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
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.
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:
- 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.
- Continue building that journey, bearing in mind they might go away and then come back again to your service.
- Underneath each of these steps, try to capture what the user might be thinking at that stage in their journey.
- 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?
- 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:
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?
Further reading
- Some further guidance on how to create an experience map from Government Digital Services