One of the greatest contributors to success or failure is the presence, or lack of shared understanding and a well communicated vision.

My family used to drive from Indiana to Florida for spring break every year. This was before smartphones, GPS, and Google or Apple maps. Before every trip, my father would go down to the local AAA and pick up a trip-ticket (a.k.a. trip-tick).

This ring bound booklet contained a perfectly designed trip from beginning to end with major stops highlighted along the way. We knew how long it would take, where and when to stop for food and gas, and ultimately, when we would arrive at our final destination. As a family, we had a shared understanding of what to expect on the journey.

Journey maps are your trip-tick

Journey maps are the visually illustrated version of a trip-tick for your customer experience. They create a shared understanding and vision for how customers will discover, engage with, and even abandon your offering. Once the team has established a shared understanding, you can more effectively prioritize where to invest your collective efforts for maximum return.

On the surface, journey mapping is pretty simple — identify the phases a customer experiences with your product. However, a quick Google search for journey maps might leave you overwhelmed and disoriented. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and levels of detail.

Having worked with dozens of teams to develop their playbooks, I’ve never found a single, unified definition of a journey map — even within the same team. These differences are typically shaped by our experiences (or lack thereof) with journey mapping. Fortunately, I have found a few common patterns and guiding principles that increase effectiveness.

Guiding principles

Legible from 10 feet — journey maps are typically large and intended to be viewed at a distance. Consider layering the levels of detail. Do make sure the the zones, phases, and insights are discoverable at a distance. Don’t worry about the details being viewable from this distance. Tell the story visually — they are intended to be a visual map of the experience. When constructing large artifacts, the more attractive they are, the more likely people will engage with them. Do make intentional use of space, color, typography, and icons color. Don’t create something that resembles chutes and ladders. Align the fidelity with audience and intent—this is one of the most common mistakes. As we’ll see shortly, journey maps fall into three basic categories, which align nicely based on audience and intent. Do start with the basic model and layer on information. Don’t start with the advanced model and try and remove information.

The three levels of journey maps

Journey maps can be categorized into three levels: basic, standard, and enhanced. Each model serves a purpose. Let’s look at some of the fundamentals of journey maps, how and when to use enhancements, and mistakes people often make.

The basic

Zones: persona, phases, emotions (these are table stakes for any journey map)

Goal: Create empathy and shared understanding

When to use: with organizations who are new to journey mapping, or design thinking and doing

Basic journey map template.

At a minimum, every journey map should include three zones: persona, phases, and emotions.

The first zone, persona, ensures you’re mapping the experience from the right perspective. It’s a common mistake to skip this step, assuming you all know who the audience is.

I recently worked with a team who skipped the persona definition step. We were working on an education/personal development product. Some team members were defining the journey for the content creators, while others were defining the journey for the person taking the courses. Fortunately, we caught this quickly and were able to re-align the team. We agreed to focus on one persona first, then come back and map the journey for the second persona.

If the team doesn’t started with a shared understanding of the audience, mapping the experience goes sideways pretty quickly.

The second zone, phases, illustrates the significant points of an experience from the moment a person first engages with your product or service to the moment they leave. An example of this might be: discover, purchase, use, renew/replace.

The third zone, emotions, illustrates how the person feels. Common examples might be: overwhelmed, confused, frustrated, accomplished, or confident.

Basic journey maps are most appropriate for introducing people to the concept of journey mapping. It’s lightweight enough not to be overwhelming, but still includes the critical pieces. It’s a great starting point to help them move from optimizing for organizational efficiencies to focusing on the customer experience.

It’s ideal for occasional travelers (people don’t do this regularly), or organizations with low design maturity. For those well-versed in design thinking and doing, it might seem a bit anemic and you should consider the standard or enhanced models.

The standard

Zones: persona, phases, emotions, thoughts, actions

Goal: Create empathy, shared understanding, and shape decisions for future roadmaps

When to use: when frequent flyers are present, organizations familiar with journey mapping or design thinking and doing

Standard journey map template.

As you might expect, this is what most journey mapping frequent fliers envision. Building on the table stakes, the standard model typically includes the additional zones of thoughts and actions. These are similar to the emotion zone in the table stakes version.

The thinking zone illustrates what the person is thinking at that particular moment in the journey. These can be expressed as questions or statements. One example could be during the use phase of a camera that automatically uploads photos to the cloud. A thinking statement might be “Wow, you mean I never have to worry about losing photos of my kid’s life events again?”

The acting zone illustrates what someone actually does. In the previous example, the action might be “Takes a photo of a significant life event, like a birthday party, or baby’s first step.”

Standard journey maps are the go-to model for most initiatives once your organization has some experience with design thinking and doing. They’re robust enough to gain value and provide some direction for prioritizing a roadmap.

They’re ideal for frequent fliers, gaining alignment across a cross-functional team, and making sure the team is directionally correct. If you’re looking to drive future innovation, or have significant impact on the future of the organization, you should consider the enhanced model.

The enhanced

Zones: persona, phases, emotions, thoughts, actions, touch-points, opportunities, ownership

Goal: Create empathy, shared understanding, making strategic decisions with significant impact to the future of the company

When to use: mostly frequent flyers, mature organization well-versed with design thinking and doing

Enhanced journey map template.

At this point, your journey map is becoming more of a strategic decision making tool for the future of the organization. You’ve matured beyond just understanding how people encounter and engage with your offering, to understanding the impact on your business. Let’s look at how the addition of touch-points, opportunities, and ownership empower you to shape the future.

Touch-points are how or where a user interacts with your offering. They can be digital or analog, inside or outside your control. Programs that look across these touch-points are often referred to as omni-channel. Good examples might be a website, mobile app, or word-of-mouth recommendation from a friend or co-worker.

Opportunities help you focus on moving forward. They’re not the solution, but rather describe a gap, or unmet need in the market. One example might be a gap in the investment/portfolio management space for DIYers, or those in the gig economy. Another might be be the need for a set of standardized baseline set of criteria for selecting a SAAS provider in a particular space (e.g. collaboration, financial management, sales enablement).

Once you identify the opportunity, you evaluate whether or not your company has an existing solution. This exercise often leads to identifying a modification to an existing solution, or the need for an entirely new solution. Ultimately, you’ve just identified a competitive advantage in the markeplace.

And finally, we come to ownership—ultimately, who is responsible. This could be one or more parties (e.g. product, design, engineering, sales, support, legal).

Enhanced journey mapping requires a highly skilled facilitator and a significant commitment from key stakeholders. Ideally, these should be people who are driving the future direction of your organization. It’s something you should work your way up to. Only attempt enhanced journey mapping once you have a few standard journey maps under your belt.

They’re ideal for executive stakeholders, gaining shared understanding and setting a vision for the future direction of an organization. If you’re looking to drive innovation, or move an organization from optimizing for internal efficiency to customer experience, enhanced journey mapping is the way to go.

Get your journey mapping game on

Ready to take your innovation game to the next level? Book me for an in-house training session.

Get a jumpstart on your journey maps with a downloadable template based on the examples in this article.

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