Journey maps

Journey Maps are a UX visualization document that showcases the steps that a user takes in a process to accomplish a goal.

Journey maps are created using insights gathered from user and stakeholder interviews. By mapping out the steps a user takes to accomplish a goal, you can uncover key pain points, emotional highs and lows, and opportunities to improve their experience. As a result of this process, teams can identify the most important functionality, content, and interactions an audience truly needs.

Like personas and archetypes, journey maps should be built on a foundation of real user research. This ensures they accurately reflect actual behaviors and experiences—not assumptions. Learn more in Understanding Your User.

journey map example

NNG Journey Map Example

Why Use a Journey Map? 

At a high level, journey maps are a combination of storytelling, visual design, and empathy. When completed, your project team will have a complete idea of how your users interact with your website or application and have clear definitions of your pain points. The process of creating a journey map allows your team to have an internal conversation and avoid any possibility of assumption misalignments.

Additionally, a visual design deliverable like a journey map is an effective way of creating something memorable and easily digestible so that everyone from managers, stakeholders and staff members can easily relate to it. 

What Makes up a Journey Map?

This is usually represented as a Persona or an Archetype. This provides a point of view for your users/people. 

This describes the journey that the user will be going on. An example of this could be “John Smith is looking to buy a new car”. This lays the expectations of the user and based on which persona/archetype they are, we can make assumptions on user behavior. 

This describes the high-level stages of the user’s journey. In the previous example we can use stages like Research -> Test Driving -> Purchasing -> Initial Experience. 

These are behaviors that the user will encounter throughout their journey and can be mapped while they go through the different stages. John can have felt overwhelmed during the research stage and have a student-like mindset, but when he gets to the test-driving stage, he could experience doubt and a second-guessing mindset. 

These are insights that come as a result of the mapping. The opportunities allow the team to identify and answer questions like “How can we improve the test-driving experience?” and “Where are the biggest opportunities to improve the car buying experience?”. 

Journey Map Complex Example

NNG Deconstructed Complex Journey Map

Additional Resources 

Here are some other resources for Journey Maps 

Keep Learning About Your Users

Discover more ways to uncover user needs, build empathy, and design with real-world insights.

Learn how to understand your user

Turn Research into User Representations

Turn insights into clear, relatable tools like personas and journey maps to keep your team focused on real user needs.

How to Create User Representations