website user journey map template

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot's free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you're creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don't have one, I would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics at the ready.

Don't have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot's Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started. 

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you've learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I would recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so if you group too many personas into one journey, your map won't accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it's best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don't worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there's no overlap.

This is essential in creating a UX journey map because it provides insight into your customers' actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they're quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels
• Email marketing
• Third-party review sites or mentions

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand, impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding -- you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

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Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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A comprehensive guide to effective customer journey mapping

A brand's user experience shapes its target audience's entire perception of your organization. Maximize audience engagement with customer journey mapping.

Discover key challenges today's marketing teams are facing, as well as opportunities for businesses in 2024.

Incorporating customer journey mapping into your web design process helps elevate consumer engagement to drive loyalty and sales.

Many in-house teams and web designers strive to better serve users by optimizing their customer experience (CX). Considering how your customers use your platform or service helps you see your website from a user perspective, letting you shape your design to better meet their needs. To achieve this, web designers can look to customer journey mapping.

A particularly handy tool for user experience (UX) design , this process helps teams understand who their users are and how to fulfill their expectations, guiding development decisions for improved audience engagement. Learn more about customer journey mapping and how you can implement it to enhance your CX.

User journey mapping: an overview

User journey mapping, also known as customer journey mapping (CJM), maps a website visitor's experience from their perspective. Presented through a visual diagram, the customer journey map charts the user’s path as they seek information or solutions, starting at the homepage and tracking their routes across other menus and links.

To create a customer journey map, you begin by researching who users are, what they want from your site, and how positive or negative their experiences have been. 

There are two main purposes for mapping your customers’ journey.

1. Improve customer experience

This is the ultimate goal of CJM. Site navigation can be especially tricky to assess because you’re already familiar with the layout. A fresh perspective on your site often uncovers overlooked details such as navigation issues or broken links.

By conducting research on UX trends and visually mapping your results, you’ll identify any parts of your design that confuse or frustrate visitors. This process also reveals areas that work well, which you can repurpose elsewhere in the design.

2. Maintains ease-of-use as your site grows

A customer journey map can make even a simple site more straightforward to navigate. When your website or business grows, you may need to add content and features to accommodate the expansion. Implementing customer journey mapping ensures your website's fundamental flow remains intuitive and that new material and features are easily discoverable and usable.

Primary user journey map types

There are various ways to approach customer journey mapping based on the specific insights you’re seeking. The end result of each map will look similar, but the focus of each is different — which changes the information it offers. Here are three standard types of maps to get you started.

Current state

The current state map is the most common type. It evaluates your website’s present state to better understand visitors’ current experiences, helping identify improvement opportunities for its existing design.

Future state

A future state map explores a hypothetical "ideal" website, considering the visitor’s experience if every site component were optimized. This map is helpful when planning a total redesign or a specific change. When you collect user research and translate the results into your map, you can present a visual outline to your client or company for a straightforward explanation.

Persona-based

A persona-based map lays out the journey of a single designated type of user, or persona (which we will define below). This type of diagram is useful when optimizing your website for a specific sector of your audience with particular needs.

Learn best practices for integrating the workflows between design and development in this free webinar.

The 5-step customer journey mapping process

Once you’ve set clear goals for your map’s achievements, you can select the appropriate diagram type. To begin visualizing your user journey, follow this five-step process.

1. Define the map’s scope

Your map may focus on just one customer interaction or outcome, such as finding the newsletter sign-up sheet or making a payment, or it could cover the entire website’s navigation. A focused scope helps you troubleshoot a problem area or ensure an especially critical element functions properly. Alternatively, a larger-scope map provides a big-picture perspective of how the site works as a whole. Creating a comprehensive map is more complex, but high-level mapping helps comprehend the entire user experience from beginning to end.

2. Determine your user personas

A persona describes a particular type of visitor using your site. When imagining and defining these users, you can assign a name to each and include details about who they are, what they’re looking for, and why.

Focus on users who contribute most to your business goals, consulting your marketing or sales teams for insights. To define your customer personas, explore current user behavior through surveys, online reviews, and email list responsiveness.

For example, if you’re creating a website for a store that sells artisanal coffee-making tools, your personas could be:

• The gift giver. This user only knows a little about coffee but wants to select an impressive gift for someone else. They’ll need help with purchase decisions, so they might interact with an FAQ or chat feature before visiting the products page. They may also leave your site if overwhelmed by options, so it’s important to offer helpful information proactively. This will keep them engaged and more likely convert them to paying customers.
• The coffee nerd. This person is knowledgeable and always seeks the highest-quality tools, so easily accessible product details and customer reviews are important to them. To support their user experience and encourage them to purchase, ensure these elements are easily discoverable.
• The tourist. This user is on vacation and looking for a cute brick-and-mortar shop to visit. They aren't interested in your online store, but an appealing photo of your physical store with easily accessible hours and location information may convince them to come by in person.

These three types of users have very different needs and goals when visiting your website. To capture all of their business, create a map for each of them to ensure you accommodate their specific wants and circumstances.

3. Give the personas context

User context is the “when” and “how” of each persona visiting your site. A user will have a different experience loading your site on a mobile device than on a laptop. Additionally, someone in no rush may use your website differently than someone looking more urgently with a specific purpose.

Figure out when, how, and in what mindset your personas most commonly visit your site to map their experience accurately. This context has very concrete impacts on your finished design. If visitors tend to look for one specific page whenever in a hurry (like contact or location information), placing those details on the front page or prominently linking to it will smooth the user experience for those users.

Here’s an example of how to place a persona in context.

Persona: Jo is an apartment hunter in her early 20s and is still in college. She's looking for off-campus housing for herself and some roommates. The collective group values location and cost more than apartment features.

