User Journey Mapping Tools

🥪 Service Blueprints From Scratch (https://lnkd.in/dCeutXvu), a neat practical guide on how to turn research insights into a service blueprint, make front stage and back stage visible — and cover roles, processes, systems and data. By Marco Torrente. --- 🔶 1. Painting a Broader Picture To start with, we map the complexity of a system by looking at a broader picture. The real world is complex, contradictory and often riddled with dependencies, undocumented decisions and data flows. So we get together with stakeholders and map across 6 layers: Front stage ⚬ Customer / User ⚬ Experience / Channels Back stage ⚬ Organisation / People ⚬ Performance / Processes ⚬ Assets / Systems ⚬ Data / Information The goal here is to understand and visualize how a service is currently running (at a high level) and what friction points or challenges are involved in delivering that service to a customer. Afterwards, we structure relevant themes according to when they happen in time. --- 🔹 2. Diving Into Details Marco suggests to build the journey by laying out the phases and steps horizontally and the layers vertically. We map customer actions as steps or activities — similar to how we would do it with customer journey maps. However, a journey is never enough because the experience needs to be delivered from the org effectively. So we need to involve the project team to add back stage items (org, performance, systems, data) as they hold deep domain knowledge. It helps understand where and why customers experience friction. --- 🔹 3. Right-to-Left Thinking Personally, I add a different twist to that mapping process. Journey maps often represent ideal user journeys that people should take, but rarely do in practice. There is a lot of complexity and chaos that they hide — from back-and-forth to external factors that influence their decisions. Often many things must happen at the same time, coming all at once, and working together towards the shared goal. As we aim for that goal, we also need to map risks, blockers, opportunities and unknowns. One way to do that is by applying right-to-left (R-L) thinking (also called “backcasting”) to your work: 🚩 Right-to-left → Start from the goal, then move backwards to start. 🎯 Expose complexity → Map a path that maximizes chance of success. 🧱 Map what happens → Known success moments, frequent blockers. 🪜 One step at a time → Always focus on immediate previous step. ❓ Mark unknowns → Flag strong assumptions for research to-do. 🚀 Prioritize work → Choose key blockers/successes to work on next. It takes a lot of grit to change a way of working in organizations. But we can frame your work around the desired outcome and use right-to-left thinking to enforce critical thinking — instead of focusing on 1000s of details that might matter short-term, but won’t make a difference at scale. Details: https://smashed.by/rtl ↓

Wow. I just built 3 mini-apps for PMs in under 10 minutes: an empathy mapper, a journey analyzer, and a competitive analysis tool with Opal (Google Labs). No PRD. No Figma. No tickets. Just an idea → an experience. Instead of debating documents, I’m now sharing working mini-apps with my team ask them "react to this, let’s refine it” I used Opal to prototype the vibe with an: -Empathy Mapper -User Journey Analyzer -Competitive Landscape Tool Each one took minutes. Each one was immediately shareable. Each one changed the conversation. Use Opal when: -You want to validate an idea before writing a PRD -You need a quick tool for a workshop or meeting -You want to make research or concepts visible -You want to better empathize about your user Think of Opal as your 10-minute lab. If it takes longer than that, move it to a full prototype — that’s where other AI prototyping tools come in. Tips for PMs adopting this workflow -Start tiny. Your first Opal app should take under ten minutes. That constraint keeps you focused on intent, not polish. -Think in verbs, not nouns. Prompts like “summarize feedback” or “visualize trends” produce far better prototypes than static descriptions. -Collaborate live. Invite designers, engineers, and stakeholders into the session. Watching the prototype evolve creates alignment faster than any meeting. -Reflect. After every prototype, note what worked. Each build sharpens your prompting instincts and your product intuition. 🔗 Guides + masterclass in the comments 👇

When I was head of growth, our team reached 40% activation rates, and onboarded hundreds of thousands of new users. Without knowing it, we discovered a framework. Here are the 6 steps we followed. 1. Define value: Successful onboarding is typically judged by new user activation rates. But what is activation? The moment users receive value. Reaching it should lead to higher retention & conversion to paid plans. First define it. Then get new users there. 2. Deliver value, quickly Revisit your flow and make sure it gets users to the activation moment fast. Remove unnecessary steps, complexity, and distractions along the way. Not sure how to start? Try reducing time (or steps) to activate by 50%. 3. Motivate users to action: Don't settle for simple. Look for sticking points in the user experience you can solve with microcopy, empty states, tours, email flows, etc. Then remind users what to do next with on-demand checklists, progress bars, & milestone celebrations. 4. Customize the experience: Ditch the one-size fits all approach. Learn about your different use cases. Then, create different product "recipes" to help users achieve their specific goals. 5. Start in the middle: Solve for the biggest user pain points stopping users from starting. Lean on customizable templates and pre-made playbooks to help people go 0-1 faster. 6. Build momentum pre-signup: Create ways for website visitors to start interacting with the product - and building momentum, before they fill out any forms. This means that you'll deliver value sooner, and to more people. Keep it simple. Learn what's valuable to users. Then deliver value on their terms.

