User Journey & Journey Map
User Journey & Journey Map in Detail
From interview to clear map: touchpoints, emotions, and pain points along the entire user experience.
End-to-End Perspective
A journey map does not show just a single screen, but the entire workflow across multiple touchpoints – from trigger to completion.
Make the Emotional Curve Visible
Each phase is evaluated by the emotional state of the user. This creates clear highs and lows that can be targeted for optimization.
Multiple Touchpoints in One Picture
A process can be distributed across web portals, email, phone, and internal tools. The journey map makes these media discontinuities visible.
Derive Design Opportunities
Low points in the journey are not only documented, but translated into concrete improvement opportunities – the direct basis for user flows.
Distinction: User Journey vs. User Flow
These terms are often confused, but they are complementary:
- User Journey / Journey Map
- Shows the entire process from the user’s perspective across all touchpoints and channels. Focus on phases, emotions, pain points, and opportunities.
- User Flow
- Models the concrete interaction with the software as a sequence diagram. Focus on screens, decisions, and system feedback.
A typical sequence: interviews provide the data for the journey map, from which targeted user flows are derived.
Example: Expense Report Across Multiple Touchpoints
A sales manager submits an expense report after a business trip. The process is distributed across several systems and steps:
| Phase | Touchpoint | User Action | Emotion | Pain Point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Travel report / memory | Trip ends, expense report due | neutral | Time pressure after return |
| Login | Web portal | Logging into expense portal | slightly annoyed | Additional login step |
| Capture receipts | Web portal (form) | Entering project number and per-diem for each receipt | strongly frustrated | Project number not prefilled, redundant entry |
| Context switch | Outlook | Searching for project number | annoyed | Media discontinuity between portal and email |
| Completion | Web portal | Submitting form despite frustration | relieved but strained | High drop-off impulse |
Insight from the Journey Map
The emotional low points concentrate on the receipt-entry phase. The main causes are:
- Manual re-entry of the project number for each receipt
- Necessary context switch to the email client
- Missing prefilling of known data
Opportunity: Introduce batch processing for receipts or automatic reuse of the project number from previous entries.
FAQ: User Journey & Journey Map
When is a journey map useful?
A journey map is worthwhile whenever a process involves multiple touchpoints, systems, or stakeholders. It is especially valuable for internal enterprise software processes where media discontinuities and coordination effort are often underestimated.
How is a journey map created?
The foundation is qualitative methods such as remote interviews or contextual inquiry. From these, phases, actions, touchpoints, emotions, and pain points are extracted and visualized in a clear map.
What is the difference from a customer journey?
The customer journey often looks at the entire purchasing and relationship lifecycle with a company. The user journey focuses on the concrete task a user solves with a software or service.
How does the journey map feed into development?
It serves as a shared reference for product owners, designers, and developers. Concrete user flows, user stories, and prioritizations are derived from the identified low points.
Used In
This tool is part of the following consulting offer.