Context : Jo is in a hurry and trying to visit as many apartments as possible. She’s looking at property rental websites that clearly state apartment addresses in each listing.

Method : Jo is browsing the sites on her iPhone.

4. List persona touchpoints

Touchpoints mark when the user makes a purchase decision or interacts with your user interface (UI) . They include visitors' actions to move toward their goals and consider each associated emotion. The first touchpoint is how they reach your website — such as tapping a social media ad, clicking on a search result, or entering your URL directly.

First, list each action the visitor took and their corresponding emotional reactions. Subsequent touchpoints include instances when they navigate a menu, click a button, scroll through a gallery, or fill out a form. When you diagram the route through your site in an A-to-Z path, you can place yourself in the persona's mind to understand their reactions and choices.

A met expectation — for example, when clicking a "shop" button takes them to a product gallery — will result in a positive emotional reaction. An unmet expectation — when the “shop" link leads to an error page — will provoke an adverse reaction.

5. Map the customer journey

Illustrate the user journey by mapping these touchpoints on a visual timeline. This creates a narrative of users’ reactions across your entire service blueprint. To represent your users’ emotional states at each touchpoint, graph their correspondences like this:

The map helps you understand the customer experience as a whole. 

For example, based on the diagram above, touchpoint 3 is the largest navigation challenge on the website. The graph also shows that the user's mood eventually rebounds after the initial setback. Improving the problem element in touchpoint 3 will have the biggest impact on elevating the overall user experience.

Customer journey mapping best practices

Now that you understand the mapping process, here are some best practices to implement when charting your customer journey. 

• Set a clear objective for your map: Define your CX map’s primary goal, such as improving the purchase experience or increasing conversions for a specific product.
• Solicit customer feedback: Engage directly with customers through surveys or interviews so you can implement data-driven changes. Ask users about their journey pain points and invite both positive and negative feedback on the overall navigation.
• Specify customer journey maps for each persona: To specifically serve each customer persona, consider charting separate paths for each based on their behaviors and interests. This approach is more customer-centric, as not all user types interact with your website the same way.
• Reevaluate your map after company or website changes: As your business scales, your website must evolve — and so will your customer’s path. Review your map when making both large and small website adjustments to ensure you don’t introduce new user challenges. Navigational disruptions can frustrate visitors, causing would-be customers to leave your site and seek competitors .

Optimize your user journey map with Webflow

A user journey map is only as effective as the improvements it promotes. When redesigning your website based on insights your map provides, explore Webflow’s vast resource bank to streamline your design processes. 

Webflow offers web design support with diverse guides , tutorials , and tools for straightforward web design. Visit Webflow today to learn how its site hosting , e-commerce , and collaboration resources support enhanced user experience for better engagement.

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Customer journey map templates to visualize your buyer’s point of view.

Use FigJam’s online whiteboard to plot your ideal customer journey from first to final touchpoints.

Bring over existing journey maps from Figma

If you already have a team library of journey map components and styles inside Figma, copy and paste them into FigJam to build out new maps faster. Curated tools and styling in FigJam let you edit most layers that you bring over.

No one journey is the same

Customer journey maps illustrate a buyer’s actions, emotions, and barriers as they interact with your brand, on a diagram. With FigJam you can:

Capture your customer personas: Create and import tabular data on target audiences directly into your FigJam workspace.

Capture and document customer’s touchpoints: Out-of-the-box shapes and connectors snap right into the grid for a visual representation of your buyer’s current and future states.

Organize, test, iterate: Widgets let you add branches to map customer interactions along the different stages of a user journey.

Chime in to bring this shared vision to life

The customer journey is something everyone should feel connected to and a part of. With audio for live conversations, cursor chats, stamps and emotes, and observation mode real-time collaboration is easier than ever. With Open sessions anyone can join your FigJam space for 24 hours—no new account required.

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Start diagramming with any of these free diagramming templates. Or, if you want to see how other teams jam with FigJam, head over to our Community.

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What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes when interacting with a product, service, or company. Journey mapping should include every individual touchpoint to fully understand the buyer persona, customer needs, and potential pain points. It's an effective tool for a variety of stakeholders, including customer service, marketing, product, and design teams dedicated to creating an optimal user experience.

Click here to learn more about how to make an effective customer journey map.

How do you create a customer journey map?

Our free template helps teams map out the entire customer journey.

Start by identifying your target customer - develop a buyer persona to understand their needs, pain points, and goals. Map out their journey, making sure to include every customer touchpoint. Identify key actions within each touchpoint, and evaluate if there are opportunities to optimize that customer interaction.

Further customize your customer journey map with specific details, especially after gathering data from multiple sources (including feedback forms, customer service data, and more). Test and validate your map as needed to ensure accuracy.

What are the benefits of using a customer journey map template?

Customer journey map templates help teams better understand customer behavior at each key touchpoint. In doing so, teams can address needs, create solutions for potential pain points within the buying process, and support overall customer retention efforts.

What are some tips for creating an effective customer journey map?

As part of this mapping experience, your goal should be to create an optimal customer experience. Some other tips include:

• Use multiple sources of data (qualitative and quantitative) to accurately portray customer behavior. Review market research, social media comments, customer service queries, and more.
• Get customer feedback to understand specific thought processes and feelings throughout different parts of their journey.
• Review the map regularly and make updates as needed to reflect existing and potential customers (especially if your product or service offering has changed significantly).

Other templates you might like

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WEBSITE ESSENTIALS

How to improve your website with user journey mapping

• Jenna Romano
• Dec 8, 2022

When you create a website for your business, you want it to do more than just inform prospective customers. While your website should educate, it should also actively help visitors achieve their goals.

Your customer will visit your website with unique intentions, and you must consider how they’ll experience your site. To shape your site to create the best outcome for both you and visitors, user journey maps can tremendously benefit the design process.

