When journey maps are used in the right way — as a means to address a specific, known business goal — the benefits are vast. Our earlier research on practitioners’ journey-mapping activities identified several advantages, including aligning stakeholders around common goals and vision, enabling focus on customer needs, and helping team members establish a personal connection with the end users.

One of the biggest practitioner pain points revealed during the same research, however, is that many people are unclear about the specifics of the actual journey-mapping process. While we’ve previously provided a 5-step process for journey mapping, this article is a more detailed guide to one of those steps: the journey-mapping workshop.

Because the structure of a workshop is dependent on the skill level and preferred methods of the facilitator, there are many ways to lead a journey-mapping workshop. This article provides an overview of one way—a case study with examples from a recent workshop—but there could be many variations of the activities listed that could also be productive.

Before the Journey-Mapping Workshop

Before getting everyone together in the same room, take these steps to ensure that all contributors are engaged, prepared, and that they understand the purpose and scope of the workshop.

Step 1. Build a team: Journey mapping is a collaborative process. If you create your map in a silo without involving others, you run the risk that the people whose support you need to get things done post mapping will not believe in it or be passionate about your findings. Create a crossfunctional team of allies who can help you advertise the process and build buy-in for your recommendations. They will also be your workshop participants.

Step 2. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor) and what journey (the scenario) you’ll be mapping ahead of time. You should focus on one actor and one scenario per map, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one scenario or journey map per workshop. You’ll just have to allow for extra time and figure out logistics (e.g., splitting up into small groups) to accommodate the additional complexity. If necessary, plan how you’ll split up teams before the workshop. Know who’s coming and assign each person to the most appropriate journey. (You wouldn’t want the designer of a small-business product working on the journey for consumer products.)

Step 3. Gather and share existing research: It’s often beneficial to start with what you already have. Gather and review any existing UX, marketing, analytics, or customer support data related to your journey, consolidate relevant insights, and identify knowledge gaps. Create a shared repository so everyone on the team has access to the artifacts you’ve gathered, which may include previous experience maps, research reports, data from diary studies, or brand or experience guidelines.

Step 4. Assign “homework”: Provide attendees with background reading ahead of the workshop. No matter how much you feel like you have shared, briefed, and campaigned, prime participants one last time before the workshop. Provide relevant background reading, existing research takeaways, and a few open-ended thought-starter questions to mentally prepare participants.

Provide participants with “homework” so they are primed for the workshop. These excerpts from the homework packet of a journey-mapping workshop include links to background reading and highlights of key concepts that participants should be familiar with for the workshop activities.

During the Journey-Mapping Workshop

This particular journey-mapping workshop structure incorporates activities to lead participants through:

  • Creating a current-state hypothesis map
  • Evolving the current-state journey map based on customer input
  • Prioritizing pain points within the journey
  • Brainstorming new ideas and potential solutions with customers
  • Creating a future-state vision through sketching and design-studio activities

It’s divided into three parts:

  • Part I: Laying the foundation: Review of basic concepts and inputs for mapping
  • Part II: Current-state mapping: Creation of an assumption map, review and evolution of the map with customers, and prioritization of pain points
  • Part III: Future-state visioning: Brainstorming future-state ideas and interactions through sketching

Depending on the number of workshop attendees and the number of prioritized scenarios and actors, this workshop could be structured over a period of a couple to several days.

Part I: Laying the Foundation

The activities within the first segment of the workshop ensure that participants share the  mental model and the language of journey mapping, understand existing research, and agree on the workshop inputs — specifically, the journey-map stages, actor(s) and scenario(s) that will be used.

Step 1. Refresh and educate: Here’s something you may find shocking: Some participants may not even open your thoughtfully prepared workshop homework! That means you’ll have to find a creative way to ensure that attendees understand core concepts while not putting those who did diligently prepare to sleep. Blend teaching opportunities into methods for gaging the room’s level of preparedness with an activity such as trivia based on your provided background reading. Bonus: Trivia also acts as an energizer to start the day. Split the room into small groups so that those who were sincerely unable to prepare are not singled out and the vibe remains fun.

