Customer Journey Mapping: Why It’s Essential for Product Design

The Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “Life’s a journey, not a destination,” may be somewhat of a cliché, but it perfectly reflects the purpose behind customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping (also known as customer experience mapping) is the strategic process of capturing and communicating complex customer interactions. User experience (UX) designers use it to illustrate the customer’s processes, needs, and perceptions across their interactions with our services, products, and organizations.

For example, when designing for Starbucks’ mobile ordering app, a journey mapping exercise would likely include a customer’s actions before they use the app, during their ordering experience, and after they’ve picked up their order and are headed back to the office. This UX design strategy is essential to understanding users and solving real design problems.

By focusing on a customer’s experiences throughout their journey with a product or service (e.g., clicks on a Facebook ad, signs up for a product mailing list, or Googles your company), rather than jumping ahead to the end solution (the present experience with the app or website), designers can deliver positive experiences and form a deeper understanding of their customers.

Customer journey mapping is an ongoing practice — a collaborative process that’s boundlessly more useful than a highly polished deliverable. Cross-functional teams who use it can include marketers, executives, engineers, customer support professionals, product owners, and more. By working together, they gain a shared understanding of how customers feel and think, and their relationship to the service. Engaging in a customer journey mapping session builds knowledge and consensus across the organization, and ultimately outlines the shared reality of customers’ experiences.

Customer Journey Mapping in Action: Case Study in Health Care

The key to understanding any customer journey is empathy. From anxieties and fears to joy and delight, the emotions tied to our products and services are what we’re looking to uncover. That’s how industrial designer Doug Dietz, the creator of the MR Adventure Discovery Series, was able to design a more successful MRI experience for children undergoing the scan.

Consider a typical MRI scanning experience, with its loud, strange noises, dark, confined tube, and cold, hard scanning bed. The apprehension, fear, and anxiety that patients, especially children, had surrounding this important medical ordeal was inhibiting results, requiring rescans and sometime sedation. By mapping the anxiety curve of the parent and child’s journey from home to the hospital, learning about their fears upon discovering a need for an MRI, and their reaction to the scanning room itself, Dietz learned why the machine experience had almost no chance of being pleasant.

From this newly realized understanding of what made the MRI a negative experience on their health-care journey, Dietz and his team were able to design a better solution. The outcome is a whole new sensory experience, a completely redesigned MRI room based on a pirate ship, submarine aquatic adventure, or outdoor camping trip complete with sights, sounds, and tasks all related to each adventure. A scary experience was turned into some children’s favorite part of the hospital.

Customer Journey Mapping at General Assembly

At General Assembly, students in our full-time User Experience Design Immersive course learn customer journey mapping as a way to validate their user research and apply a broader understanding of previously defined personas, another tool in the UX toolkit. In their class projects, both with real-world and fictional clients, students use the user data they collect to validate their team’s assumptions about a user’s journey and add new findings from their research. Students break the journey up into steps, indicating the touch points and emotions that users experience during those steps.

In addition to the user research, students sharpen their communication skills by running a team workshop that includes stakeholders from other disciplines, like marketers, developers, and customer support. Creating a customer journey map is a group activity and students learn the necessary skills to get non-design stakeholders, like project managers and executives, to participate in the process and arrive at a shared understanding of the customers. Students practice customer journey mapping in each of their team projects, so they can accurately identify a problem and uncover the needs of users.

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Meet Our Expert

Jared Rogers is a User Experience Design Immersive instructor at GA’s Austin campus. His extensive UX career centers on education, tech, and media industries with both agency and in-house design experience. Some of his notable clients include IBM, AT&T, Stanford University, and Meredith Corporation.

“There’s a high demand for UX roles. Companies of all sizes value what UX research and design can bring to the table. With Austin growing as a technology hub, these UX generalist roles provide value for any business.”

Jared Rogers, UX Design Immersive Instructor at General Assembly Austin