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Core skills: the UX process · Advanced beginner · Lesson 21 of 99 · 2 min video, then about 2 hours of practice
Journey mapping
After this you can map a user's end-to-end experience across stages and channels, and use it to locate where the real problem sits.
Why it matters
A journey map places actions, thoughts and emotions across the stages of an experience, including the parts that happen outside your product. Its value is diagnostic: it shows that the painful moment is often before or after the screens you were asked to redesign. Build it from research data, not from a workshop of assumptions; an evidence-free journey map is just a group opinion in a nice format. Trap: mapping a happy path only. The drop-offs are the point.
How to use this resource
Two minutes from Nielsen Norman Group on what a journey map is made of: actor, scenario, phases, actions, thoughts, emotions and opportunities. Old, and entirely unaffected by age. Watch it, then build one: the artifact is the learning.