Welcome! This is a recap of the hands-on workshop, led by Jeanette Fuccella and Josh Levie, where we explored how to create and apply experience maps. We’ll walk through what experience maps are, when and why to use them, and how to build them—including ways to incorporate GenAI to enhance your maps. We’ll also discuss how experience mapping can help uncover opportunities to apply GenAI to real end-user challenges.
What are experience maps?
Experience mapping is a human-centered design thinking approach that helps teams focus on solving the right problems with the right solutions. By visualizing the steps, pain points, and opportunities in an end user’s journey, teams can align more effectively to drive measurable impact – often through novel and creative innovations. There are many different types of experience maps, including journey maps, service blueprints, storyboarding, etc.
In their simplest form, experience maps are frequently designed as a grid that depicts the stages for a particular person executing a series of tasks toward a goal. The columns represent the individual stages, and the rows typically represent the key personas involved, along with what the primary persona is doing, thinking, and feeling. Pain points and opportunities are identified as part of the mapping process.
Why create experience maps?
Experience maps enable us to ensure that we clearly understand end user struggles in their context along a task flow. By deeply understanding the needs and experiences of those we're designing for, we can develop solutions that are not only innovative but also deeply resonant and effective. Without this deep understanding of the user’s nuanced experience we risk missing the root cause of a problem, which can lead to ineffective application of resources.
Creating an experience map in 5 easy steps
1. Map for impact
First, decide what end user experience is worth mapping. For greatest impact, look for opportunities where you can both have the greatest positive impact on the customer and for the business.
2. Map with data
The ultimate end goal of experience mapping is to build a better future, which means ensuring that you’ve got compelling evidence to support the change(s) that you want to make. Using data to inform your map ensures that your map is accurate and valid, such as:
- Customer or employee survey data
- Usage data (eg where do users get stuck or go down a wrong path)
- Support tickets
- Training materials / FAQs (show the stages in the journey and where customers frequently need assistance)
- Conversations that you initiate with end users
Also use GenAI (per your company policy) to:
- Summarize and interrogate survey comments
- Find existing internal data and documents
- Analyze support ticket data
- Conduct deep research with public domain content
3. Map collaboratively
In any large, matrixed organization, change requires significant stakeholder engagement and buy-in. Collaborating on the construction of an experience map is a powerful way to achieve these goals, while also building diverse perspectives into the process.
4. Map visually
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This is especially true when it comes to mapping. A visual representation of the user’s journey is a fast and effective approach for communicating where struggles are occurring and why. It additionally drives the necessary alignment across stakeholders to identify novel, innovative, and effective approaches for solving the real, underlying problems.
Maps can range from extremely simple to complex, depending on your abilities and desires. The key is to ensure that the map effectively communicates the message you want viewers to receive.
Don’t be afraid to leverage GenAI in this step to:
- Get ideas for different approaches for visualizing your map
- Generating graphics
- Summarizing across multiple perspectives and viewpoints
5. Map for action
The fundamental purpose of an experience map is to build a better future. Once you’ve built a map that creates understanding and empathy for user problems, the team can get started ideating solutions to those problems. The team may even want to create a second map to showcase how the solution solves the problem by changing the user experience.
Use GenAI here to:
- Get ideas for innovative solutions
- Identify opportunities where GenAI and Agentic AI might be especially effective technological solutions!
Conclusion: Build a Better Future for your End Users with Experience Maps
Whether digitizing a previously manual process or updating an existing workflow, you work hard to automate the experiences for your end users. Make sure your efforts pay off by taking the time to map out the current journey first so you can ensure that you’re eliminating as many friction points as possible for the greatest impact possible.
Resources for your journey
To help you along your way, be sure to check out these excellent resources!
- UX Mapping Cheat Sheet (Nielsen Norman Group)
- MRI Case Study: The Journey From Design Thinking to Creative Confidence (IDEO)
- US Federal Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government (Whitehouse.gov)
- What Is Design Thinking & Why Is It Important? (Harvard Business School)
- Mapping Experiences: From Insight to Action (Jim Kalbach)
- Journey Mapping Toolkit (ServiceNow)