In today's healthcare the real problem isn’t a lack of tech. It’s a lack of connection. Patients want the same smooth experience they get everywhere else. But most hospitals still run on old, clunky systems. The result is friction at every step — from booking to follow-up. Here’s how we’re changing that in my hospital. We mapped the entire patient journey. Not just one app. Not just one tool. The whole experience. This is what we found: • Pre-arrival: Online booking and digital triage cut confusion and save time. • Check-in: Mobile check-in and digital forms end the paperwork shuffle. • During care: Patients get real-time results and can message their care team securely. • Follow-up: Digital discharge, reminders, and tele-reviews keep care going at home. The impact is clear. Digital appointment systems push satisfaction above 90%. No-shows drop. Clinic flow improves. Patients feel informed, prepared, and in control. But here’s the key: Tech should amplify the human touch, not replace it. A single app is not enough. You need a journey map to spot the “moments that matter.” That’s where you find the friction — and fix it. My advice to leaders: • Start with the journey, not the tool. • Cut friction with care. • Build digital pathways that boost empathy and connection. When you redesign the journey, you restore dignity to every patient. This is the future of healthcare. Simple. Human. Connected.

Not every user drop-off is a design flaw. Sometimes, it’s an emotional misstep in the journey. That’s why product managers need to map more than just flows, they need to map feelings. If your product decisions are based only on funnels and clicks, you're missing the '𝗪𝗵𝘆' behind the '𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'. That’s where Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) becomes powerful. I’ve put together a 1-page CJM Cheat Sheet to help you:  ✅ Uncover user pain and motivation across touchpoints  ✅ Spot friction and emotional drop-offs  ✅ Align product, design, and GTM teams around real user needs This isn’t just for UX folks. It’s a core skill for PMs who want to ship more human-centered products. Comment 'CJM' below if you want the higher resolution of this cheatsheet. Hope it helps 🙌

What's your approach to designing user flows? ✏️ -Understand the User and Goals: Start by gaining a deep understanding of the target users, their needs, and their goals. Conduct user research, interviews, and surveys to gather insights into their behaviors, pain points, and motivations. Define User Personas: Create user personas to represent different segments of your target audience. Personas help humanize the users and guide the design process to meet their specific needs. -Map the User Journey: Outline the entire user journey from the initial touchpoint to the final goal. This involves understanding the various stages users go through when interacting with your product and identifying potential entry and exit points. Identify Key User Tasks: Identify the primary tasks users want to accomplish within your product. Focus on the core functionality and prioritize these tasks in the user flow. Create a Flowchart: Visualize the user flow by creating a flowchart. Use arrows to show the sequence of steps users will take to complete their tasks. Consider different scenarios and decision points they might encounter. Keep it Simple and Intuitive: Aim for simplicity and clarity in the user flow. Minimize the number of steps required to achieve a task and avoid unnecessary complexity that could confuse users. Consistency across Platforms: If your product is available on multiple platforms (e.g., web, mobile), ensure a consistent user flow across all of them. Users should feel comfortable and familiar with the flow, regardless of the device they are using. Anticipate User Errors: Design the user flow with the anticipation of user errors or confusion. Provide clear error messages and guidance to help users recover quickly. User Testing and Iteration: Test the user flow with real users through usability testing sessions. Analyze the feedback and data to identify pain points and areas of improvement. Iterate and refine the user flow based on the insights gained. Collaborate with the Team: Involve stakeholders, designers, developers, and other team members in the user flow design process. Collaborative efforts lead to a more comprehensive and well-rounded user experience. Consider Edge Cases: Take into account edge cases and less common scenarios in your user flow design. This ensures that your product is accessible and usable for all users, regardless of their specific circumstances. Accessibility and Inclusivity: Design with accessibility and inclusivity in mind. Ensure that the user flow is usable by people with disabilities and diverse backgrounds.

Safety Innovation Advent: Day 4 - Create a Journey Map for a Safety Process In the lead-up to Christmas, I’m sharing an insight, activity or practical tip each day to help you innovate in health and safety. Today’s activity: Journey map a safety process First: what is journey mapping? At it's core, journey mapping is a great tool to visualise the steps, interactions, and emotions that people experience when engaging with a process. It’s commonly used in customer experience design, but it’s equally valuable in health and safety to highlight pain points, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement in your workflows. By mapping the journey, you gain insights into how well processes support frontline workers and identify opportunities to simplify or enhance them. Here's a high level overview of how to create a journey map: 1️⃣ Choose a process to map Pick a safety-related process that impacts your team, such as: Reporting a hazard | Onboarding a new worker etc. 2️⃣ Define the journey start and endpoint Clearly outline where the process begins and ends. For example, a hazard reporting journey might start when a worker notices an issue and end when the issue is resolved and communicated back to the team. 3️⃣ Break it into steps List every step involved, such as filling out forms, getting approvals, or communicating with others. Be specific; this helps identify bottlenecks or unnecessary complexity. 4️⃣ Identify touchpoints and tools Mark where people interact with forms, technology, or other systems. For example: A worker fills out a paper form (touchpoint: paper form). A supervisor enters the report into a digital system (touchpoint: software). Notifications are sent to a team for resolution (touchpoint: email). 5️⃣ Uncover the pain points: Ask yourself (and your team): Where do delays happen? Are there any confusing steps? What causes frustration or errors? Equally you can do the same for the things that are going well... 6️⃣ Visualise the map Sketch or create a visual representation of the journey, using arrows to show the flow and notes for each step. This can be as simple as a sheet of paper, a whiteboard sketch or a diagram in tools like PowerPoint or Miro - my personal favourite is to use Lucid Charts. Why this matters for safety innovation: A journey map reveals opportunities for improvement and enhances the user experience, making processes more intuitive and effective. Workers who find safety processes easy to follow are more likely to engage with them, leading to better outcomes for everyone. To practice feel free to do this alone, but to employ this approach in your workplace you MUST involve frontline workers when mapping the journey. Their firsthand insights will uncover their unique challenges and ensure the solutions work for the people they’re designed for. Stay tuned for more practical tips in this series by following my profile and the hashtags #SafetyInnovationAdvent #SafetyInnovation #SafetyTech.

