The A to Z of UX - J is for Journey Mapping: A 10-Point Checklist for Driving Clarity, Alignment and Growth
- UXcentric
- 5 days ago
- 13 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
DARREN WILSON
What is Journey Mapping?
Journey mapping is a visual tool that captures the steps a user takes when interacting with a product, service, or brand, along with their thoughts, emotions, and pain points along the way, from first exposure to the final transaction.
Different journeys will stress test the different parts of the experience, especially when different personas are involved.
As such, the mapping helps teams identify gaps, highlight opportunities, and align across functions by building a shared understanding of the user experience.
When based on real data and created collaboratively, journey maps become powerful assets for improving customer satisfaction, guiding product decisions, and reducing risk in delivery.
By doing so, secondary paths or alternative use cases that require design solutions will become apparent, some of which may require simple recovery by the user.
In this article, we’ll look at why journey mapping is important for driving clarity, alignment and growth and a 10-point checklist to do so.
Credit: Kim Flaherty, Nielsen Norman Group
Getting the most from Journey Mapping
In the world of digital products and services, you must fully understand the experience your user will have. A journey map offers a powerful way to visualise the steps users take, the pain points they encounter, and the moments that matter most.
Done well, journey mapping bridges the gaps between teams, aligns business and customer goals, and brings empathy into product decisions.
They translate user needs into clear priorities, prevent costly rework, and ensure that your team invests development effort where it will deliver the most business impact. This checklist is your guide to making that happen.
But journey maps are often misunderstood. Some treat them as decorative artefacts, while others mistake them for simple process flows.
A journey map built on assumptions is a direct route to scope creep and wasted engineering cycles. Grounding it in real data isn't an option. It’s how you de-risk your product strategy and ensure you build features that customers will use and pay for.
When grounded in real user data and created with cross-functional input, it becomes a strategic tool, one that helps teams build the right things, at the right time, in the right way.
We’ve been using them at UXCENTRIC for some time now, and our customers have seen the benefit, such as in Gobby, a disruptive start-up that specialises in surveys:
"Mapping various processes in designing software demonstrated that user journeys are rarely linear. They exposed necessary routes for ensuring user success in fulfilling goals, as well as creating opportunities to add unexpected value to their experience."
Gary Beckwith, MD, Gobby Limited
Why it matters for you
Journey maps translate user needs into priorities, helping you avoid technical misfires and align delivery with real value. They’re not just a UX tool. They're also a risk-reduction asset.
So, whether you're an engineering lead trying to align backend infrastructure with user flows, a design agency mapping out opportunities for innovation, or a product owner looking to prioritise your roadmap, this guide will help you get the most from journey mapping.
A 10-Point Checklist for Driving Clarity, Alignment and Growth
We’ll now look at ten things to consider to make your journey maps meaningful, practical, and impactful.
1. Know Your Goal
Journey mapping is most effective when there’s a clearly defined intent.
“Journey maps align an organisation around user goals and experiences by visualising the interactions that matter most.”
Jim Kalbach
Before you create a journey map, clarify why you're doing it and tie it to a measurable business outcome.
This initial step ensures the entire exercise is tied to a measurable business outcome, making its value clear to everyone involved.
Are you exploring a new feature? Trying to improve conversion? Understanding post-sales support? The objective shapes every decision, from which user to focus on and which phases and metrics to include.
A journey map without a clear goal can become a catch-all document that tries to do too much and ends up doing very little.
Ask yourself, what do we want to learn or achieve through this map?
This step is particularly important when you're dealing with multiple stakeholders.
Without a shared purpose, a journey mapping session can quickly turn into a brainstorming free-for-all or a political negotiation. Setting a clear, singular goal brings focus and helps you define scope.
Example
This initial clarity prevents the map from becoming bloated or unfocused. For example, when Spotify mapped their user journey for playlist sharing via third-party apps, they focused on specific personas and emotional barriers, such as users’ fear of being judged for their music taste and addressed an awareness gap where many users didn’t even know the feature existed. These insights led to improvements in UI and in-app flows. (Source: Contentsquare)
Credit: Kristina Allen
Quick tip
Use a goal-framing template: “We want to map [persona] doing [task] to improve [outcome].”
Recommended reading
2. Start with Real User Data
Effective journey maps are based on evidence, not assumptions.