In the following guide, we’ll look at what a user journey map is and the benefits of using them for your website design —plus we’ll detail the steps you need to create one.

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map, also referred to as a customer journey map, is a diagram that depicts a user’s interactions with a product over time. Typically represented by a flow chart, user journey maps are a common UX design research and planning tool.

Anyone designing a website can create journey maps to improve their site’s user experience. Typically, UX designers complete the research and planning involved in user journey mapping before they design a website for the following reasons:

It’s a strategic exercise: User journey mapping gets you thinking about who your visitors are, their goals and what they want and need from your site to accomplish them.

Helps visualize the user flow : By visualizing your visitors’ steps throughout the site, you’ll understand their thought process as they work to achieve their goal.

What are the benefits of creating a user journey map?

Designing a website with user journey mapping is a user-centered method that will help you empathize more with the user when designing your site’s content and information architecture . Because user journey mapping allows you to anticipate visitors’ behaviors, your design will result in a more positive user experience.

User journey maps will also help you with:

More confident decision-making

Journey mapping allows you to remove inefficiencies and mitigate risks as you visualize your customers’ experience.

Website optimization

Business owners can use user journey maps to influence visitors to click on CTAs and increase site conversions. It can also help them build an intuitive website structure that people feel comfortable navigating.

How to create a user journey map

With user journey mapping, you should understand who your visitors are, why they’re on your site, and what’s going to help them achieve their goals. The steps below will enable you to create a user journey map that anticipates your visitors’ needs and how they browse it:

Get an app to help you map out your user’s journey

Figure out who your ideal users are

Create user personas

Define the scope of the user journey map

List the key phases and touchpoints

Think about user goals and actions at each phase

Make an empathy map for the user journey

Anticipate problems along the journey

Think about opportunities for optimization

Collect data, review and revamp your journey maps

01. Get an app to help you map out your user’s journey

While you could use a spreadsheet or a flow chart maker to create a user journey map, it’ll take more time than using a UX tool built specifically for user journey mapping.

Use these tools to add and remove fields to your map, rearrange the steps and edit its visual appearance. Many times, you’ll have the option of starting from scratch or using a pre-made user journey template that suits your needs.

02. Figure out who your ideal users are

When starting a business, you usually have a general idea of your target audience. User journey mapping goes further to discover your niche. Typically, you’ll find your ideal segment of users at the intersection of what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about, and where there’s a growing demand for what you do.

Go ahead and fill in the blanks:

Experience: _______________________

Passion: __________________________

Demand: _________________________

What sits at the intersection between all three? That’s your ideal customer.

03. Create user personas

Once you’ve identified your ideal user, research them to better know who they are. Use your insights to create user personas that realistically communicate the people most likely to visit your site.

User personas are fictional users who represent the needs, personality and goals of a larger archetypal user group. In addition to adding a “real” name and photo to user persona profiles, you’ll fill in details related to:

Basic demographics

Professional or personal details

Motivations

Pain points

Quotes that describe what they think or how they feel

Many brands have numerous user personas. Create profiles for each of your target personas. When you’re done, choose one to start with and include them in your user journey map.

If your brand is new or yet to launch, you might not have much existing data to pull from. You can use tools to learn about your ideal user, even if they’re not your current user:

User interviews: Round up interviewees who represent potential users, and ask them questions related to your brand. Keep in mind that this information needs to help you learn more about your average or potential user, as well as what kind of online experience will encourage them to sign up.

For example,

What do you do for a living?

Why did you start your business?

Have you ever considered using a service like ours? Why?

What would convince you to work with our services? Rank your top 3 reasons.

Social media listening: Social media is a powerful tool when creating user personas, since it helps you know potential users more personally. By gathering data on what your target users talk about, you’ll understand what motivates them to engage with other brands and can apply that to your site as well.

04. Define the scope of the user journey map

The more granular your user journey maps, the more precise your web design. You can (and should) create user journey maps for the different interactions customers have with your brand and your website.

When mapping out the user journey for new visitors, focus on what their first site experience should look like as they discover more about your product. Once you have an initial interaction with a target user, build on it. With returnees, for example, think more about what long-term loyal customers want when they enter the site, such as checking out new products or rewards programs.

Break down the scope of each interaction with the following details:

User: This is a segment of our user persona. For example, “it’s a lead we targeted on Facebook.”

Goal: What is the user’s goal during this particular visit? If the user found an ad advertising a discounted course, for example, their goal is to find out more about it.

User Flow: Provide a basic summary of how you expect this interaction to go. For example, you anticipate that a user who landed on your site through a Facebook ad will want to first read more details and then purchase your product.

What follows in the user journey map will help you figure out what’s needed on your website to increase the likelihood that they will complete their purchase at the end of the visit.

05. List the key phases and touch points

By defining certain phases of the user journey, you’ll start visualizing in detail how users get to your site, why they arrived and how they’ll interact with it. Each phase outlined in your map should include the various touch points where these interactions happen.

You can also think of these phases as your goals for their visit.

Discovery: Visitors find your brand and site through a targeted Facebook ad.

Video: Visitors are brought to a landing page of your site featuring a video that introduces your brand.

Learn: Visitors read more information about what you do and what they’re going to get from your offering.

Purchase: Visitors pay for your services with a simple two-step checkout process.

Email phase: Visitors receive a “thank you” email with relevant details to get started and stay in touch.

As you fill in this part of the user journey map, consider the following questions:

What is the source of this website traffic? In other words, what lured in these users? You can optimize these off-site touch points to increase not only your quantity of traffic, but the quality of it, too.

What is the first page they’ll see on your site? For this particular user journey, does it make sense for them to enter through the home page? Or is it better to take them to a dedicated landing page where they can focus on a specific product or service?

