Whether you realize it or not, you’ve already designed an experience for your audience. If you didn’t plan for it, you may have some unintentional interactions. Those accidental experiences might end up being good, but could also be chaotic, confusing, frustrating… The more complex the situation, the riskier it is to leave it to chance. So how do you create a cohesive and intentional experience when you have a lengthy process, a lot of steps, and many people involved?
An experience map is a representation of how people interact with your organization, brand, product, or service. During the process, you methodically think through and plot key touchpoints, activities, exchanges, and sentiments of a person or audience. As you create your map, it helps you break down and visualize complex interactions.
Experience mapping session with United Way of Central Indiana
The purpose of your map guides the information you will highlight. For example, if your goal is to connect with your audience online, your map may focus primarily on digital experiences. If your goal is to build a new process for serving customers, you would map both the customer journey and the internal employee processes which support that journey. Let’s talk about a few different types of maps.
Types of Maps
Journey maps plot the activities of a person, like a customer, a patient, a donor, a member, or a volunteer—anyone your organization serves. These are time or event based, showing the progression as a person moves through phases or steps in an experience. To create your map, you need a comprehensive list of the experiences you create for your audience, as well as an understanding of the steps they take outside of your control, which can be gleaned through interviews, surveys, observation, or other forms of empathy research.
Journey maps can be focused on one specific part of an experience. For example, a sales or buying journey might cover what happens for a person as they research, consider, and make a purchase, but not dive into how they interact with the product or service after they are a customer. In some cases, you may be looking at the full life cycle of a customer, in which case, your map will be much longer.
Empathy maps focus on what a person is thinking, feeling, or doing as they experience your product or service. Again, research is important to help you connect actual insights from your audience to your map. Interviews, surveys, or more immersive methods like conducting a diary or field study can give you access to your audience perspective.
An empathy map can be simple, following a template that almost looks like a persona, or, they can be combined with a journey map to show the thoughts, emotions, and actions of the person in conjunction with the phases or steps of a process.
Service blueprints illuminate the internal procedures that support an audience experience. To build one, you’ll need to have all roles involved present to accurately capture what is happening at various stages.
In the service design industry, these types of maps often refer to activities as taking place on the front stage or back stage. Front stage activities are touchpoints, or direct interactions your audience has with your organization. These can be anything from a letter sent via snail mail, to an automated digital thank you note, to an in-person exchange at an event. Things happening back stage are internal processes, technology, or functions that are often invisible to the person served, though they might be essential to the experience.
Another element to consider, especially if you are improving an existing experience, is that it may be helpful to map both the current experience and the aspirational or ideal experience. This will showcase the gaps that exist, and help you on your path to designing your new experience.
After working with all kinds of processes and templates, I have often found a mashup of journey, empathy, and service blueprints gives the most complete picture of a complex service or experience. The process can be a bit more challenging because you have much more data to make sense of. But in my opinion, the result is worth the effort. Complex processes and experiences deserve complex inquiry.
About that Magic Part…
Everyone on the Same Map. Er, Page. Your map is essentially an artifact that can align people around process and help your team create consistently great experiences for others. For teams who have struggled with clarity on their role, the role others play, or how what they do connects to overall organizational vision, this process can be illuminating. Many teams print a large copy of their map and hang it in a communal space for collaboration and discussion.
Maps are Amazing Insight Machines. The process of experience mapping may lead you to uncover all sorts of insights and opportunities. One organization I worked with realized their internal team structure wasn’t set up to support good handoffs between teams. There was a huge opportunity to create a better customer experience by improving collaboration between sales and production. With another, the process showed the complexity of managing projects, creating content, and keeping distributed teams in the know about marketing efforts, which ultimately helped them advocate for more resources for internal communications. Recently, a group I worked with initially planned to create a new volunteer experience, but they ended up realizing there were a lot of opportunities to improve their team’s processes as well.
I’ve never seen anyone go through the process of experience mapping without having at least one major a-ha or fundamental shift in how they view their audiences, their organization, or both.
A Lot of Bang for Your Buck. Depending on the situation, mapping can take more or less time, but you can create a map pretty quickly. In just a few hours, your team can have more clarity, feel energized, and ready to tackle needed changes. Of course there are other considerations, like time or budget for research prior to mapping, but the point remains: a few hours spent experience mapping can easily be your most strategic, productive hours spent all year.
Mapping Pitfalls
After facilitating many mapping sessions, these are some common issues I’ve seen come up for people:
Mapping assumptions like they’re the gospel. One of the biggest problems I’ve seen with mapping is to assume you already know everything about your audience and their experience. If you’re content to stick with your assumptions, the map process will not be transformational, or even that helpful. Your map data should involve some connection to actual research that allows you to step into the shoes of those you serve and understand their perspective on your organization.
Not including the right people. The more complex the process or experience, the more people you may need from your team to complete your map. During a mapping process, I often find people surprised at some of the steps one of their peers puts into an experience. When teams get siloed, they often simply can’t see the role others play. And because people often iterate on processes and add steps as they go, what they do may seem automatic or even trivial to them. They may never train others or update process documents to reflect what is happening. Talking through an internal experience with a cross-functional group is pretty much always eye-opening for teams.
Getting hung up on what’s not working. Sometimes it’s best to plan on multiple mapping sessions, starting with just mapping what you do now. As you map what’s happening, you will naturally note pain points. It’s human nature. It’s easy to get side-tracked on solving that problem right then and there. Yet ideation needs to be positive and generative, and when you are digging into what doesn’t work, it’s just not the best mindset for coming up with creative ideas. Note those pain points, and set another session (or sessions) for solving and actual experience design.
Being intimidated about doing it wrong. The language and terms of experience mapping can feel a little wonky, and makes people worry they aren’t doing it right. It seems everyone has their own specific language and process they like to use for creating experience maps. Don’t let the language hang you up. As long as everyone in your group understands the purpose of your map, and you have clear, shared labels, you can make a useful map. The important thing is illuminating insights about the experience, not calling everything by the right names and having a perfect process.
Mapping, magical though it may be, can often be messy. That’s okay. If you approach it armed with some research and a sense of openness, you’re bound to discover insights and opportunities that can be transformational for your organization.
RELATED RESOURCES
Adaptive Path’s 4 Step Mapping Process (requires email to download)
This is Service Design Thinking Journey Template
Simple Empathy Map Template