Journey-mapping trivia helps participants refresh their knowledge and enables the facilitator to gage the level of knowledge in the room.

Step 2. Review actors and scenarios: Though you will have decided which actor(s) and scenario(s) to focus on before walking into the room, give your participants a chance to feel ownership over them (and ensure they understand these concepts). For example, enabling discussion over a quick interactive quiz like the one below helps participants connect with the narrative of the scenario and reinforces buy-in for the scenario.

Weave additional learning opportunities and chances for participants to connect with and learn the scenarios. Even a quick, interactive quiz such as the one above helps reinforce the scenario for attendees.

Step 3. Review the research (again): Even if you consolidated and shared existing research with the team before the workshop, it’s possible that not everyone took the time to pore over it like you did. You should dedicate time within the workshop agenda to review the key findings. And even if the team is familiar with the research, it’s still better for everyone to be aligned on the takeaways as a group and for those takeaways to be fresh in everyone’s heads. The research review could take the form of one or two people simply presenting recent research findings, or it could be something more interactive.

For a recent journey-mapping workshop for a team very familiar with existing research, we did a quick postup of “what we know” about the journey. Participants worked in small groups to generate one research insight per sticky note, cluster them into groups, and then shared their themes back to the larger group. This approach has the bonus of providing an artifact that the team can hang and reference in their workspace as they begin mapping

Participants in a journey-mapping workshop post up research insights related to their assigned scenario (left) in order to create an affinity diagram (right).

Step 4. Provide facilitation training for participants: If customers will join your workshop, help your participants prepare. As the workshop facilitator, you’ll likely have more small groups than you can actively lead, so you’ll need to empower your attendees. Remember: This is a crossfunctional team, so not everyone is familiar with user research! Provide some guidance. I prefer to do two things: First, plan a training segment within the workshop to review facilitation guidelines. Secondly, provide teams with printed interview guides with suggested lines of inquiry related to their scenario.

Part II: Current-State Mapping

In the second segment of the workshop, teams go through a series of activities to create a draft map, update the map based on customer input, and identify pain points.

Step 1. Map the current state: Here, each team concentrates its collective knowledge into a map specific to its assigned scenario. It’s helpful to remind participants that they are creating an assumption map, meaning that there may be gaps or unknowns. At this point in time, it’s okay to make some assumptions, because they’ll continue to adapt the map and make adjustments with additional research. That’s why we make maps with sticky notes — so we can tear them off or scribble over them with Sharpies as learning evolves!

A current-state assumption map should have gaps, like the map above, because teams may not know everything about the journey when they create the map. Assumption maps provide a place to consolidate what is known, so that the gaps can be filled in with additional primary research.

Step 2. Interview customers: The act of consolidating what the team knows from existing research creates a current-state assumption map. At this point, customers who align to each group’s primary actor or persona join the teams. Recruit your customers based on relevant screening criteria. (For example, for journeys related to opening a new credit card, it’s ideal to recruit participants who are actively looking for a new credit card or who have recently opened a credit card.) Using the provided facilitation guide, small groups interview the customers, asking open-ended questions about their experience with the journey they are assigned.

Journey-mapping workshop participants talk with customers who have joined their small groups. Their current-state assumption maps hang around the room.

Step 3. Evolve the map: Once customers have shared experiences without seeing their team’s assumptions, the discussion moves to the wall. Teams walk customers through their assumption maps, continuing to ask open-ended questions and encouraging customers to share stories. It can be useful to provide some tangible tools to customers to lower their barrier to engagement. For example, in this journey-mapping workshop, we gave customers stickers to represent agreement or disagreement, and asked them to physically contribute to the map to reflect their experience and help us validate or evolve our assumptions.

(Left) Small groups walk customers through their assumption maps. (Right) Customers used silver star stickers to mark components of the assumption map that aligned to their experiences and yellow caution stickers to mark areas of the assumption map that did not align to their experiences.

Step 4. Generate and prioritize pain points: After time for in-depth discussion and map adaptation, allow the groups to focus on frustrations that occur throughout the journey. These frustrations, also called pain points, will serve as an input for the future-state visioning. Make pain-point generation easier for attendees by providing a fill-in-the-blank structure for them to fill in:

  • I need ______ in order to ______.
  • I need ______ so that ______.