Where should they end their journey? When considering the best (and most realistic) ending point for visitors, think about both their needs and your own goals. For example, after visitors learn about your brand, you probably want to take them straight to a purchase page with the goal of converting. However, what if a visitor isn’t ready to purchase? You can still hold on to that lead by leading them to sign up for your weekly newsletter.

06. Think about user goals and actions at each phase

Now that you’ve mapped the various phases, write out the user's specific goals for arriving at this touchpoint and what actions they’ll take to achieve it. Objective-setting will help you understand what drives your users forward and anticipate what most visitors want to happen when they get to each stage.

For example:

Discovery: If I click this ad, I’ll see if this offer is as legitimate as it seems.

Video: If I watch this video, I’ll get a high-level overview of this course.

Learn: If I read through this page, the coach will address any doubts I have about this course.

Purchase: If I click this “Buy Now” button, I’ll be directed to checkout.

Email: If I open up my email, I can get started on the course right away.

07. Make an empathy map for the user journey

A user’s emotions heavily influence their journey. If your website doesn’t elicit the right kind of emotional reaction—be it relief, joy, excitement, or something else—visitors might not end up where you want them to.

A user journey map should reflect potential shifts in the user’s mood, behavior and thought process as they continue through each phase. This information allows you to determine the best way to use or influence that emotional state to help them accomplish their goals.

An “Overall Sentiment” section can depict your user’s mood. You can describe these using text or visuals, including emojis and colors and descriptions to show how their feelings transform over the course of their journey. Additionally, a “Think & Feel” section is where you can write out quotes that represent how your users feel during each phase.

To complete this part of the map, go back to the research you did earlier. Through user interviews and social listening, you should have some helpful soundbytes. Familiarize yourself with your users’ language so you can craft feelings that sound just like them.

08. Anticipate problems along the journey

No website is flawless. Even leading brands that have been online for decades must consistently work on refining the user experience. Knowing this, add a “problems” section to your user journey map.

This section helps you anticipate where your users may encounter friction, so you can solve these issues in the future. In some cases, it could relate to your web design. For instance, a lengthy checkout form might lead users to abandon your site. In other cases, the problem could be something larger—like a lack of brand reputation.

Writing the problems that may keep users from moving to the next step, will help you critically consider and solve how to design your website around them.

09. Think about opportunities for optimization

The “Opportunities” part of a user journey map is where you’ll hypothesize ways to optimize the user experience. Treat this section like a brain dump for all the things you can do to improve the user journey.

Once you’ve got a list of ideas, you can look around for case studies and research to back up your hypotheses. Tap into what’s worked for others and load up your “Opportunities” section with data-backed ideas to improve your own users’ journey.

10. Collect data, review and revamp your journey maps

Your initial research helped you get to know your users and how you can optimize your site for them. However, your live website’s data unlocks the next phase in designing the ideal journey.

Once your site goes live, start monitoring traffic to measure your initial user journey mapping’s effectiveness. Identify the following data:

The most visited landing pages on your website

Which pages users most commonly visit next

How the subsequent flow throughout the website looks

Which areas of the site experience the greatest loss of users

You can use website analytics or visualization tools to watch your user journeys play out in real time and historically, plus see what happens when different users enter your website.

One last thing you can do at this stage is get feedback from actual users. By conducting user interviews, adding a feedback form to your site or running online surveys, you can gain real input about your site experience

Once you’ve identified the problems along your designed user journey, return to your map and update it accordingly. This real user data can help highlight new opportunities and revamp your user journey, making solid, data-backed redesign decisions for your site far into the future.

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

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There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

User journey template

Gain a complete understanding of your user's experience

About the User Journey Template

Use this collaborative template to gain a more complete understanding of your user's experience, from the phases they have to go through to the emotions that they experience at each stage. Through this exercise, you'll identify first the user’s pain points and then opportunities for improvements along the journey.

5 benefits of creating a user journey

1. User journeys can help simplify complex processes.

2. User journeys make it easier to see the "big picture" and understand how all the pieces fit together.

3. User journeys can help you identify potential pain points and areas for improvement.

4. User journeys foster creative thinking and help you craft a more intuitive and user-friendly experience.

5. User journeys can help you better understand your users and their needs.

How to create a User journey template

Detail each phase of the user journey.

What are the phases of the process? For example, if the user is going to the market, the overarching phases of the trip are getting ready to leave, traveling to the market, shopping, and returning home.

Map out the steps of each phase

What steps are involved in the above phases? For example, in order to get ready to leave, the user will likely collect any shopping bags that they have, prepare a list of items they want to buy, decide on a mode of transportation, etc.

Add what each user should feel during every phase

What should the user feel as they move through the phases? For example, if the user is preparing to leave for the market, they might be thinking, 'what is it that I'd like to make for dinner this week?' How does what the user is feeling affect their journey?

Outline any pain points for each phase

What are some issues that the user is likely to face as they move through each phase? In the market example, it's possible that they don't have enough shopping bags to carry all of the goods they would like to buy.

List out the opportunities for improvement based on the steps, feelings, and pain points the user feels

What opportunities for improvement can you identify that would make the phases or the individual steps easier for the user? Using the above market example again, how could planning be facilitated, or transport addressed? What could be simplified or streamlined so that the user has a smoother and easier experience overall?

Get started with this template right now.

Build and improve user journeys easily and collaboratively

Sticky notes & text

Add ideas, action items, and more as a sticky note or text box — then change the colors and cluster to identify patterns and new solutions.

Real-time collaboration

Add more productivity and engagement to meetings and calls with features to guide collaboration.

Add comments and tag collaborators for smooth asynchronous communication.

