Whether you’re attempting to address user-research goals, such as learning about a specific persona’s needs related to your product, or internal business goals, such as addressing lack of ownership over certain parts of the customer experience, journey mapping can be useful activity for bringing teams together to create one shared organization-wide vision for prioritizing design and UX ideas and investments.
Before jumping into your next journey map, however, do your due diligence to ensure that the mapping process will be productive. First and foremost, know and use the 5-step process for journey mapping and complete the premapping activities recommended: Before you even pick up a sticky note, establish a crossdisciplinary team of allies that will help socialize and create buy-in for your effort and that will determine and commit to the scope of the map upfront.
2 Critical Decisions to Make Before Journey Mapping
In addition to the invaluable premapping steps of establishing a team and determining the scope, there are 2 key decisions you must make before you begin the process:
- Will you map current-state or future-state experience?
- Will you begin with a research-first approach or an assumption-first approach?
The first decision determines the temporal state of the map (current or to-be). The second decision determines when and how resources and data will be gathered to shape the map. Answering these questions at the outset will focus the scope of the map, set the overall direction for the team’s activities, and eliminate snags in collaboration as the process advances.
Decision #1: Will You Create a Current-State or Future-State Journey Map?
The first decision: Is it more useful for your team to visualize the reality of the current-state experience with your company or product, or is it more useful to communicate an idealized future-state experience?
Current-state journey maps visualize the experience customers have when attempting to accomplish a goal with your product or company as it exists today.
Future-state journey maps visualize the best case, ideal-state journey for an existing product or a journey for a product that doesn’t exist yet.
When and How to Use Current-State Journey Maps
If you want to identify and document existing problems for customers and then determine relevant solutions, you’ll want to create a current-state journey map. It will enable you to understand user needs and find gaps in the current experience. A current-state map should emphasize current customer pain points, areas of disconnect in the journey, and overall dips and peaks in the user’s emotional journey. (Don’t forget about highlighting the good, as well!)
Use current-state maps to communicate and persuade: The output of current-state mapping initiatives can serve to convince additional stakeholders, product owners, or channel leads that pain points exist and to communicate the frequency and magnitude of those pain points. The contextual thoughts and user emotions contained in the map are especially helpful for creating a persuasive narrative that generates buy-in for activities and investments that will address the pain points.
Use current-state maps to provide shared understanding: Current-state maps also provide a cohesive launching point for UX and design activities. With a shared understanding of where the experience falls short, teams can move swiftly into brainstorming new interactions or flows because the problems are now well understood by everyone, and therefore more easily prioritized. Sketching or prototyping new design ideas is more productive with a well-understood current state.
Use current-state maps to generate additional user research: The current-state map can also serve as a foundation for further user research for journey mapping. Put current-state maps in front of customers to generate additional discussion and insights. While referencing the current-state map, ask open-ended questions about what does or does not align to their experiences, and have them react to the map. Update and evolve the map based on new findings.
When and How to Use Future-State Journey Maps
If you want to reinvent journeys for the better or conceive new experiences that meaningfully differentiate your company from competitors, try a future-state journey map. Future-state mapping helps you envision ways of supporting new customer segments or of creating and delivering new offerings.
Use future-state maps to create shared vision: When there is no existing product or offering, future-state maps can serve as a North Star that communicates the experience in its ideal form. This tool helps teams create a shared vision about what the experience should be like or even generate experience guidelines or principles to keep them aligned in their efforts. The process offers similar benefits for teams who want to completely reimagine an experience for an existing product or service instead of identifying and tweaking individual pain points.
Use future-state maps to provide direction: You can also think of the future-state map as a roadmap for teams creating a new product or experience. It can serve as a planning document for prioritizing the features, content, or service points that must exist in order to achieve the ideal experience reflected in the map.
Decision #2: Will You Use an Assumption-First or Research-First Approach?
Is it more feasible for your team to begin mapping with existing knowledge and validate (or invalidate) that map later, or is it more valuable to conduct primary research upfront? In other words, will you begin your mapping initiative with an assumption-first or a research-first approach?
The assumption-first approach begins with a workshop where a crossfunctional team makes use of already existing knowledge in order to create an assumption map or hypothesis map.
The research-first approach begins with a period of primary user research led by the UX or design team; the research is later consolidated into a map.