It grounds the project in evidence, critical for de-risking feature development and securing stakeholder buy-in.
For an engineering manager, this data validates that you are solving a real problem, preventing resources from being wasted on building a solution based on assumptions.
It’s tempting to sit down with a whiteboard and sketch out how you think users behave. But without actual user input (interviews, support tickets, analytics, or diary studies), you risk mapping a fictional experience. And building on fiction rarely leads to great design.
Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative sources. Combine metrics like drop-off rates or NPS with rich, story-driven data from real users.
Even if you're early in a project and formal research hasn't happened yet, start with whatever signal you have: transcripts, sales calls, surveys, even Slack threads. Then build research into your process as soon as you can.
Include real quotes in your journey map. For each step, add something a user said as evidence. It adds empathy and keeps your team grounded in reality.
Credit: Nielsen Norman Group
Example
Airbnb’s UX team uses journey mapping across hosts and guests to identify friction in onboarding and booking. Analysis drills from UXDesignInstitute confirm that platform improvements led to higher booking completion rates. (Source: Emily Stevens, UXDesign Institute)
Quick tip
ResearchOps or repository tools like Dovetail or EnjoyHQ can accelerate insight gathering.
Recommended reading
Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users
Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research
3. Choose the Right Persona
One journey map cannot speak for every user. Focusing on a specific persona (ideally one that is based on user research) helps create clarity and precision.
Personas don't need to be overly detailed, but they do need to be relevant. Use a persona that reflects a real user group with a distinct goal or behaviour pattern.
The danger of blending too many user types into one map is that you end up with a vague, generic picture. Instead of surfacing clear needs and opportunities, you dilute the value of the insight.
Example
The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) created journey maps for distinct citizen personas, such as when buying a house, to tailor services effectively. This persona-focused approach helped them simplify complex processes for diverse user groups. (Source: Gov.uk)
Credit: Gov.uk
Quick tip
If you’re short on time, start with a proto-persona (a preliminary user profile) based on stakeholder input and refine it as research becomes available.
Recommended reading
Indi Young’s Practical Empathy and Alan Cooper’s work on goal-directed personas
4. Map the Phases Clearly
Journey maps are typically broken into phases, distinct segments that represent the user’s progress through an experience. Clear phase definitions help your team understand context and sequence.
Break the experience into meaningful phases. Common ones include:
Be careful not to confuse internal business processes with user-centred phases. The user’s perception of the journey often differs from how an organisation structures its services.
Mapping these phases correctly helps product owners identify precisely where a funnel is breaking and allows engineering teams to see how different system parts connect to deliver the user journey.
Start by asking, "What’s going through the user’s mind at this stage?" rather than, "What step are they in, according to our system?"
Credit: Ruthie Carey
Example
Companies like Uber exemplify this, mapping out the distinct phases of a trip, from request and matching to the ride itself, to isolate friction and optimise each stage of the service.
Quick tip
Using storyboards or swimlane diagrams can help visualise overlapping actions and perspectives
Credit: Interaction Design Foundation
5. Identify Touchpoints and Channels
Each phase of the journey involves interactions such as emails, app screens, help docs, calls, and in-person moments. These are your touchpoints, and mapping them out clearly is essential.
“The value of a journey map lies in its ability to make the intangible visible — revealing complexity and opportunity.”
Touchpoints often span multiple systems and teams, which is where journey mapping can highlight fragmentation or inconsistency.
Think omnichannel. Users don’t see your organisation as separate departments or platforms. Instead, they see one experience.
Credit: Ben Forrest
Example
As described by Ben Forrest, Disney’s MagicBand initiative focused on delivering a seamless omnichannel guest experience, from ticket purchase and mobile check-in to in-park navigation and cast member interactions. By mapping cross-channel interactions and emotional moments, their team identified key friction points and design opportunities.
Quick tip
Use icons or colour keys to highlight which team owns each touchpoint (e.g. design, CX, engineering).
6. Capture the Emotional Journey
Mapping the user's emotional journey isn't a soft skill. It's a diagnostic tool in your toolbox.
A dip in the emotional curve from 'anxious' to 'confused' is a direct signal of a likely support ticket, a drop-off in your conversion funnel, or a negative review. Fixing these precise moments delivers a measurable lift to your KPIs."
