Accordingly, they can leverage every problem as an opportunity for growth. 

Customer Goals and Expectations 

Recognizing the customer goals and needs will help companies deliver according to their expectations. Understand these based on their importance and plan accordingly. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map?

The preliminary step for addressing ‘how to create a customer journey map’ is to get a user persona or choose from multiple user personas available. You can learn about the customer's persona through an affinity diagram. After knowing it, select a specific customer persona and scenario for customer journey mapping. Here is the flow of events that will go into making a customer journey map: 

1. Set Clear Goals 

It is the first and foremost step. You will answer a few queries about the type of customers being targeted, the type of customer’s experience of interest, the ultimate goals to be achieved, and other aspects. Also, include key metrics relevant to the decided goals to help you track progress in using customer journey mapping. 

2. Research 

The next step is to collect data to address the queries you have in the previous step. The information can be found in call center recordings, website analytics , metrics, social media, support logs or customer interaction. Also, focus on the answers provided to questions like 

• When was the product purchased?
• Why was it canceled?
• Point of attraction towards the brand, website or product 
• Ease of navigating through the website or amount of time spent on the website 
• Problems solved or unsolved by the brand
• When did the need for customer support arise? 

3. Profile and Highlight Persona

Create the persona profile to combine and manage user information and other specifications. The complete profile will be stored to retrieve important information as needed. Gain more specific details for customer journey mapping to understand the customer experience accurately. 

4. Numerate the Touchpoints 

Make a list of all the touchpoints or the points of interaction between the customer and the brand. Besides direct communication, do include the ones with indirect contact. The latter includes checking the reviews on third-party websites. Higher touchpoints indicate complications in navigation or purchase, while too few touchpoints indicate a lack of interest. Do note that customer touchpoints depend on your industry type; hence, be specific in your expectations. 

5. Make Two Customer Journey Maps 

Create the customer journey map with all the information collected for a specific goal. It should include all the touchpoints, variations in the journey, all the product versions, small and large volume purchases, actions, emotions, motivations, challenges and pain points. While it will be the consumer's current or existing customer journey, you must create another ideal version of it. 

The ideal version will be your future goal. You will make the changes you wish to incorporate in this journey and how you want it to exist. To learn more about the possible problems that may occur to your customer or to understand how the improved version will look, take the customer journey yourself. Identify and note the points that might seem annoying, involve long waiting, contribute to closing the website or drive you away from the brand. 

6. Count Your Resources 

Stepping into the practical implementation, count the resources to plan for how you will take the next steps. The requirements may arise for employees, software, customer service tools, strategy development, revised budget and other things as necessary. Develop the plan and strategy to improve accordingly. Enlist all the steps to be taken.  

7. Implement, Monitor and Update 

To ensure achieving the goals, take measures to implement the changes before the next launch. After the launch, monitor the problems that may still exist or the new issues that might arise due to some ignored or unidentified aspects. Update the plans accordingly at regular time intervals. 

Top Customer Journey Mapping Tools

Some of the top and standard customer journey mapping tools to take help from are: 

• Lucidchart: The tool offers visually engaging and helpful insights into the customer experience. The AI integration allows for easy and automatic map generation, easy customization and enhanced decision-making. 
• Gliffy is another top user-friendly visualization tool. It supports complex technical diagrams and offers features like sticky notes, freehand drawing tools, collaboration, etc. 
• Smaply: In alignment with data security and GDPR, the Smaply has features like a persona builder, journey map editor, journey management and others. It is suitable at the enterprise level. 

Common Challenges in Customer Journey Mapping

The challenges in customer journey mapping are: 

• Scattered Data: Customer interactions occur through many social media channels. Integrating multiple sources and touchpoints into a single platform might pose a challenge. 
• Filtering the Data: Despite obtaining the data from sources, the need to filter out the relevant information remains. This is because the overall data can be composed of outdated or missing data. 
• Stakeholder Involvement: It is difficult to get stakeholders like IT teams, senior management, sales, service and product teams to participate. Communicating the benefits of customer journey mapping in decision-making can help overcome this challenge. 
• Inability to Gain Information: Often, there needs to be more information due to customers' silence. Their denial to respond signifies a lack of customer satisfaction and loyalty but without reason. Identifying such moments or touchpoints can offer relevant insights. 
• Delay in Data Analysis: A slow response or a specific date for obtaining the data analysis information leads to delayed insights. This hinders the ability to address the pain points promptly or capture the opportunities swiftly. 
• Improper Actionability: The challenge will be faced if impact and actions are decided without clear goals. The inability to prioritize the right negative experience and pain point can lead to improper actionability. 

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How to Measure the Success of Customer Journey Mapping?

While defining the precise goals, the step also involved identifying the right metrics to measure the progress. These metrics are a clear insight into the effectiveness of customer journey mapping. A few examples of Key Performance Indicators   (KPIs) to emphasize are: 

• Awareness: At this stage, SEO ranking, video views, social media engagement, number of visitors to the website, and conversion rate provide insights. 
• Consideration: The important metrics here are cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), number of clicks, engagement and others. 
• Conversion: The progress made in the customer journey mapping can be measured here in terms of sales, leads, cost per conversion, and cost per lead. 
• Retention: The metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction rate, and user feedback offer information on the success of customer retention. 
• Advocacy: The effectiveness of advocacy can be measured by the number of influencers talking about the brand, guest posts, frequency of referrals, and quality of customer reviews.  

Besides these, companies must also identify the exact part of the customer journey they want to measure. It can be gaining a customer, using a product, using a payment process, or other things. 

Conclusion 

Every business should consider the customer journey. By identifying customer pain points, experiences, and opportunities, the customer journey map offers direct insight into identifying the scope of improvement. It is part of effective project management and must be thoroughly known, practiced and understood by all candidates aiming for the position. 

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1. What are the most frequent mistakes made when creating journey maps?

Some of the common and frequent mistakes in creating customer journey maps are not setting a goal, not doing proper research, not considering the customer's perspective, needs and desires, focusing on a single communication channel and not communicating effectively with the customer. 

2. How can I select the best customer journey mapping tool?

Look out for the ease of using the functionality and editing, sharing and collaborating with other users. Also, the integration possibilities and features of action trackers should be considered. 

3. What is the purpose of customer journey mapping?

The prime aim of customer journey mapping is to visually identify the quality of experience the customer gains from the brand. This recognition helps identify opportunities for improvement in the overall process. 

4. How often should a customer journey map be updated?

The ideal time for updating the customer journey varies among industries. It can range from 6 months to a year. Hence, the customer journey map can be updated semi-annually or annually, or quarterly if needed. 

5. What is a customer journey map in design thinking?

In design thinking, the customer journey map focuses on improving user-friendliness by improving the product's design and interaction points. 

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About the author.

Sachin Satish is a Senior Product Manager at Simplilearn, with over 8 years of experience in product management and design. He holds an MBA degree and is dedicated to leveraging technology to drive growth and enhance user experiences.

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