Example: “I need a simple way to compare options so that I don't get overwhelmed.”

Give participants a time limit to silently generate needs statements on sticky notes, have them place the stickies on the pain-points swim lane of the map, and then discuss and affinity diagram them. After discussion, use dot voting to identify which pain points are most critical.

A closeup of pain points on the journey map after dot voting has taken place.

Part III: Future-State Visioning

The workshop concludes with a third segment: future-state visioning. Here, participants brainstorm ideas with customers, then use rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique to create future-state flows.

Step 1. Generate “big ideas”: Using the identified pain points as catalysts, both internal workshop participants and customers come up with abstract ideas that align to known frustrations within the journey. It’s useful to encourage the teams to think big and use metaphors to express their ideas so that they don’t jump to specific solutions (e.g., features) too soon. Use a time limit and provide a quantity goal (e.g., try to generate at least 5 ideas in 5 minutes) to keep participants from over-censoring their ideas. After this round of idea generation, participants post up and present their ideas to the rest of the team.

(Left) Participants generate big ideas on sticky notes after identifying critical pain points in the journey. (Right) Example big ideas generated by the team.  

In this workshop, we followed the presentation of ideas with a round of impact and effort voting. Customers and internal participants whose primary job responsibility was user research voted on the most impactful ideas by placing a set number of gold stars on the corresponding stickies. Remaining internal team members voted on the most feasible ideas by placing the same number of green dots on the ideas. The result was a visual ranking of the ideas that takes both feasibility and impact into account. This is a good time to break, thank customers for their time, and continue the workshop with internal participants only.

(Left) Individuals present their “big ideas” to their teams. (Right) A set of big ideas that have been voted on to reflect customer impact and organizational feasibility.

Step 2. Sketch individual future-state flows: Armed with the ranked “big ideas,” internal participants begin the task of translating the ideas into a set of interactions using the design-studio technique of timed rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique. First, individuals silently sketch flows based on the most feasible and impactful big ideas. Next, they present their ideas back to their team for critique. In the example below, we used tangibles (i.e., sticky notes) to capture the critique discussion: The team members called out aspects of the sketches they thought were particularly powerful or well-aligned to known frustrations on green sticky notes (green = good). For aspects of the individual flows that could be improved, they wrote comments on yellow sticky notes (yellow = ideas). These sticky notes were placed directly on the sketches for reference.

Teams silently sketch flows (top left), present their sketches (top right), and receive critique from their team (bottom left). Strong aspects and new ideas generated through discussion are captured on sticky notes placed directly on the sketches (bottom right).

Step 3. Create consolidated future-state flows: In the final workshop activity, small groups combine the most powerful ideas and strongest aspects of their individual sketches into one group sketch, reflecting a future-state journey for their scenario. Small groups then present their consolidated journey back to the entire workshop team.

A workshop participant presents his team’s consolidated flow back to the entire workshop team.

After the Journey-Mapping Workshop

Move quickly after the workshop in order to maintain momentum and make use of the excitement generated in the workshop.

Step 1. Share takeaways: Capture the workshop outputs by taking photos of each artifact and action shots of internal participants and customers working through the activities. (Of course, make sure you have consent ahead of time.) Share these artifacts in a central repository for reference, and capture and share next steps and action items in one place for the entire team.

Step 2. Bring the ideas life: The team members left the workshop with several strong flows and new interactions captured in sketches. Now, they can use iterative design to create low-fidelity prototypes of these flows and test them with customers, continuing to make adaptations based on user feedback.

Step 3. Keep refining the process: As you apply the workshop structure to additional journeys, continue to tweak and refine the activities to be the most successful and productive for your team.

Conclusion

This article provides guidance on a specific set of activities; however, there are many ways to run a journey-mapping workshop. The overall structure and activities are a starting place, created for one specific context. Use this as a starting place and adapt it based on your needs, scope, and limitations.

Learn more in our full-day course on Journey Mapping to Understand Customer Needs at the Virtual UX Conference.