6 ½ Journey Mapping Tips

5 min readMay 26, 2020

We all know the value Journey Maps can bring to your organization, especially if they haven’t visualized their user journey before. Here are my personal top tips when creating one.

1. Have your personas firmly in place

This one may feel a bit elementary but it is extremely important and often overlooked. Understanding and visualizing your users is key for effective Journey Mapping, they are the ones going on the Journey after all.

By firmly in place I mean have team, company, leadership, stakeholder, etc. buy-in. We don’t a haze surrounding shifting personas while mapping out a Journey.

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2. Set internal expectations

Journey maps are incredibly insightful, fun, and engaging. They can drum up a ton of excitement and highlight big opportunities. However, they also are not a magic spell to solve all problems.

Setting appropriate expectations early on helps your team/company know what to expect.

Explain they are never 100% accurate, not all users will follow that same linear flow.

Explain they are a single tool, part of a larger toolset that can help increase user-centricity, better customer experience, and all those other buzzwords.

Also, explain some of the great ways they can be used. Identifying new opportunities, prioritizing work or new features, highlighting areas that need the most attention, etc.

3. Be inclusive when building

This is a big one. Make sure to include a diverse group in your workshop. Include different levels within the organization, different teams, different perspectives, and people who may not usually work together.

This does a lot of things.

It’s simply faster. More perspective means you can fill in all the defined areas of your map faster, with proper facilitation of course.

It creates shared ownership and excitement. We want everyone to reference the Journey Map right?

Makes it fun and breaks down silos. Even if your organization doesn’t have silos it probably has a silo foundation or at least a chalk outline of one. Bringing people together from all parts of the company can spark new collaboration avenues and excitement.

All of this helps you to arrive at a stronger first iteration Journey Map.

4. Validate

This one may seem obvious but validate, validate, validate.

A Journey Map without user validation is a lovely list of assumptions. Excitement can overrun and cause a map to be considered “done” before it is out of its infancy. If you feel this is starting to happen or feel pressured to push out the map too early try making a quick list of why validation is essential. Include reference and links to research highlighting this as a pitfall to avoid.

Testing your assumptions isn’t just essential, it can be eye-opening and incredibly insightful. If your assumptions are spot on that is awesome. If they are wildly off that is also awesome because you just highlighted a huge area for improvement.

5. Visualize emotions

This can feel like one that isn’t that important. It can feel like fluff. It isn’t.

The simple visual of an emotion line through the Journey can be the most important part. People often gravitate to it, especially if the emotional lows and highs are quite dramatic.

With just a passing glance people can immediately see what stages can be dramatically improved.

6. Be inclusive when gathering feedback

Remember when we talked about inclusivity in tip 3? It’s back, this time when you are almost ready to share with the full organization but need a final round of feedback first.

Include as many members of leadership as you can. While being appropriate and respectful of their time of course. If a quick chat isn’t possible try recording a quick video walking through the map and explaining what type of feedback you are looking for. Make sure you also give them an easy way to provide that feedback.

Include those who participated and helped along the way. If you followed tip 3 and had a diverse group in your workshops you’ll cover a lot of your organization here. Be respectful of their time too, they are busy and might not have the time but will appreciate the opportunity. Shared ownership remember!

Include a handful of people who haven’t seen it and/or have no idea what Journey Mapping is. If they understand and can follow it give yourself a cookie. Then share that cookie with your awesome team who helped along the way.