Journey Mapping: How I Improve UX with Customer Journey Maps

Journey mapping bridges the gap between your “imagined” user experience and the chaotic reality of product usage.

As a UX researcher, it’s easy to feel like I already know everything about users. But with user journey maps, I keep discovering new pain points in the product experience that I could never foresee.

So I’m going to break down exactly what journey mapping is, the components you can’t ignore, and the specific process I use to improve user engagement with them.

What’s journey mapping?

A journey map is a visual representation of how a user goes through your product in order to accomplish a goal. It’s a one-page document that turns actions, thoughts, and emotions into a user story.

In UX design, a user journey map forces you to look at your product from your customer’s perspective. It reveals the gaps between what you think happens and what actually happens. And as a result, it lets you find opportunities for improvements in the product experience.

What a customer journey map is not

It’s easy to confuse journey mapping with other UX deliverables, so let’s be clear about what a journey map isn’t:

• User flow: User flows are diagrams of the technical steps a user takes (e.g., click button A -> see screen B). Journey maps show why users feel frustrated, confused, or motivated.
• Sales funnel: Funnels are linear and company-centric (initial awareness -> conversion). Journey maps might not be linear (e.g., a user encounters themselves going back and forth between pages), and they only focus on the user’s point of view.
• Service blueprint: A service blueprint maps the backend. It tracks internal processes, employee actions, API triggers, and database calls required to support the experience. Meanwhile, journey maps put you in your customer’s shoes.

Unlike these, the customer journey map highlights the user’s emotions and thoughts when doing a job-to-be-done (JTBD). It shows the clicks but also the user’s hesitation, anxiety, and thought process, so you can understand their internal obstacles too.

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Why journey mapping is essential for customer experience

You might think you know your product inside out. But in my experience, this bias hides friction points that are not obvious unless you’re a user.

This is why mapping the journey is crucial for UX. It serves three critical functions:

1. Uncover pain points: If you map a user’s emotional state and realize they are anxious during payment, you can design the checkout page differently to make them feel safer.
2. Expose silos: A user might interact with marketing, sales, and support in one hour. If those departments are isolated, the map will show how this separation hurts the entire customer experience.
3. Focus resources: A journey map highlights the key moments where users decide to stay, upgrade, or churn. This way, you can prioritize the most impactful aspects of the product experience.
4. Share vision: A customer journey map can act as a point of reference for your team. This way, everyone is on the same page about users’ behaviors.

The key components of a journey map

Every effective map needs these five components:

• The actor
• The scenario and expectations
• Journey phases
• Actions
• Opportunities

The actor

This is the type of user who’s going through the journey. A power user trying to export complex data is different than a trial user inviting a teammate.

To define it, it’s necessary to define a specific user persona that focuses on goals, pain points, and JTBDs (e.g., “Finance Manager exporting end-of-month reports”).

The scenario and expectations

The scenario (or environment) describes when and why the user is interacting with your product. It could be a goal (increase feature adoption), a job-to-be-done (e.g., creating a report), or a lifecycle stage (e.g., switching from a competitor to our tool).

On the other hand, the expectations are what the actor assumes will happen. It helps you later identify if the experience meets or falls short of those expectations. For instance, if the user expects a one-click import but faces a manual CSV upload, that gap becomes a pain point.

Journey phases

These are the high-level stages of the journey, and they should be defined based on the scenario. If the scenario is “switching to a new project management tool”, the map would then trace that user’s journey through discovering, trialing, and adopting the tool.

Whereas, for high-level B2B SaaS journeys, you might also use customer lifecycle stages like adoption, expansion, or advocacy.

Actions, mindsets, and emotions

It documents what the user does, thinks, and feels at each stage of the journey. Think of:

• What are they physically doing? (e.g., googling reviews, post-purchase interactions, clicking “sign up,” reading docs)
• What are they thinking? (e.g., “Is this secure?”, “Where is the export button?”)
• How do they feel? (e.g., anxious, desperate, excited, neutral, etc.)

These are graphed as a line moving up (positive emotions) and down (negative experiences) across the phases.

Opportunities

At the bottom of a journey map are the insights, opportunities, and recommendations that emerge from analyzing the user’s journey.

They might include ideas for product enhancements, UX fixes, or even changes to business processes. For example, if users are frustrated by a complex setup, the opportunity might be to introduce an onboarding checklist to break the task into small actions.

My 5-step process to creating user journey maps that improve UX

Although there are many ways to create user journey maps, this is the 5-step mapping process I use that helps me improve the user experience. It involves:

1. Define the scenario and the actor based on your product goal

The first step is deciding whose journey you’re mapping and what experience you’re focusing on. It involves identifying the user persona (actor) you want to understand and clearly outlining the scenario based on the user’s goals.

For the scenario, determine it based on a specific goal or JTBD, such as “exporting data for a board meeting” or “onboarding a new team member.” I recommend focusing on high-value scenarios that correlate directly with retention or revenue expansion (e.g., activation, feature adoption, upsells, cancellation, referring friends, etc).

Then, define the specific user persona that’s going through the journey (e.g., Admin, CFO, etc). In my case, Userpilot let me create specific user segments based on their role, plan type, or even recent activity (e.g., “Signed up < 7 days ago”). This granularity allows me to map journeys that are relevant to specific personas (as well as filter my analyses based on their characteristics).

