Journey Mapping To Define Your Strategic Vision

Transforming your business can be challenging if you have not set your strategic vision. Arteri helps government organisations and businesses explore and define their strategic direction through various methods including current and future-state journey mapping. Arteri’s approach helps you target the changing expectations of customer and citizen - and transform your business to meet those needs.

Journey maps look at the customer experience from the outside-in view of the service. They identifies the hurdles and positives individuals face in completing their journey.

What are current and future-state journey maps?

NNGroup defines current- and future-state journey maps as:

Current-state journey maps visualise the experience customers have when attempting to accomplish a goal with your product or company as it exists today.

Future-state journey maps visualise the best case, ideal-state journey for an existing product or a journey for a product that doesn’t exist yet.

We use journey maps to understand the user experience through a process. Processes can be different – such as the process a customer experiences with a business, for example: buying a shirt through an online retailer.

In developing a current-state journey map, you can articulate user pain points and their needs, disconnected steps and how the customer, user or stakeholder feels (emotionally) at any point. And, using a future-state journey map, you can articulate how you want your product or service to serve your customers, the customer’s emotional experience in using your product or service, and how it solves their pain points.

Both maps can help you describe where you are and where you want to go. You can visually show others where changes can improve the user or customer experience – in tangible and intangible ways.

You can also start to unpack where your organisation needs to make improvements inside the business from a tools, process, information & data and people perspective.

Different types of journeys

Journey maps can be used to map a great number of events.

The macro journey maps are life events. These journey maps are important because they tell us about the events people go through in life – such as birth, going to school, working, natural disasters (flood, drought), or buying property.

Focussing in on individuals, customer experience journey maps can tell you how an individual interacts with your product. This could be through onboarding to a new platform or committing to a sale. User experience journey maps can tell you about how staff interact with your business, such as onboarding into a new role.

Journey maps don’t need to focus on your business or your product, but how you fit into a broader individual experience – such as how an exporter exports a product out of Australia.

Journey maps identify the high-level phrases that individuals go through, and then the steps to complete the phrases. Journey maps look at the experience from the outside and identifies the hurdles individuals face in completing the journey. They also consider the emotional side of the experience and articulate why negative experiences happen.

How to build a current-state journey map

The following steps will help you understand how to build a current-state journey map. Future-state journey maps are imaginative and can be created singularly or collective and with or without real-life users and customers involved. We recommend you read our article on ‘co-design’ [FM1] to consider developing your journey maps together with your stakeholders.

Find your participants and record their experience

Identify the types of people who use your service and product. Identify the types of people you want to use your service or product. Both types of people are important because they may have different experiences of your product or service.

With a confirmed list of participants, you can record their experiences. Using design research methods (such as interviews, workshops, diary studies or observational studies), collect the experiences of your participants.

Synthesise the experiences and create the visual representation

With the participant data, you now need to consolidate it to a experience narrative. What is the most common experience? Which outlier data is worth noting or including?

The journey map itself is a visual representation of the data. This artefact is the outcome of journey mapping, and will help you get buy-in and convince stakeholders that change is (or isn’t) needed for current or new product or service.

Read next

If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve got a hold on the basics of journey mapping. You can learn more by reading:

• Nielsen Norman Group discusses journey mapping approaches.

• How to develop a customer journey map by Atlassian.

Or, if you’re a visual learner, watch:

• Customer journey mapping workshop by PlaybookUX 

Get In Contact

Arteri is built on the foundation that design thinking and co-design is the future for business and organisations. Our experts can build journey maps for you or guide you through the process. Reach out today to understand how we can help https://www.arteri.com.au/contact.