💡How To Approach Product Redesign Product redesign is one of the most challenging design activities. Not only can a redesign be expensive and time-consuming, but the outcome of a redesign can be drastically different from what is expected. Here are a few things to keep in mind when planning redesign ✅ Users don't like changes. Once people learn how to use a product, every significant change you introduce, be it a visual (new look) or function change (new interaction patterns), will cause stress because users have to learn how to use an updated product. So, it's important to measure the value you bring by changing things and compare it to the effort (user learning curve). If the user value >> effort, it's okay to redesign. ✅ Explore current user journeys to figure out pain points & prioritize them. Do user journey mapping (https://lnkd.in/dNzt3NxX). It will help you identify areas where users face friction. It's not that rare when friction happens outside of primary user flows. For example, eCommerce platform users might face problems with customer support service (after-purchase experience). This means that the customer support flow should be redesigned rather than the primary user flow. ✅ Build a shared understanding of what you want to achieve and why. Learn stakeholder expectations to find the match between user and business goals. Use Jobs to be Done framework (https://lnkd.in/dZGPZ8kG) to document jobs for which users hire your product. Create a 2x2 Effort-Value matrix that will help you identify low-effort, high-value redesign activities. ✅ Avoid introducing sudden changes. The worst thing that you can do is to change the look and feel of your product overnight without notifying users about it. One interesting case is eBay's failure with the "yellow background" redesign (https://lnkd.in/dbVRyPqd). Always prefer incremental changes over a major update. ✅ Give users control over when a change affects them. For example, if you release a new look and feel of your product, keep the old theme for some time and allow the users to switch to it if they prefer to use the old theme. By doing that, you won't interrupt user workflow and help them learn the system at the pace that works for them. ✅ Highlight new things to users. If you introduce any change to the default way users interact with your product (i.e., change the location of primary functional controls), highlight it to returning users so that they can easily learn where they can find key UI elements. 🖼 How to redesign product by Taras Bakusevych (https://lnkd.in/d6RheYBr) #UI #userinterface #uidesign #productdesing #design #uxdesign #userexperience

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch

You’re losing customers if you only optimise the last step in the journey. Your conversions are low So, you decide to redesign the checkout flow No bumps, no surprises. Just click and pay. Improved checkout = more sales. Right? In theory, yes But, annoyingly your conversions don't increase Here's why 👇 The user's overall goal is to buy something (i.e the macro-journey) But, the overall goal depends on achieving smaller steps first (i.e the micro-journeys) Every small step is a risk of users leaving A dip in your conversion rate A lost sale Let's look at online clothes shopping. Micro-journeys might include: → Seeing an ad → Creating an account → Finding the right size → Assessing the quality → Reading the returns policy → Signing up for a promocode → Deciding if it will arrive in time → Enter the payment details. Checkout What if customers want to buy, but they can’t? They're excluded. They’re blocked. → No models with representative skin tones/bodies → No financing options to pay later → Website isn’t accessible → The list is endless Microjourneys, behaviours, inclusion, price, performance (+ lots more!) It all affects conversions 👇 Here’s 3 things you can start doing: 1️⃣ Research with a range of customers to understand their different needs Understand if, and who you're excluding Quant data will tell you what they’re doing, but qual data will tell you why they're doing it. 2️⃣ Think in journeys - not isolated features You’ve solved one problem, what’s the next step? 3️⃣ Track macro-conversions and micro-conversions to see the overall picture Where are the drop-offs? What do they interact with? Macro-conversion = purchasing an item Micro-conversions = newsletter sign ups, clicking ads, enter payment details, etc Of course we can’t deliver everything all at once (oh hey prioritisation 😉) But we can: → Uncover how we to help people achieve their goals → Ensure sure we’re focussing on the right thing → Remove barriers Every small step is a risk of users leaving A lost sale. Zoom in to zoom out. ---- P.S Do you track micro-conversions and macro-conversions?