Anonymous voting

Gain consensus and reach alignment quickly, either in real time or asynchronously.

Find & filter

Search and filter by color, last edited by, and more to unlock patterns and enhance visual collaboration.

Mapping and diagramming

Build quick and easy visualizations of flows, maps, processes, hierarchies, journeys, and more.

User journey template frequently asked questions

What is user journey mapping, what is the difference between user story and user journey, what are the benefits of creating user journeys.

Template by Accenture Interactive NL

We connect deep human and business insights with the power of technology to define and deliver new realities. Experiences that can make lives easier, healthier, safer, and rewarding. At Accenture Interactive, we’re reimagining business through experience.

Mural is the only platform that offers both a shared workspace and training on the LUMA System™, a practical way to collaborate that anyone can learn and apply.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

The State of UX Hiring Report 2024

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UI DESIGN]

1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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Website visitor journey map + free template

When it comes to customer experience, the first interaction matters a lot. And it can happen way before the client even touches the product or service your offer. For example, when they see an online ad promoting your product.

That’s something to keep in mind when running any business, no matter whether it is online or offline. Website owners (especially those offering a SaaS product) might be tempted to think only about the technical side of their product. But they should also focus on the user experience they deliver at different stages of your user journey.

When it comes to customer experience, the first interaction matters a lot. And it can happen way before the client even touches the product or service you offer. For example, when they see an online ad promoting your product.

To understand what your company website visitors are stressed about and know what problems may exist before a visitor even faces them and come up with ideas on how to improve their experience, as well as your website and product, you can start with creating a user journey map for your website, detailing the steps your user takes and even mapping out their emotional journey.

A quality journey map can help plan out user-friendly navigation from initial research to post-purchase needs, convert a lead to a customer, and increase customer loyalty by getting a +1 brand advocate. 

To provide you with some guidance on building a customer map for a website, we’ll follow in the footsteps of Mike Wojcik, a product marketing manager looking for an IT solution for his company and his website journey. This customer journey map outlines the stages Mike goes through, focusing on Mike’s actions and emotions during the interaction with the website of a SaaS company — DemoFilm.

So, what does Mike’s journey look like? Read on to find it out, or scroll down to watch the video about it.

• 1 Before actually creating a journey map for a website
• 3.1 Phase 0: Get aware & Search
• 3.2 Phase 1: Website navigation before purchase 
• 3.3 Phase 2. Website navigation for post-purchase needs
• 4 Website visitor journey map
• 5 The video

Before actually creating a journey map for a website

Create your persona(s) first. The protagonist of this journey map is Mike Wojcik, a product marketing manager at ChartAnalysta. The company develops solutions to visualize statistical data in charts and figures.

The product marketing team is launching new features in the platform. Mike is searching for an easy-to-use solution to create product demo videos of the ChartAnalysta platform and deliver the product value to their leads and customers more efficiently.

Mike’s personal and professional goal is to grow his time-management skills. He prefers to work independently and is a perfectionist and a science geek. He isn’t quite familiar with classical video editing tools. Being a SaaS worker himself, Mike believes that a good SaaS service is worth using. Thus, he is looking for software that could do all the monkey jobs for him and one he could manage easily.

After outlining your buyer persona (learn more about how to create a buyer persona in our Step-By-Step Guide ), decide on the sections to add to the journey map. 

In the map we built for this article, we used 7 sections of UXPressia’s CJM Tool:

• Goals – to understand Mike’s goals and think of how to help him achieve those goals;
• Action points – to get a full picture of what the user does at each stage and plan out any possible user interactions with your website;
• Problems – to find out existing experience flaws;
• Ideas – to spot opportunities for future improvements;
• Process and channels – to visualize Mike’s path through different channels;
• Experience – to illustrate the user’s emotional journey;
• Image — to explain things visually:

After defining the sections, think of the stages of the map. In our example, we divided Mike’s journey into 12 stages. This website user journey map template can work to spot ideas for improving your current web pages and foresee the pitfalls in the prospective website UX. Note that UXPressia’s templates are 100% flexible. You can remove, move around, or add custom sections depending on your specific business needs.

Website visitor journey stages

Let’s look at the possible stages of a website visitor journey. Ready to learn Mike’s story?

Phase 0: Get aware & Search

Every customer journey starts with understanding a problem and an intent to find a solution. Mike comes up with the idea to use a software solution instead of hiring a video editor or urgently learning to edit videos himself after discussing the problem with his teammates at a work meeting. This is where the initial search starts. Your future website visitor can be searching through multiple channels at a time, so it’s a point to plan out your digital presence and improve the brand’s share of voice.

At the stage of the search, just like any average user, Mike visits and compares various websites, learns the basics about the solution itself, and decides on choosing a software OR gets back to his initial plan (hire a person to do video editing or do it all by himself).

Phase 1: Website navigation before purchase 

1.1 main page.

In most cases, the main website page will be the first touchpoint for your future customers. They likely have already reviewed a couple of websites and don't want to spend another 20 minutes examining each and every detail of your software. Remember that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. When visiting the website, Mike wants to get a quick answer to the question, “Can this software solve my problem?”. Optimize your main page or landing page to make it transparent and provide the value clearly and briefly.

1.2 Product tour + Subscription plan

It’s time to show what’s under the bonnet of your software and how it overcomes the competitors, but remember not to delve much into technical details. It would be great to merge this page with the pricing plan page so that users have a clear understanding of how much they pay for an actual set of features and don't need to get back and forth between two pages.

1.3 Demo request

Mike is impressed with the DemoFilm software and sees the platform with his own eyes. However, he can’t just quickly get access. Instead, he has to leave a demo request and wait for the sales manager to contact him to schedule a demo call demonstration. While a guided demo and a call with a sales representative definitely have their perks, this step can be a huge obstacle for a visitor. Think of providing an option to try your platform and schedule a meeting afterward. Integrate a live chat with a sales manager to remove this limitation. 

