Experience Map

It is a strategic tool for capturing and presenting key insights into the user/customer (or potential user/customer) interactions with a product, a service or an ecosystem in a timeline. This tool highlights the user’s needs, actions and emotions before; during and after a particular interaction. The main aim is to identify and visualize the different key moments that constitute the user experience in relation to existing services/products. This tool is ideally based on real-life information about your user/customer and is complementary to the Persona tool, that is, it is a way of putting your Persona in action.

This tool will allow you to:

• Structure and make sense of all the information you have about your user or potential user/customer
• Be more empathetic as you gain a better understanding of your users/costumer’s needs, motivations and behaviours.
• Identify opportunities for conceiving new products or services

This is a very useful tool for the ideation phase, after having gathered information about your user/customer or potential user/costumer’s behaviours, aspirations and experiences.

Ideally, you should work on the creation of the experience map with a team.

Preparation: in between 2 to 4 hours

Development: in between 2 to 4 hours

You will need at least:

• Large paper sheets
• Blank paper cards or post-its
• Markers

STEP 01: Identify your user’s profile and his/her purpose/aims

STEP 02: Identify the different stages of the user’s journey. The experience map always starts before the beginning of the direct interaction with the product or service in question and goes beyond this direct interaction. Identify the different touchpoints or points of interaction between the user/customer and any agent or artefact of your system. Identify the channels or mediums of interactions with users/costumes (print, web, mobile, phone call, store…)

STEP 03: For each stage describe 3 levels of information: what the user is doing (action), what the user is thinking (thoughts) and how the user is feeling (feelings)

STEP 04: Produce a rough map and share it with your team. With the help of sticky-notes group the main ideas by colour and try to fill in each one of the stages that you identified previously.

STEP 05: Identify the problems or pain-points in the user’s journey. This will allow you to highlight areas of opportunities for improvement where there is:

• A gap between what the user is expecting and the actual experience
• A barrier to an interaction that should occur for the journey to continue
• Negative emotions

STEP 06: Draw and tell a coherent story with a clear start, development and end.

Try to use information from real life experiences and not suppositions or vague ideas Stay tuned with your user/customer. Keep asking yourself:

• What is s/he doing?
• What does hear from other people about the service or product?
• How is s/he feeling?
• What is s/he looking for?
• What are his/her fears or frustrations about using the service or product?

Interviews, Observation, Persona

Adaptive path’s guide to Experience mapping

Lallemand, C. & Gronier, G. (2016). Méthodes de design UX. Eyrolles