Journey Mapping

Brief

This was an excellent course for augmenting my knowledge of journey mapping and experience mapping activitites. Christian Briggs led most of the course content and discussions with practioners. Hearing Matt Snyder talk about the strategic value of journey mapping activities reinforced my convictions that these activities make the process more holistic. Among the instructors were Kai Wang, Sr. Product Designer. His example of car buying journey hit home for me, since I spent two years on the dealership side and year at a major OEM.

Techniques Learned

Christian, Matt, and Kai provided a wealth of knowledge in this course. Among the topics and techniques explored were:

• An understanding of the three most common types of journey maps and why they work so well.
• An understanding of three common journey mapping processes.
• How to gather data for journey mapping.
• How to create a perspective grid to analyze gathered data.
• How to create an experience map, customer journey map and service blueprint.
• How to set up and run a journey mapping workshop.

Applying Knowledge

I’m interested in adapting some of my old templates for use in Figma–for creation of interactive journey maps. Megan Brown recently wrote about the interactive features enabling interactivity of the shared maps, with reference to Figma and Sketch. And since RunwayML just released Gen 3, I’ll be excited to make AI generated persona’s a bit more lifelike.

Thinking Futures

On the teams I’ve worked, these journey maps were a mainstay of conversation. Much like personas, they helped to think about the products from the outside-in. And that’s where good UX and HCD reside: thinking outside our designerly perspective by understanding people and their systems more deeply.