Consider whether your users are anxious, confused, delighted, or relieved. Mapping emotion helps teams connect with users’ lived experience and identify where to improve it.
Emotion often drives behaviour. A moment of frustration might lead to churn. A moment of delight might turn a user into a promoter.
Use emotional curve visuals, emojis, or colour gradients to highlight highs and lows. Try using a dotted line graph below each phase, showing the emotional arc.
Emotional arcs help anticipate not just usability issues, but how people feel across phases, a practice grounded in Alan Cooper’s foundational UX frameworks (Cooper, 2014).
Example
Starbucks has long focused on designing for the full emotional arc of the customer experience, from craving a coffee to entering the store. Journey maps used by strategists and consultants highlight how sensory touchpoints like aroma, music, and environment shape emotional engagement. By aligning atmosphere with anticipation, Starbucks reinforces positive emotional peaks that strengthen loyalty. (Source: Juan Fernando Pacheco)
7. Expose Pain Points and Gaps
Once the emotional curve is in place, pain points become easier to spot and to prioritise. Look for drop-offs, complaints, delays, or support queries that signal friction.
Use warning icons or red markers to draw attention to problem areas.
These pain points often relate to internal silos or legacy systems. That’s why journey mapping works best when teams from across the business contribute.
Each pain point is a business problem in disguise, a potential support ticket, a source of churn, or a driver of negative reviews. These are the items that should directly inform your backlog.
“Journey maps help prioritise problems by showing where users are blocked, bored, or frustrated.”
Tomer Sharon (2016)
Quick tip
Pair pain points with evidence (support tickets, quotes, error logs) to strengthen your case for change.
Example
British Airways partnered with consultancy Human8 to develop a structured, multi-method path‑to‑purchase model, tracking real customer journeys across booking, airport transfer, and support with tools like in‑moment reporting and TripTalk groups. These insights helped BA embed journey mapping into strategic planning and improve service design across key digital and operational touchpoints (Source: Human8).
Credit: Human8
8. Highlight Moments of Truth
Not all steps are equal. Some moments disproportionately shape the user’s perception of your product or brand. These are "moments of truth", the make-or-break points.
Identify these moments and consider what would make them excellent, not just functional. These are usually the best places to invest effort.
Run a cross-functional workshop asking, "If we had to improve just one moment, which would matter most?"
Example
Amazon identified the first delivery as a critical moment of truth that strongly shapes customer loyalty. Focusing design and operations efforts here has led to innovations like delivery notifications and packaging improvements to delight customers (Source, Retail Economics).
Quick tip
Ask the team, “If we could only improve one moment, which would shift the whole experience?”
Credit: David Carr
9. Align Teams Around the Map
Journey maps are powerful silo-busters. They create a shared understanding that gets marketing, product, design, and engineering out of their respective silos and focuses on the same user-centric goal.
Maps help different functions see where they contribute and where gaps lie. This often sparks better collaboration and joint ownership.
When you're the only UXer on a team, journey maps help get others involved and thinking like a user.”
Buley, L. (2013).
Journey maps are also a good way to onboard new team members. They provide a fast, visual way to explain your users and systems.
They also create a single source of truth that prevents the common disconnect where design, product, and engineering have slightly different ideas of what's being built. This alignment is key to shipping faster and with less rework.
Involve stakeholders from design, engineering, product, support, and marketing. Co-create the map or at least review it together.
“When done collaboratively, journey mapping creates shared accountability — and gives UX a seat at the strategic table.”
Merholz & Skinner
Example
Spotify regularly brings together product, design, engineering, and marketing teams in collaborative workshops to align around user problems and product direction. These sessions create shared understanding across disciplines and have supported smoother, more coordinated feature planning and releases. (Source: Spotify Design)
Quick tip
Use maps in onboarding and cross-team planning to align faster and reduce miscommunication.
10. Make It Actionable
A journey map isn’t complete until it drives decisions. Translate the insights into hypotheses, user stories, or roadmap items and create a prioritised list of insights that can be directly translated into user stories for the next sprint, epics for the quarterly roadmap, or specific hypotheses for A/B testing.
Prioritise the ideas using effort vs. impact, then align with delivery teams to test and iterate. For each major pain point or opportunity, write a “How Might We” question to frame your next steps.