1. 4 Free trial

After a demo call with sales and a little help choosing the plan, Mike is ready for his free trial. He is full of enthusiasm but also a little bit nervous as he has never created a demo video before. The free period is a double-sided coin. We all love freebies, but the frustration comes when the grace period is over. Mike feels really great about using the software, but he is anxious to miss the end of the period and get withdrawn automatically. Make sure you provide clear instructions for this flow on your website. Think of adding automatic notifications or a countdown. And, of course, state it all out clearly about payment options. 

Phase 2. Website navigation for post-purchase needs

The user’s journey doesn’t end with a purchase. A SaaS user usually keeps interacting with a website, using it as an entry point to the software. If your business only provides downloadable desktop software, you can still think of your website optimization for users’ post-purchase needs, like support, education, troubleshooting, learning for the new updates, etc.

2.1 Additional service

You can think of introducing some add-ons at this stage. Tell more about the additional services or enterprise offers before visitors proceed to payment. Mike got interested in corporate onboarding and added this service to his final billing. Just like at the previous stage, make sure you deliver this information clearly.

2.2 Billing form

Your crucial milestone is almost reached, so it’s important it goes without a hitch. Design a 1-2 click payment solution, shareable payment links, and auto-billing within the same webpage. And no PDFs or additional emails to share with an accountant, please!

2.3 Platform login + Support & Intercom

After paying for the service, Mike can’t wait to proceed to his job task and create his first demo video. However, he still experiences issues with creating accounts for his teammates and has to waste his time interacting with customer success and technical support in emails, intercom messages, and on the phone. Mike also faces some trouble figuring out how to use one of the platform features. He contacts support but only receives the links to long-read articles that require a lot of time to find the answer.

A good tip here: plan out one means of communication on your website. Adding an intercom (or similar) service can improve the customer experience, even if they face some trouble with your service. Plan out some basic answers, but never underestimate the power of personal communication.

2.4 Feedback

A satisfied customer or website visitor is the best business strategy of all. Design a questionnaire to collect customer feedback and, once in a while, send push-up notifications asking the customers to share their experiences. Don’t be too pushy or include too many open questions. A happy customer will tell more in his own words if he really wants to. Respect privacy, as not everyone likes their messages to be shared in public. Design a customer review section on your website’s main page to showcase the best customer experience and grow your business liability.

Website visitor journey map

Combining all the stages, you will end up with a detailed journey map ready for further ideation process, precise website visitor tracking, and improvement of your visitors' experience. Mike's journey looks like this:

Ready to build your own website customer journey map and improve your website traffic? Take the first step using the template and a detailed customer journey experience with the help of the UXPressia template.

Prefer watching to reading? Check out our YouTube video with Mike's story.

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What is User Journey Map Template?

A User Journey Map is a visual representation of the steps a customer goes through when interacting with your product or service. It helps you understand their needs, emotions, and pain points at each stage of the journey. This template allows you to map out the stages, questions, touchpoints, and emotions of your customers, helping you identify areas for improvement and optimize their experience.

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Who is this User Journey Map Template for?

This User Journey Map template is perfect for businesses and organizations of all sizes, including startups, marketing teams, product managers, UX/UI designers, and customer success teams. It is especially useful for those who want to gain a deeper understanding of their customers' needs and pain points, and improve their overall experience with the product or service.

Why use this User Journey Map Template?

Using this User Journey Map template on Lark can provide numerous benefits for your business, such as:

Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers' needs, emotions, and pain points at each stage of their journey.

Identifying areas for improvement and optimizing the overall customer experience.

Enhancing communication and collaboration among team members by providing a visual representation of the customer journey.

Saving time and resources by utilizing a pre-built template that can be easily customized to fit your specific needs.

Leveraging Lark's powerful features, such as real-time collaboration, mobile access, and seamless integration with other essential tools, to streamline your customer journey mapping process.

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How is Lark different from all the work collaboration tools?

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Streamline your product design process with a comprehensive overview, project portfolio management, manage your projects, track progress, and align with strategy.

Free Pay Stub

Manage your employee payroll with ease and accuracy, manage your project tasks, deadlines, and deliverables effectively, operations plan, streamline your operations with a comprehensive plan.

Goal Tracking

Track your personal and professional goals with ease, training schedule, organize and manage your training sessions effectively.

Lifecycle Powerpoint

Manage your project lifecycle with ease and precision.

Grant Tracking

Track your grants, deadlines, status, and more with ease.

Conference Itinerary

Organize your conference itinerary with ease.

Subscription

Manage your subscriptions with ease and never miss a renewal date, sprint demo, track and manage your sprint demos with ease.

Consultant Timesheet

Track your consultants' work hours and billable status with ease, project scope, define your project's boundaries with clarity and precision, track and achieve your personal and professional goals with ease, project management plan, manage your project tasks, resources, and timelines effectively, manage your project estimates with ease and precision, manage your sales and purchases with a comprehensive proforma invoice, hourly weekly schedule, organize your week with precision and ease.

Request For Quote

Streamline your procurement process with a comprehensive rfq template, strategic roadmap, strategically plan your company's future with a comprehensive roadmap.

5 Whys Root Cause Analysis

Identify, analyze, and solve problems effectively, manage your volunteers and their tasks efficiently, purchase order, streamline your purchase order process with ease.

Donation Tracker

Track your donations and donors with ease, requirements document, manage your project requirements with ease and efficiency, marketing brief, plan and execute your marketing strategies effectively, monthly goals, track and manage your monthly goals effectively, track, manage, and resolve issues efficiently, travel planner.

