Adventures in Journey Mapping

HOW I FOUND JOURNEY MAPPING...

About 4 years ago, I was working on a large redesign of Ally’s corporate website. We started the project with bunch of stakeholder interviews, which was great. It got us all in the right headspace and gave us a good understanding of what each stakeholder's individual business goals were. We also did some persona research, which created a clear picture of who was accessing the space and how they were using the functionality available. The only obstacle to success was convincing our business partners that there was a need for change.

This particular group of business partners was always hard to sway. Their past experience with different teams, tainted their view of the value of UX.

We needed a way to introduce customer issues in a way that would impact their overall perception of the problem. That's where journey mapping came in.

I stumbled upon journey mapping through some of my daily article newsletters. It seemed like the perfect way to start the conversation about change and opportunities without showing a fully formed solution. Our business partners needed to understand the need for change through the customer's perspective, not our opinion.

 

What makes journey mapping amazing?

Journey mapping allows you to visualize the end to end customer experience across multiple channels. It's a great way to pinpoint gaps, empathize, identify opportunities and share knowledge with peers.

 

CREATING A JOURNEY MAP

To create a successful journey map you have to have 4 things...

  1. Personas
    You have to clearly identify the customer who's shoes you will step into when creating the journey map. Who will experience what you are putting out into the world? What are their goals? How do they behave? What motivates them? What gives them pause? **Note: Personas aren't something you can create out of thin air based on your perception of who your customer is. Data and qualitative feedback should back the personas you choose and reinforce the choices you make in your journey map. 

  2. A Storyline
    The storyline is what really brings the persona to life. It fills in all the gaps that data leaves behind. It makes the personas more human and relatable.

    • Start with the background. What's motivating the customer to act in the way that they are?

    • Create a path. Based on data the data you have, what steps is the user most likely to take to complete the task at hand? What would they get hung up on? What pitfalls would they encounter? Will the previously shaped character traits effect how they do things?

    • Elaborate on each step in the path to create the story. Make your storyline believable and flow. Too many edge cases and all of a sudden you’ve created a flow chart and not a journey.

  3. Emotion & Empathy
    Each storyline that you create should clearly communicate the emotional state of the customer as they go through various parts of the experience. It's best to integrate feedback directly from customers into this portion of the map. Quotes from testing or reviews help back up opportunity proposals and create a more dynamic and believable storyline. Mapping emotions like a line chart helps you easily see where the rifts in the experience are. The rifts highlight the opportunities for improvement, the final pillar.

  4. Opportunities
    Identifying opportunities is the most important part of journey mapping. It's the point where you look at each step of the journey and identify ways that the experience could be improved. Focus should go to the least satisfying parts of the journey for the customer. These are easy to identify once you've gone through the empathy mapping activity because they'll be marked by negative emotion identifiers.

 

Things to remember...

  • No two journey maps are alike. Make it your own based on your goals and what you're trying to communicate to your audience. It can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be.

  • Have fun! Journey mapping is supposed to be a learning and exploratory exercise. Get creative with your opportunities.

  • Journey mapping is a group activity. Make sure everyone is involved and feels like they are a part of the creation of the map. It helps keep everyone on the same page and points you towards a common goal.

  • Share your journey map with as many people as possible. They are meant to be shared and iterated on as things in the journey change.

 

My first journey

This is one of the journey maps that I developed for Journalists entering the Ally Corporate website. For this specific project we didn’t have time to journey map with stakeholders and many had never really thought about the different personas entering the site. Seeing this artifact helped stakeholders understand why we were proposing specific layouts, opportunities and UX options at each point in the users flow.

This is a pretty standard journey map, but it’s very effective in communicating the gaps in the experience and the need for improvement. You can’t help but pay attention to a frowny face.

 

Invest Journeys

Ally, at one point, acquired Tradeking, a well-known brokerage site, to act as it's brokerage arm of the business. The addition to the product suite, although needed, caused some growing pains at Ally. Somehow we needed to figure out how to support this whole new customer set, with a totally different mental model than our regular banking customers. 

View Case Study

 

Mortgage SERVICING JourneYs

One day Ally decided they wanted to be in the mortgage lending business. Little did they know how difficult being in the business was and what work they would need to do on the customer experience side to reach user expectations.

These journeys reflect our aspirational savers going through the process of opening an account and making their first payments.

 

IRA JOURNEYs

Opening an IRA is a ridiculous and complex process which makes it a perfect candidate for journey mapping. This was some of the most mind bending journey mapping I’ve ever done. You don’t think your bank is behind on the times until you try to move an IRA from one institution to another. If you’ve ever done it, I applaud you. If you haven’t, just trust me, it’s a very arduous process that needs revamping.

Anyways, total we created around 10 maps and scenarios and needed to communicate them in as few slides as possible for an executive discussion. Here’s where we landed…

 

Happy journey mapping :)

If you have any questions or feedback for me please feel free to reach out.