For example, let’s say I’m focusing on new admin users who just signed up and need to invite team members. This segment already sets a scope for the next step, which is the research stage.

2. Gather data points to feed your map

With the actor and scenario setting up the scope of the research, I can start investigating data points, come up with hypotheses, and gather insights that will help me build the journey map.

For this, I need both quantitative and qualitative data to make sure the insights are representative of the real user experience.

So for quantitative data, I use Userpilot’s product analytics to track how users interact with our product. My favorite tools are:

• Path analysis: I use paths reporting to generate a visual tree of user actions after a specific event (e.g., “Clicked ‘Import Data'”). This reveals the paths users actually take, and helps me identify where users deviate from the happy path. So if, for example, they’re going back and forth between the “settings” and “pricing” pages, then there might be confusion about plan limits.

• Funnel analysis: I also track funnels to look at the completion rate between specific steps. If I see a higher drop-off between “Upload CSV” and “Map Columns,” then there might be a friction point worth investigating.

Now, although the quantitative data tells what’s happening, qualitative feedback helps me validate hypotheses and understand the why behind certain actions. These are the tools I use:

• Session replays: Userpilot’s session replays let you watch the sessions of users who dropped off and look for “mouse thrashing” (moving the mouse rapidly in frustration) or rage clicks (repeatedly clicking an element that isn’t responding). When filtered well, these sessions can reveal usability issues that 1,000 data points couldn’t.

• In-app surveys: Userpilot also lets me trigger microsurveys after specific actions (e.g., creating a report or dropping off from an onboarding step). I can ask a simple question like “What stopped you from completing this today?” to understand the source of a user’s frustration. Also, I can trigger NPS surveys right after an event to get sentiment data for specific customer touchpoints.

• Customer interviews: For deeper feedback, I interview 3-5 users to collect data about their thought processes. They often reveal “internal state” issues such as fear of hidden costs or data privacy concerns.

3. Put together the journey map

Once I’ve collected enough evidence, I start building the journey map.

The first step is simply adding the persona and the scenario I determined earlier. After that, I use the data to fill the rest, including:

Setting up the journey stages

Based on paths and retroactive analysis, I can break down the timeline in which a user goes from point A to point B.

For instance, for a B2B project management tool, the path for a “Team Lead” persona might look like this:

• Sign up for the trial via the landing page.
• Create the first project workspace.
• Add at least one task to the project.
• Invite a colleague to collaborate.
• Activate after experiencing the “Aha!” moment (e.g., moving a task to “Done”)

Mapping the micro-actions

Based on session replays and event data, I add the micro-actions involved in each stage. These must be granular tasks such as:

• Click ‘Settings’.
• Scan for ‘Team’ tab (Duration: 5 seconds).
• Open a new tab to find emails (Risk of distraction/exit).
• Copy and paste teammates’ emails (Risk of formatting error).

Measuring emotional states

The in-app surveys measure the overall sentiment of users when using the product. These survey responses let me draw a line of users’ emotional states (i.e., positive, neutral, and negative) across the journey map.

This result is a graph that resembles an electrocardiogram (EKG) and shows where users are experiencing more negative emotions.

Capturing internal monologues

Along with the actions, list the user’s mental process based on the 1-on-1 interviews. These can include objections like:

• “Will this send an email to my boss immediately?” (Anxiety about reputation)
• “Do I need a credit card for this?” (Anxiety about cost)
• “Where is the save button?” (Anxiety about data loss)

What’s great is that addressing these objections often requires changes to microcopy rather than code. Simple reassurances like “No credit card required” or “Auto-saved” can improve the emotional curve.

4. Identify the opportunities for improvement

The final layer of the journey map is “opportunities.” This is where we turn the graphic into actionable tasks.

To identify opportunities, list a specific solution to every emotional dip or objection in the journey. Be specific about what the solution is and the internal ownership, for example:

Additionally, I highly recommend prioritizing the opportunities using an Impact vs. Effort matrix. This way, your team can act on the most impactful problems first.

5. Take action, measure, and repeat

Journey maps are not a one-and-done task. It requires constant observation, intervention, and measurement.

Once our team starts implementing the solutions, it’s necessary to validate that every fix made an impact. To do this, I often keep track of key metrics (e.g., activation, retention, upsells, etc.) or compare new survey responses (e.g., CSAT, CES, NPS) based on the target customer persona.

Additionally, I use A/B testing to optimize my intervention. For example, to address drop-offs at the setup screen, I could test an interactive walkthrough versus a static help doc to see which one drives higher completion rates.

Userpilot makes journey mapping easier!

Journey mapping forces you to stop looking at your product as a collection of features and more like a sequence of experiences. It connects the what (data) with the why (emotion) to spot friction.

But in a PLG environment, you’ll need tools like product analytics, session replays, NPS surveys, and in-app experiences to not only consolidate all the product data, but also to take quick action (i.e., guiding users when they need it).

I can’t recommend Userpilot enough for this. So if you need a product platform that integrates most customer journey mapping tools (i.e., product analytics, feedback, and in-app engagement), then book a Userpilot demo to make journey mapping easier!

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