Board Meeting Agenda

Streamline your board meetings with a comprehensive agenda.

Fundraising

Track your donors, donations, and follow-ups with ease, project retrospective, analyze your project's success and areas for improvement, conference planning, effortlessly plan and manage your conferences.

Product Launch Plan

Efficiently plan and track your product launches, manage your project backlog with ease and efficiency, sprint planning meeting, streamline your sprint planning meetings and keep track of your team's progress.

Reporting Specifications

Streamline your reporting process with a comprehensive overview, 24 hour planner, plan your day hour by hour with this 24 hour planner template, workback plan, streamline your project management with a comprehensive workback plan, template management, manage your templates effectively and efficiently, event schedule, organize and manage your events with ease, resource planning, efficiently manage your resources and tasks with a comprehensive view, construction proposal, manage your construction proposals efficiently, project kickoff, kickstart your projects with a comprehensive plan.

Organize and analyze your data with ease

Best Practices Documentation

Document and implement best practices across various business functions.

Supply Request Form

Streamline your supply requests with a simple and efficient form, legal case management spreadsheet.

Legal Case Tracking

Track and manage your legal cases efficiently, track and manage your project tasks efficiently, account plan, manage your client relationships effectively with a comprehensive account plan, employee task list, manage your team's tasks efficiently and effectively, weekly goals, track and manage your team's weekly goals with ease, daily task employee task list, streamline your daily tasks and improve productivity, deliverables, track and manage your project deliverables with ease, project pipeline, manage your projects efficiently with a clear overview, streamline your order management process with ease, track and evaluate participant performance with ease, manage your request for information (rfi) process with ease, professional development plan, track your professional growth and plan for future skills with ease, competitive analysis, analyze your competition with a comprehensive overview, google sheets calendar temp, manage your personal and professional life with a comprehensive calendar.

24 Hourly Schedule

Organize your day with a 24-hour schedule, create a new database from the time card, track your employees' work hours and tasks efficiently, case management, manage your cases efficiently and effectively, risk benefit analysis, analyze the potential benefits and risks of your business decisions, business case, streamline your business case creation process, manage your projects efficiently with a comprehensive overview, gap analysis, identify and address gaps in your business operations, workforce planning, streamline your workforce planning with a comprehensive overview of your employees, streamline your project management with clear roles and responsibilities, streamline your testing process with a comprehensive test case template.

30 60 90 Day Plan

Streamline your first 90 days in a new role with a clear plan, performance review, streamline your performance review process with a comprehensive template, strategic planning, strategically plan and track your company's goals with ease.

Software Comparison

Compare and choose the best software for your needs, interview notes, streamline your interview process with a comprehensive overview of each candidate, success plan, track your goals and measure your success with ease, risk register, manage and mitigate potential risks with a comprehensive overview, creative brief, streamline your project management with a comprehensive creative brief.

Student Progress Tracker

Track and analyze student progress with ease, construction budget template goog, track your construction budget with ease and accuracy, employee availability, manage your team's availability and shift preferences with ease, sprint backlog, manage your project tasks efficiently with a sprint backlog.

Google Docs Timeline

Track your project's progress with a comprehensive timeline, elevator pitch, craft compelling elevator pitches with ease, strategize your business goals and objectives with ease, event budget, track and manage your event expenses effectively, team charter, streamline your team's mission, roles, and norms with a comprehensive team charter, social media calendar template goog, streamline your social media posts and track engagement metrics.

Travel Itinerary Template Go

Plan your travel itinerary with ease and precision, project deliverables, work breakdown structure, streamline your project management with a detailed work breakdown structure, implementation plan, streamline your project implementation with a clear and concise plan, organize your meetings effectively with a detailed agenda.

Manage your projects, tasks, and deadlines with ease

Expense Report

Track and manage your team's expenses with ease, weekly schedule, organize your week efficiently with a clear schedule, time blocking, organize your day efficiently with time blocking.

Standard Operating Procedure

Streamline your operations with our standard operating procedure template, google docs itinerary, plan your business trips with ease and precision, root cause analysis, analyze, track, and prevent incidents with a comprehensive root cause analysis, performance improvement plan, track and manage employee performance improvement plans, market analysis, analyze your market with precision and ease, 12 week year, plan and track your goals and actions for each week of the year.

Profit And Loss

Track your company's financial performance with ease, action plan, streamline your project management with a comprehensive action plan, cost benefit analysis, analyze the cost and benefits of your projects with ease, products list, manage your product inventory with ease, organize your events, meetings, and activities with ease, cost analysis, analyze and manage your company's expenses effectively, project charter, streamline your project management with a comprehensive project charter, income statement, travel itinerary.

Streamline your project management with a comprehensive workflow

Manage your project risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies with ease, vendor list, manage your vendors efficiently and effectively, mutual action plan, streamline your business objectives and action plans with mutual action plan templates, daily schedule, organize your daily activities with a clear and concise schedule, track your expenses and savings with ease, go to market strategy, strategize your market entry with comprehensive planning, risk assessment, manage and mitigate risks effectively with a comprehensive overview, raci matrix, workback schedule, streamline your project management with a detailed workback schedule, action items, track and manage your team's action items effectively.

Business Plan Temp

Craft a comprehensive business plan with ease.

Proof Of Concept

Track and manage your innovative projects with ease, free business plan, streamline your business planning process with a comprehensive template, timeline template go, track your project's progress from start to finish, smart goals, track and achieve your goals with precision and clarity, process mapping, streamline your project process with a clear roadmap, gantt chart template goog, manage your project timelines and tasks efficiently, vacation planning, staff roster, manage your team's information and hours with ease.

Sales Tracker

Track your sales, analyze trends, and maximize profits.

Uat Sign Off

Track and manage your user acceptance testing (uat) with ease.

