User Journey Maps

Imagine you're entering a supermarket - have you ever thought about how the order of the aisles has been organized? Yes, great minds know what you want to buy as essentials and how to guide you to the exact shelf where you can find your bread and milk by passing by other shelves which can have interesting products for you that you haven't thought about you'd need.

To do this they are building user journey maps to ideate which are great for visualizing processes a user goes through. We use the same method in design, to be able to get close to the users' needs and empathize with them.

You can't go wrong with your map, it's really about ideation: the objective of this document is to imagine a visual story of the process one of your personas will work through in order to accomplish a goal.

It's important to keep in mind that a user journey represents an overview of a particular action or flow using your product or service and not a map of the entire product or service; for example, looking up a location on a map, searching for particular information. The aim is to focus on the overall context and that the insights uncovered during the creation of your journey map will help you design your project.