How to Create a Journey Map: A Guide to Your First Mapping

A small bike repair shop introduced online booking a year ago. The idea was that the phone would finally ring less. Instead, it rings just as often as before, and some of the booked appointments fall through because nobody shows up. The team has theories: People are just unreliable. The booking page is too complicated. The reminder email ends up in spam. Nobody knows which theory is right.

This is exactly the kind of situation a journey map is made for. It shows the path a person takes from their first thought to their goal and reveals where things get stuck along the way. That might sound like a big workshop with colorful sticky notes and consultant fees. It doesn’t have to be. A useful first journey map can come together with a large sheet of paper, a few conversations and an afternoon.

This article shows you step by step how to create your first journey map. You don’t need any prior knowledge. The bike shop serves as a running example through every step.

What a journey map is and what it isn’t

A journey map is a visualization of the path a person takes to reach a specific goal. The Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), a well-known usability research and consulting firm, describes it roughly like this: It starts as a timeline of the person’s actions. Their thoughts and emotions are added to create a narrative. That narrative is then condensed into a clear visual.

You’ll come across the term in several variations: customer journey map, user journey map or simply journey map. In everyday work, most teams mean the same thing. What matters more than the label is that everyone involved agrees on what goes on the map.

One term comes up constantly: touchpoint. A touchpoint is any moment where a person comes into contact with your offering. For the bike shop, that includes the listing in a maps app, the website, the booking confirmation email, the conversation at the counter and the invoice.

To help you tell the journey map apart from related methods, here are three quick distinctions:

• Experience map: It’s broader and shows how people experience a topic in general, independent of a specific product. For example, “getting a broken bike repaired” in general, not at one particular shop.
• Service blueprint: It builds on the journey map and also shows what happens behind the scenes: which teams, processes and systems make each touchpoint possible.
• User story map: It comes from agile software development and helps teams plan and prioritize features. A journey map, by contrast, is about understanding, not about planning implementation.

For getting started, the journey map is all you need. It’s the foundation the other formats build on.

Before you start: three decisions

Most journey maps don’t fail at the drawing stage. They fail before it. If you start without a clear frame, you end up with a huge wall of sticky notes that shows everything and nothing. Three questions help you avoid that.

Whose journey are you showing?

Every journey map shows exactly one perspective. NN/g calls this person the actor. Often that’s a persona, a fictional but research-based description of a typical user group. The article What Are UX Personas and Why Does Every Team Need Them? explains how to build personas.

If you don’t have personas yet, that’s not a problem. Describe the person in two or three sentences. For the bike shop, it could look like this: “People who rely on their bike for their daily commute and are booking a repair for the first time.” Someone who rides a road bike as a hobby goes through the process differently and can get a separate map if needed.

Which scenario?

The scenario defines the situation and the goal the person has in it. The more specific, the better. “The entire customer relationship” is too big for a first map. “Booking a repair for the first time and picking the bike up again” is something you can actually work with.

Expectations are part of the scenario, too. What is the person hoping for? In our example: finding an appointment quickly, knowing roughly what the repair will cost and being without the bike for as short a time as possible.

Current state or future state?

NN/g distinguishes between two kinds of maps. A current-state map shows what the experience is like today, including every gap and low point. A future-state map describes what it should ideally look like. For your first map, the current state is almost always the better choice. You can only improve something meaningfully once you know where you stand.

Assumptions or research: how much effort does it take?

Now comes the question that makes many beginners unsure: How do you actually know what people think and feel? There are basically two ways.

In the first approach, the team gathers what it already knows or suspects in a workshop. The result is a so-called hypothesis map. It comes together quickly and gets everyone around the same table. The catch: It mostly reflects the team’s opinion, not what customers actually experience.

In the second approach, you start with user research, the systematic study of how people really use a product. Only then do you draw the map. This is more thorough but takes more time.

NN/g recommends a middle path: Start with a hypothesis map as a team, then validate and refine it with research. In her article on the two approaches, Kate Kaplan explicitly warns against stopping at the hypothesis map, because important decisions then end up resting on untested assumptions.

