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Journey mapping

Matt Carrano avatar

Author: Matt Carrano | Last edit: January 08, 2026

What is a journey map?

A Journey Map is a visualization of the process that a user goes through in order to accomplish a goal. Most journey maps follow a similar format, including five key elements

1. Actor (Persona): The specific user or persona experiencing the journey, representing one point of view.
2. Scenario + Expectations: The situation the map addresses, associated with the actor’s goal or need (e.g., a user wanting to buy a ticket on the phone).
3. Journey Phases (Timelines): The high-level stages of the journey (e.g., Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Advocacy).
4. Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions: The specific behaviors, thoughts, questions, motivations, and feelings the actor has throughout the journey. Emotions are often plotted as a line showing the "ups and downs" of the experience.
5. Opportunities (Takeaways): The insights gained from mapping, speaking to how the user experience can be optimized.
 
A completed user journey map might look something like this:
 
Example of a customer journey map from UX Hints. Includes stages of the customer journey: Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, Service, and Loyalty. At each stage, in the column is step of the customer journey, followed by customer's thinking, doing, feeling, and pain points. In the last row is opportunities for the company.

Why: Importance and Relevance of Journey Mapping

 
Journey mapping is considered a business imperative because of its ability to drive a customer-centric philosophy, enhance internal alignment, and foster empathy across the organization. Creating a user journey map:
 
Promotes Empathy and Storytelling: Data alone often fails to communicate customer frustrations. Journey maps reinforce empathy by giving teams a window into the customer’s experience. By showing how customers feel throughout their journey, the maps invite stakeholders to share in the customer's experience.
 
Fosters Alignment and Breaks Silos: The process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model for the whole team.
 
Facilitates Data-Driven Decision Making: Journey maps combine qualitative (anecdotal) and quantitative (statistical) data, providing a solid foundation for informed decision-making. This visualization helps businesses better comprehend interaction points, revealing insights that might otherwise remain obscured.
 
Identifies Pain Points and Opportunities: Journey maps provide a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting areas for improvement and revealing opportunities to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty. By visualizing the entire journey, businesses can spot gaps in their offerings and prioritize efforts based on where users face the most friction.
 

When to create a journey map

Journey maps are appropriate whenever you need to understand and visualize a process that involves a sequence of events, a process over time, or interactions across multiple channels. They are particularly useful when designing a new product, refining a service, or enhancing customer support to identify where improvements can be made.

Journey maps should always leverage actual user data, and therefore should only be created after other user research activities have been performed to develop a deep understanding of users and their needs. They are recommended as a method for mapping raw user insights to identify resulting opportunities that can be prioritized against desired business outcomes. As such, they can be used to help a team further define and refine the problem they want to focus on before jumping to ideating on solutions.

How to create a user journey map

Creating a comprehensive journey map requires a research-based, ordered process.

Define Goals and Scope
Before starting, clarify the fundamental questions: why you are creating the map, who will use it, and what specific user experience it will address. Determine the specific user experience you are focusing on and the user segments being targeted.
 
Decide on User Personas
Identify whose journey you are mapping out. Select or create personas (representations of target users based on real data). The journey map must focus on one point of view (actor) to maintain a strong, clear narrative. If mapping multiple user types (e.g., student vs. faculty), create separate maps. Internal Resource Link: [Link to Internal UXD Persona Guide]
 
Create the Journey Map
Your completed journey map should include the following elements:
  1. It should include a short statement to summarize the intended user outcome. This will help to provide viewers of the map with some context.
  2. You should clearly define the scenario or task that is being mapped.
  3. Break your scenario into steps and then write a narrative that describes what the user does at each phase of the journey.
  4. For each phase of the journey, reflect on the user's feelings as they proceed through the task. Are they happy or satisfied with their progress? Or do they feel frustrated at certain points in the journey. Identifying user frustrations is a good first step towards identifying opportunities for improved outcomes.
  5. It may be useful to include screenshots or other artifacts that will help visualize what the user is seeing or experiencing at each step.
  6. Identify specific pain points that result during each step (if any). Pain points are specific things that cause users frustration and/or create obstacles that stand in the way or their achieving desired outcomes.
  7. Identify opportunities or improvement ideas that come to mind as a response to places that users found frustrating as part of the journey. Identifying these opportunities can be a great team brainstorming activity and will serve as a basis for identifying problems to prioritize and solve.
Below is an example of a completed journey map that includes these elements.
 

A Miro template for creating this journey map can be found here.

 

Journey map examples

The following are some examples of Journey Map from both inside of Red Hat and from public sources.

Example 1

This is an example of a classic journey map where the both the user's actions and emotions are represented as they move through their journey.

 

 

Example 2

This journey map was created by the Red Hat Open Shift team to reflect the process a systems admin goes through to install and monitor an Open Shift cluster.

 

Example 3

This journey map is intended to reflect a future vision for a student attending college for the first time. This type of journey map is sometimes referred to as a “To-Be” Journey Map.

Learn more

The following are some useful articles and references for those wanting to learn more about journey mapping.

methods process

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