Keep the map alive. Revisit it quarterly, after releases, or when users' needs shift.
“A good journey map is a collaborative, evidence-based tool—not a deliverable. It’s only valuable when used to drive decisions.”
Martin Stickdorn
Example
IBM integrates journey mapping into its Enterprise Design Thinking framework to align teams, uncover pain points, and inform delivery. In one case study for IBM zCX, cross-functional teams collectively constructed "assumed-as-is" journeys, identified gaps, and refined these with validated user research, all culminating in team journey maps and actionable blueprints. This user-centred mapping informed subsequent ideation, prototyping, and planning. (Source: Andrea Karina Burgueño, IBM Design)
Quick tip
Assign an owner to maintain and evolve the map regularly.
Beyond the Map: Turning Insight into Action
Journey mapping is just the beginning. It feeds into:
UX strategy and roadmaps
Service blueprints
Product discovery
Team alignment
Opportunity spotting
Make sure the map isn’t left in a folder. Bring it into workshops, retros, planning sessions, and design critiques.
Types of Journey MapS At a Glance
Current-State Journey Map
Captures the user’s experience as it exists today, including their goals, actions, touchpoints, emotions, and pain points.
Best for: Identifying friction, surfacing gaps, and aligning teams on what the status is right now
Future-State Journey Map
Imagines an improved or ideal version of the experience, based on user needs, business goals, or design vision.
Best for: Ideation, innovation, and aligning stakeholders on the long-term direction.
Day-in-the-Life Map
Expands beyond a specific product to illustrate a user’s behaviours, routines, contexts, and motivations over time. It helps teams understand where your offering fits, or fails to, in a broader ecosystem.
Best for: Revealing unmet needs, identifying moments of opportunity and framing new ideas.
Service Blueprint
Builds on a journey map by adding backend layers, people, systems, processes, and policies that enable the experience.
Best for: Operationalising service delivery, managing handoffs, and improving internal alignment.
Experience Map
A generalised map of a human behaviour or task, not tied to a specific persona or product. Often created during early discovery to explore broad patterns across users or industries.
Best for: Strategic research, identifying design themes, and comparing journeys across domains.
Journey Mapping Tools (with Use Cases)
MiRO
Ideal for real-time remote mapping and workshops
UXPressia
Built-in templates and customer persona integration
Smaply
Great for large organisations and includes stakeholder mapping
Figma
Flexible for design-led teams to prototype journey flows
Lucidchart
Good for technical users wanting structured maps
Bonus: What Else Should I Consider?
Journey mapping is flexible and adaptable. Here are a few additional practices worth considering as your mapping practice matures:
Backstage processes
Extend the map into a service blueprint to understand what systems, people, and policies drive the front stage experience.
B2B or multi-user journeys
Consider layered maps to reflect buyer, admin, and end-user needs.
Lifecycle vs. task journeys
Zoom out to map the entire customer relationship, or zoom in on critical moments like onboarding or cancellation.
Link with empathy maps or scenarios
Add narrative and emotion to deepen your understanding.
Define and track experience metrics
Link your map to KPI's such as Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and/or support volumes (number or frequency of customer support interactions).
Create prototypes, and test
Use different degrees of fidelity according to need to simulate the journey and test with users to eek out any changes that need to be made early on
These additions don’t replace the essentials, but they can add valuable depth and focus, depending on your goals.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Mapping without users
Leads to fiction, not insight
Too much detail
Makes it unreadable and overwhelming
Lack of ownership
Becomes a one-off exercise, not a strategic tool
Not revisiting
Users change. Products change. Your maps should too.
When Not to Use a Journey Map
When you need to make a quick UI decision (use a task flow instead).
When the journey is too fragmented to track.
When there’s no clear persona or goal defined yet.
In these cases, hold off or switch to lightweight alternatives like empathy maps, assumption boards, or storyboards.
Final Thoughts
Journey maps help teams understand users, spot problems, and align around improvements.
However, they only work when grounded in real data, designed for collaboration, and turned into action.
Whether you’re refining onboarding, improving support, or building something entirely new, a journey map is a practical way to bring focus and empathy to your UX process.
Map early. Map collaboratively. Map often.
Get in touch with the author
Darren Wilson, Co-Founder and Director of Design at UXCENTRIC
07854 781 908