Technical Debt Register

Track, manage, and resolve technical debts efficiently, marketing calendar, plan and track your marketing campaigns with ease, sample rollout plan, streamline your product rollout with a comprehensive plan, photo directory, create a comprehensive photo directory for your organization, process flow chart, visualize and streamline your sales process, investment agreement, track and manage your investment agreements with ease.

College Schedule

Organize your college life with a comprehensive schedule, meeting tracker, track your meetings, attendees, and action items with ease, business travel itinerary, organize your business travel details in one place, plumbers invoice, manage your plumbing services invoices with ease.

Employee Daily Activity Report

Track and manage your team's daily activities efficiently, work breakdown, streamline your project management with a comprehensive work breakdown.

Html Report

Create comprehensive html reports with ease, plan and manage your events with ease, end of day report, track your team's daily progress with ease, cna report sheet, track and manage patient care with ease, rank tracker report, track your keywords and their performance across different search engines.

Classroom Seating Chart Whiteboard

Organize your classroom seating with ease and efficiency, delegation of authority matrix, streamline your task delegation and authority levels with ease, executive project status report, track your projects' progress, budget, risks, and more in one place, decision log, track and manage your team's decisions with ease, simple payment agreement, manage your payment agreements with ease and precision, medical chart, manage your patient's medical records efficiently, level 10 meeting, streamline your team meetings with the level 10 meeting template, capability matrix, track and manage your team's skills and certifications, benchmark analysis, analyze your competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, content plan, streamline your content planning and execution with ease, seo competitor analysis, analyze your competitors' seo strategies and improve your own.

Campaign Brief

Streamline your marketing campaigns with a comprehensive brief.

Streamline your deal management process with a comprehensive overview

24 hours schedule, organize your day efficiently with a 24-hour schedule, weekly planner, organize your tasks and deadlines with a weekly planner, software change log, track and manage software changes efficiently, construction gantt chart, track your construction project progress with a gantt chart, termination of contract letter, manage your contract terminations effectively and efficiently, manage your projects, tasks, and deadlines efficiently, daily to do list, organize your day efficiently with a comprehensive to-do list, seo project management, manage your seo tasks efficiently and effectively, project management decision log, track and manage your project decisions with ease, content management, manage your content effectively across different platforms, organize your legal memos with ease.

Marriage Contract

Simplify your marriage contract creation process.

Approval Matrix Whiteboard

Streamline your approval process with the approval matrix whiteboard template, company contact list, organize and manage your company's contacts with ease, data analysis report, analyze and present your data effectively.

Shift Schedule

Manage your team's shifts efficiently and effectively, project roadmap, track your project's progress with a comprehensive roadmap, commission sheet, track and manage your sales team's performance with ease, report requirements, streamline your report creation process with this comprehensive template, weekly report, track your team's weekly progress with ease.

Camp Schedule

Organize your camp activities with ease and precision, policy memo, streamline your policy memo creation and management, leader standard work, streamline your leadership tasks and priorities, employee schedule, streamline your employee scheduling process, it incident report, track, manage, and resolve it incidents effectively.

User Acceptance Testing Checklist

Streamline your user acceptance testing (uat) process with this comprehensive checklist, 5050 partnership agreement, create fair and balanced partnership agreements, contractor invoice, manage your contractor invoices with ease and efficiency, plan of record, track your project tasks, deadlines, and progress with ease, governance plan, streamline your governance plan with a comprehensive overview of tasks, roles, and deadlines, meeting minutes, track your meetings, attendees, agendas, and action items with ease, urgent important matrix, prioritize your tasks effectively with the urgent important matrix template, customer success plan, track and manage your customer success journey, business development plan, strategize your business growth with a comprehensive plan, out of office coverage plan, manage your team's leaves and ensure smooth task delegation with our out of office coverage plan template, staffing matrix, manage your staffing needs efficiently and effectively, college pros and cons list, compare and contrast different colleges with ease.

75 Hard Wellness Challenge

Track your daily wellness activities and progress with ease, social media posting schedule, schedule and manage your social media posts effectively, test report, track and manage your software testing process, scheduling matrix, streamline your tasks and manage your team efficiently, user story mapping, map your user stories, track progress, and manage tasks with ease.

Monthly Planner

Organize your work and personal life with a monthly planner, investigation report, track and manage your investigations with ease, budget report, track your budget, income, expenses, and net profit/loss with ease, change of shift report, streamline your shift changes with a comprehensive report, request form, streamline your request management process with a comprehensive request form, workshop agenda, streamline your workshop planning with a comprehensive agenda.

For Dummies Book

Streamline your book writing process with a structured approach, organizational chart, visualize your company's hierarchy with our organizational chart template, llc annual meeting minutes, streamline your annual meetings with our llc annual meeting minutes template, pto calendar, manage your team's time off with a comprehensive pto calendar, addendum to a contract, track and manage your contract amendments with ease, minutes of meeting mom, streamline your meetings and keep track of decisions with the minutes of meeting (mom) template.

Identify the root cause of problems and devise effective solutions

Profit and loss statement, streamline your standard operating procedures with this comprehensive sop template, website migration project plan, streamline your website migration process with a comprehensive project plan, inventory report, action register, trip report, track your business trips, objectives, expenses, and insights, event brief, kinship diagram whiteboard, visualize and understand your family tree with ease, alignment chart, align your team's goals and strategies with clear execution steps, end of day cash register report, track your daily sales and cash register status with ease.

Communication Matrix Report

Streamline your project communication with a comprehensive matrix, streamline your standard operating procedures with this sop template, meeting agenda, streamline your meetings with a comprehensive agenda.

Organize your tasks efficiently with a clear view of priorities and deadlines

Project timeline, manage your project timeline efficiently and effectively.

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