A brief guide to mapping the user experience

User Experience Maps also called "User Journey Maps" are a simple but very effective tool for understanding what your user experiences when using your product.

What is user experience mapping?
User experience (journey) mapping displays a user's journey of your product through the different possible touchpoints allowed. It distinguishes the various interactions of the user which is generally achieved through a collection of user research and insights.

Here's a (very basic) example of a user experience map:

The above is only one example of mapping but there are tons of alternative ways of mapping the user experience, just take a look at this Google image search for "user experience map".

Why would you want to map the experience?
By mapping what our users are feeling, thinking and doing at a particular touchpoint we're able to identify opportunities and limits with our product. This map can be used as a visual tool to help the company to make important decisions such as the following:

• Where to focus resources.
• What do we know about our users?
• What do we not know about our users?
• What opportunities are available.

How do you go about doing it?
First off you need to start by gaining insights into how your users’ interact with your product. The insights you want to gain will include; what the user is doing, thinking and feeling at a certain moment in time. This can be done through Quantitative & Qualitative research such as analytics, user satisfaction scores, customer surveys, market research, user interviews, user testing and so on... The main thing to do here is to record the research so later you can use this information to map out the journey.

Next you'll want to turn those insights into a visual representation of the user's journey through your product. You can generally map it out as, at a certain point (or place) a user did such an action involving certain things and the user felt this. It’s best to map around the different stages of a user journey and then map out what the user’s action was, what they interacted with and how they felt.

What should you do once you have it?
Take a step backwards and give yourself a good pat on the back.... No, wait seriously, you should now use the map to do the following:

• It could be used as a base for identifying and prioritizing opportunities.
• It could be used as a source for product ideation and it should help generate stories of future user experiences.
• It could be used to define the principles for product wide user experience.
• It could also be used to define the utopian end-to-end user experience for your product.

If you're not going to use it for any of the above then, at least, use it as a base for organizational planning.

Do you want to see an example?
Yes, of course you do but that will have to wait for another post... This post was just to whet your appetite and I will do a follow-up post of an example.

The map at the top of the post is probably one of the best examples of how information can be used in journey mapping by Charles Joseph Minard. It's a depiction of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia which displays the size of his army at geographic locations during their march to Moscow and their retreat, along with temperature data.