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6. User journey mapping

Visualise how your users find and use your services. Highlight challenges the user faces

What is it good for?

  • To visualise how your user interacts with your services
  • To understand any pain points your user might face before, during or after engaging with your services
  • To involve the team and other stakeholders

When to use it

As part of discovery research to map how users are currently using your product or service

How to use it

User journey maps show how your users find you and use your services. They can help you gain a deeper understanding of your users' behaviours and needs as well as where the pain points are in your current service.

Creating or reviewing your user journey map can be a great workshop opportunity to get the whole team involved.

To create your map you'll need to use:

  • Your research data
  • Conversations with colleagues and volunteers
 

Your map will show how your users move through your service and reveal gaps, pain points and opportunities.

Using the data you have:

  1. Start by thinking about the different interactions your user has with your organisation or a particular service. What are the different steps they take? Write one interaction per post-it.
  1. Continue building that journey, bearing in mind they might go away and then come back again to your service.
  1. Underneath each of these steps, try to capture what the user might be thinking at that stage in their journey.
  1. Next, in a row underneath, think about what the user might be feeling at each stage: is it frustration, is it relief at having found your service, is it confusion because they haven't found out the information they were hoping for?
  1. Once you have as complete a picture as possible, it's time to map what your staff are doing at each stage of the users' journey. It could be sending an email, making a phone call, logging an interaction in the CMS.
 

To begin with, your map might look something like this:

Notion image
 

Once you've got this journey map, it's time to analyse what you see:

  • Where are the main pain points in your users' journey?
  • What is the cause of these pain points?
  • How can you improve the service to help them at those difficult points?
  • Are there any easy things you could do to drastically improve their experience?
  • What conclusions can you draw about your staff's experience?
 

Get the tool

Here's a handy Miro template you can make a copy of and use for your own journey map. Or you can just use a wall in your office or home with some post-its.

Further reading

  1. Some further guidance on how to create an experience map from Government Digital Services