Journey mapping
A journey map is a way of collecting stories about a process. The stories can be short or long, and can span minutes or decades. Important to the journey mapping process is understanding why people do things that way, not just what they do.
Example applications
Journey maps can take lots of forms, usually exposing an activity over time. A typical use of journey mapping might be a trip from A to B, such as driving to uni. A journey map could also be used to describe how a user interacts with a system, such as planning a uni timetable.
Steps
A journey map is best done individually before coming together to share how different stories overlap.
- Decide the scope of your journey, or agree on the start and end points. For example, from A to B.
- Individually fill out all the steps that are on the journey. You should be detailed at this stage
- Once all the journey maps are completed, come together and use the individual maps to prompt a discussion
- Synthesise all of the ideas around the journey, and agree on one journey map. This may need to be less detailed to account for all the different perspectives.
Hints
- It’s important to collect all the details about a journey from all different perspectives. Try not to complete your first journey map as a group
- Complete a journey map with different roles (such as those identified in a stakeholder analysis). For example, getting to A to B, talk to a pedestrian, cyclist, car owner, bus driver, etc.
- During the journey mapping, you could wear different hats (see De Bono’s six-hat thinking). One person could wear the Information (white) hat, and another could wear the Emotions (red){: .link-ext target=”_blank” } hat.
- After you’ve completed your journey map, look at how the stakeholders interact with the journey, or the different systems that the user interacts with.
Core resources
- Service Design Tools - Journey Mapping (Online or as PDF)
- Cockburn, A., ‘Writing Effective Use Cases’, Addison Wesley Introduction to Use Cases [Chapter 1, PDF 13 pages]
Similar tools…
A journey map is similar to a use case scenario (Wikipedia) or storyboarding (Wikipedia). A journey map tends to be directed more at understanding why the user is doing something, whereas a use-case scenario tends to be more of a description of what the user does. Both are similar to flow or process diagrams, which we cover in a later topic.\