When and How to Use an Assumption-First Approach
In an assumption-first approach, teams start with a 1–3-day journey-mapping workshop with stakeholders, create a draft of a hypothesis map, then validate or evolve what they have created with additional user research. The primary benefit of the assumption-first approach is that it provides an introduction to journey mapping to those who are unfamiliar with the process, helps gain buy-in, and aligns siloed team members. The risk is that the process often stops before validation occurs, with a hypothesis map being used to make critical decisions.
Before deciding on mapping from assumptions, assess your existing base of knowledge about users and their behaviors:
- How much knowledge do you have?
- How methodologically-sound was the data collection?
- How recent is the knowledge?
- How broad is the knowledge?
- How deep is the knowledge?
The more questions are answered positively, the lower the risk of proceeding with an assumption-first approach. (Conversely, if you have little existing knowledge, and it was collected with sloppy methodology long ago, and it is only broad but not deep — or only deep but not broad — then your risk will be high.)
Use an assumption-first approach to educate team members: If UX or CX maturity is especially low at your organization or within your department, you may need to focus energy on educating people about why you’d want to do journey mapping at all and helping everyone understand the process, first. By hosting a journey-mapping workshop to bring stakeholders together, the assumption-first approach provides an opportunity teach others about journey mapping by getting them directly involved.
Use an assumption-first approach to lower the entry barrier to mapping: The assumption-first approach enables you to make use of existing organizational knowledge. Often, you can expose pain points and gaps within the journey by simply bringing together what you already have, without having to win approval for a lengthy and expensive upfront research phase. Armed with some small wins from this approach, you may be better set up to secure additional support and budget to continue the process in a rigorous way.
Use an assumption-first approach to move quickly: If you have an imperative to innovate or to ideate new design ideas quickly, the assumption-first approach can accelerate the process of prioritizing pain points and generating solutions to test. Especially if stakeholders have research fatigue or aversion, use the assumption-first approach as a platform to bring together the deep but often disparate knowledge the team has and to avoid repeating studies that will reveal already known insights.
When and How to Use a Research-First Approach
In a research-first approach, journey mapping begins with an upfront period of primary user research in an attempt to gather new insights before mapping the customer journey. The obvious benefit of this approach is that it ensures mapping of primary data instead of stakeholder assumptions. However, this approach can be lengthy and expensive — involving phases for research, analysis, and stakeholder readouts — and it does not provide as much opportunity to bring people along for the process as the assumption-first approach does.
Use a research-first approach to provide rigor: If you are part of an organization where internal “anecdotes” and “assumptions” will be scoffed at and will not hold much weight, don’t create an assumption map. It may be better to invest time and energy upfront, securing buy-in and budget for user research that can be thoroughly conducted and analyzed and used to create the first edition of the map. If this is the case, make sure to include space in the timeline for frequent research readouts with the broader team. (In other words, don’t disappear into a research hole.)
Use a research-first approach for small-scale, contained projects: If the scope of your mapping initiative is small and contained enough, you may not need to get crossfunctional stakeholders involved in interactive collaboration. For example, if your team is focusing on a journey that falls solely within your product domain and you have the authority to make decisions and determine new design directions based on mapping outputs, you may not need to waste time with an unnecessary workshop. However, in the small number of cases where this is true, it is still beneficial to keep stakeholders in the know about the process and insights revealed during mapping, should you be questioned later about changes you wish to make.
Recommendation: Use a Hybrid Approach
As with any design project, there are tradeoffs involved with making these 2 critical decisions, and there are benefits and challenges for each path. Your team size, project budget, scope and timeline, team politics, and existing journey-mapping knowledge and experience should be factors in helping you pick the best approach.
For most teams, using a hybrid approach for each decision works well: Create a current-state map first, to understand existing opportunities, and then create a future-state map to envision new ideas in a holistic way. Use a hypothesis-first approach to build buy-in with stakeholders; then follow up with user research to validate or evolve assumptions and create a second version of the map integrating primary user research findings.
Here’s what this recommendation looks like in a high-level process:
- Start with what you already have, using the assumption-first approach. Create a current-state hypothesis map with crossfunctional stakeholders in order to understand existing opportunities.
- Perform additional user research, such as interviews, diary studies, or inviting customers into your workshop to react to the first draft of your map. Update and evolve your map based on new insights.
- Once the team is confident that the pain points and gaps within the journey are well understood, conduct a visioning exercise to create a future-state map that can serve as your North Star for optimizing the experience.
This process could be executed with a variety of activities, timelines, and executional formats depending on the factors listed above.
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