Experience Mapping
Experience Mapping visually represents user journeys over time, capturing their actions, thoughts, and feelings from initial need to service completion. This method helps teams understand user experiences, identify pain points, and reveal interdependencies within a service.
Use Experience Mapping when you need to understand a service that spans multiple steps, locations, or teams, especially when the service involves complex user interactions and potential pain points.
Solves: Lack of shared understanding of the user journey; Siloed teams with limited visibility into the end-to-end user experience; Difficulty identifying and prioritizing areas for service improvement.
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Step 1: Gather User Data (Ongoing): Collect data from user interviews, surveys, and observations to understand their experiences.
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Step 2: Prepare the Workspace (15 min): Choose a large wall or digital whiteboard and gather sticky notes, markers, and event cards.
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Step 3: Identify Common Stages (30 min): Lay out event cards for each participant, align common events, and break the rows into stages. Name each stage using color-coded sticky notes.
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Step 4: Build Up the Experience (60 min): Add the steps involved in each stage to form the 'spine' of the experience. Extract emotional highs and lows, reactions, and service touchpoints from event cards.
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Step 5: Live with the Map (Ongoing): Display the draft map in a team area and encourage discussion, review, and refinement over several days or weeks.
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Step 6: Draw a Detailed Map (60 min): Create a finalized, digital version of the map in a graphics application for sharing and ongoing reference.
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Step 7: Share a Summary Map (30 min): Create a simplified version of the map highlighting key stages and findings for broader communication.
- Encourage diverse perspectives from team members to create a comprehensive map.
- Focus on capturing the user's emotional experience, not just the steps they take.
- Focus on a specific user persona to create a more targeted experience map.
- Create separate maps for different user segments with distinct journeys.