Journey Mapping and Experience Mapping

Journey Mapping and Experience Mapping are powerful tools for improving your clients’ or customers’ experience. They are typically used to map customer experiences that are rich and complex, involving many parties and taking place over long periods of time.

Examples are:

The Patient’s Journey: From first symptoms to diagnosis to treatment to recovery
The Student’s Journey: From high school to the first day at college/university
The Government Grant Journey: From awareness to application to receiving funding to claims to reporting and closure
The Service Experience: Identifying needs, gaps and experiences of clients from target sectors, with different elements of a service
The Product Ownership Journey: From awareness to purchasing decision to use, to maintenance and upgrades to disposal

Journey Maps and Experience Maps allow you to see your clients’ experiences with your organization in a rich and tangible way, from their perspective, not restricted by your organization’s thinking.

In a recent project, we followed domestic Small-Medium Enterprises on their journey to becoming established as exporters to either a relatively well-understood market (the U.S.A.) or a less-well understood market (China).

Benefits

The Journey Map visualization – usually a poster – acts as a tangible reminder and conversation-generator, keeping your initiatives and your clients’ needs central to your organization’s conversations and culture
Staff involved in the process emerge with a much greater understanding of the client’s perspective and needs, of each other’s roles and contributions, and of the opportunities for change
Senior managers have a tangible summary of the key issues and aspects of your clients’ experience
The richness and openness of the process means that significant gaps in services or experiences are more easily identified than in typical surveys, interviews or requirements-gathering and client feedback approaches
The Map acts as the launch-pad for targeted service improvement initiatives

How do we create Journey Maps and Experience Maps?

We have honed our approach over a number of Mapping projects to a process that falls into 5 steps:

Background research, including stakeholder interviews
Workshop #1: With 15-20 ‘grass-roots’ stakeholders, build a draft map of the experience, identifying steps, actors, actions, and likely issues
Client interviews:
- Develop the interview script for structured interviews which are nevertheless driven by the client’s priorities
- Carry out 15-20 interviews (usually remotely), typically 30-minutes to 1 hour each
- Analyse transcripts to identify specific client experiences and issues, and to pull out direct client quotes
Workshop #2: With the same attendees as the first workshop, provide the client feedback, hear stakeholder views, and generate ‘Opportunities’
Produce the Journey Map or Experience Map and provide a final presentation

The main difference between Journey Maps and Experience Maps is that Journey Maps represent experiences and interactions that happen over time, in sequence, whereas Experience Maps are structured around services and experiences, not timelines.

What is the cost and timeframe?

Typical timeframe for a project would be 8-12 weeks, depending on project scope, the number of stakeholders involved and the number of clients interviewed
Typical costs would be around $30K, with the same dependencies

When should I do Journey Map or Experience Map research?

If you are concerned that your customers’ or clients’ experience is not great, or that there are significant gaps in your service offerings
When it’s time for a major review of your service offerings or client-facing processes
When you want to engage and energise your staff in opportunities for client-centred service improvements

Why Neo Insight?

Our approach to Journey Mapping captures the 'voice of the customer' with numerous quotes, and more insights and Opportunities than most mapping approaches.
Neo Insight has been capturing and designing for user experience at detailed to strategic levels for federal and local government, high-tech companies, educational institutions and others since 2001
We each have over 25 years’ experience in user experience design and research
We run dozens of projects every year, and study 500 or more individuals as they use web sites to accomplish their goals