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Journey Mapping 101
How to make sure your user experience is complete
Among other tens of methods you can use to build a user experience, there is Journey Mapping. In this article, you will understand what Journey Mapping is and why we use it.
What Journey Mapping is?
As the name suggests, Journey Mapping is a UX tool that lets us visualize [almost] the entire process a user goes through to accomplish a goal. Journey maps can come in different forms, but all have 5 main components:
1. Actor
The actor is the persona or the user who experiences the journey. You have to choose a character that will be your point of view. For example, for a pet adoption application, your actor could be someone who is looking to adopt a rare breed of cat.
2. Scenario and expectations
The scenario should describe the flow that the user wants to follow to accomplish a goal. Here we also set the expectations for these actions. For example, if the scenario would be to search for and adopt a pet, the expectations should be to provide an easy way to search for the information they need to complete the process.
3. [Journey] Phases
For any process, we can group certain actions into phases. For example, when we want to buy a product we can have the following phases: discover, try, buy, use, and seek support.
4. Actions, mindsets, and emotions
Each process is defined by a series of actions, mindsets, and emotions.
Actions — the steps the user takes to describe a phase. For example, for the discover phase [in buying a product] the user might do the following actions: search on Google about the product, read reviews about it, etc.
Mindsets — these are represented by the motivations and thoughts of the user from each phase.
Emotions — there are the indicators that tell us whether the user is feeling frustrated or delighted. For example, if the user couldn’t find any reviews about the product, they will feel confused.
