A user journey map is a powerful asset that's used to understand how people use our products. It is an essential tool for building websites, applications, and services. This book will show you how to research, present, and use a user journey map.

User Journey Mapping

Preface

Imagine you want to buy a gift for your friend online. You might start by looking for some inspiration. What does this person like? You might use search engines, but maybe also inspiration boards. Or maybe some of those “top ten gifts for X” articles that are popular, especially around Xmas. You finally arrive on a website that offers the kind of things that inspire you. You go through categories, maybe use the search. You find the right gift, you go through the checkout process. The experience was good and quite simple. You buy it. Then you wait. And it never arrives. After a couple of days you try to contact the shop. It takes them more than a few days to answer. Eventually, after a lot of back and forth with them by email and over the phone, they find out what was going wrong. They agree to send you another one. But sadly, it doesn’t arrive on time for the birthday. You might have had a decent—maybe even good—experience on the website. But how about the overall experience?

An Introduction to User Journey Maps: What They Are, and What They're Useful For

In Part 1 of this book, I explained what user journey maps are, why they’re useful, and what to include in them. I also explained the things to watch out for when creating user journey maps.

The Different Types of Maps and How to Use Them

In Part 1 of this series, we covered what user journey maps are and why they’re beneficial. In Part 2, we looked at the different kinds of maps you could build—from current journey maps to disaster maps, future state maps, and everything in between.

Conducting User Research

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at what user journey maps are and why they’re useful. In Part 2, we covered the different kinds of maps you could build. In Part 3, the focus was on user research: why it’s important to gather data to build your user journey maps, and what methods you can use for gathering that data.

How to Run Workshops

In the previous tutorials in this series, we looked at what user journey maps are, what types of maps you can build, how to conduct user research to get data to build your own user journey map, and how to build a draft version of the map during a collaborative workshop. Our journey (pun intended) is nearing its end.

Community Questions