Journey Map

What is this technique about

Journey maps combine storytelling and visualisation, allowing the individual/teams to understand and address the customer’s needs. Storytelling and visualisation are essential aspects of a journey map as they are effective in conveying the information in a concise, impactful and memorable way. A journey map creates a shared vision which is critical and is the main aim of creating a journey map.

Journey maps are created to support a known business goal. The goal can be an external issue, such as learning about a specific persona (a customer type) or an internal issue, such as addressing a customer experience problem. Journey maps that fail to align with a business goal will not create any insight. Some potential goals where journey mapping could be applied to are:

1. 1. Shifting a company’s perspective to being customer-centric
   2. Creating one shared organisation wide vision
   3. Assigning ownership of key touchpoints
   4. Targetting specific customer profiles

Where does it come from 

The journey mapping technique was developed in 1985 by Ron Zemke and Chip Bell. It was initially developed for a telecom company to solve customer experience issues following a residential telephone outage.

For which purposes it is used (why in your engineering teaching)

The journey map method can be used in engineering education to introduce the concept of powerful story telling. The method introduces the method of presenting facts, and ideas in a concise and impactful way. The method also strengthens customer-centric innovation perspective in students.

How to use it

A compelling journey mapping has five key high-level steps:

1. 1. Aspirations and allies – building the core team and defining the scope for mapping
   2. Internal investigation – gathering existing data and research
   3. Assumption – formulation of hypothesis on the current state of the journey
   4. External research – collecting new data for validation/invalidation of assumption
   5. Narrative visualisation – creating a visual narrative combining existing insights and new research

The figure below shows a deconstructed journey map.

A journey map can be divided Into 3 district zones.

• • Zone A – provides the constraints for the map. It contains:
    1. The persona considered (“Who”) and
    2. The scenario to be examined (“What”)
       
       
  • Zone B – provides the visualisation part of the journey map. The data required for this part is taken from the internal and external research phases. It contains:
    1. Distinct phases of the journey
    2. Actions taken by the persona
    3. Thoughts of the persona
    4. Emotional experience of the persona/user
       
       
  • Zone C – is the output or the insights section and can be modified according to the business goals. It usually contains two sections:
    1. Opportunities to focus and explore
    2. Internal ownership during the phase