How much time do teams actually invest? NN/g surveyed 343 practitioners in 2022. On average, they reported about 74 hours for the whole process, just under two full work weeks. Research took the largest share at a little over 20 hours. Interesting for anyone hoping to cut corners: Teams that started from assumptions without prior research didn’t save any time.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to block out two weeks for your first map. The 74 hours refer to full-scale projects. A lean version for a small team could look like this:

• One hour for a hypothesis map with the team
• Three to five short conversations with real customers
• One hour to review existing data: support emails, reviews, notes from phone calls
• One hour to revise the map together

That’s not a scientific study, but it’s far more than gut feeling. And it’s enough to uncover the first real problems.

Your first map, step by step

The bike shop has made its decisions: The actor is people who rely on their bike every day and are booking for the first time. The scenario is “book a repair and pick up the bike,” and the map shows the current state. Time to get started.

Step 1: Gather material

Before you draw anything, collect what you already have. Almost every business knows more about its customers than it realizes. Typical sources include:

• Support emails and inquiries
• Reviews on platforms and in maps apps
• Notes from phone calls or conversations at the counter
• Website analytics, for example where people drop out of the booking flow

Then talk to a few people from your target group. Ask them to walk you through what actually happened: “Tell me about the last time your bike broke down. What did you do?” Ask about what the person did, not about their opinion of features. Write down what they say as close to word for word as you can, because you’ll need it later.

The bike shop calls four people who booked in recent weeks and reads through the reviews from the past twelve months. Something stands out right away: Three of the four people called before booking to ask whether the repair could even be done in one day.

Step 2: Define the phases

Phases are the major stages of the journey. They form the columns of your map. Choose them from the person’s point of view, not from the perspective of your internal processes. Four to seven phases are a good range to start with.

The bike shop ends up with six phases:

1. Notice the problem
2. Find a shop
3. Book an appointment
4. Drop off the bike
5. Wait
6. Pick up and pay

Make sure the first phase starts before the first contact with your offering. Many important insights sit right there: in the moment someone notices the brake is rubbing and wonders what to do about it.

Step 3: Add the actions

In the first row below the phases, write down what the person does. This isn’t a click log but a short narrative. NN/g makes exactly this point: Actions describe behavior in broad strokes, not every single step.

An excerpt from the bike shop map:

• Find a shop: searches a maps app for nearby repair shops, compares reviews, opens the website.
• Book an appointment: looks for prices on the website, can’t find any, calls, then books online.
• Wait: hears nothing for two days, sends an email asking whether the bike is ready.

Step 4: Capture thoughts and questions

The next row shows what’s going through the person’s mind in each phase. What questions do they have? What’s unclear? This is where your interview notes come in. Real quotes are more powerful than any summary and make the map credible.

The bike shop map includes statements like these from the interviews:

“I wanted to know whether the repair was even worth it before I booked an appointment.”

“I wasn’t sure if I had to bring the bike in the morning or at the time I booked.”

“I need the bike for work. I had to know when I’d get it back.”

Clearly mark what comes from real data and what is still an assumption. A simple system works: green sticky notes for evidence, yellow ones for assumptions. That way, everyone on the team can see at a glance where the map is still on shaky ground.

Step 5: Draw the emotion curve

This is where it gets visual. Draw a line below the phases that shows how the person feels. Up means positive feelings, down means frustration, uncertainty or annoyance. NN/g recommends a single line across the entire map so the highs and lows jump out immediately.

For the bike shop, the curve shows a clear pattern. It starts slightly negative with the problem: The bike is broken, which is annoying. It rises while finding the shop, because the reviews are good. It drops sharply during booking, because prices are missing and the process is unclear. It rises again at drop-off, where the conversation at the counter is friendly. During the wait, it sinks to the lowest point on the entire map: Nobody gets in touch, and the person doesn’t know whether they can ride to work tomorrow. At pick-up, it goes back up.

This curve is often the moment when things click for the team. The bike shop had never thought of the waiting time as part of the experience. For customers, though, it’s the worst part.

Step 6: Mark the touchpoints

In another row, note where the person comes into contact with you in each phase. This helps you see which channels are involved and where the handoffs between them are bumpy.

For the bike shop, one thing stands out: The “Wait” phase has no touchpoint at all. The shop goes silent exactly where uncertainty is highest. And the “Book an appointment” phase includes a channel switch: from the website to the phone and back again. Every switch like that is a sign that one channel isn’t answering a question.

Step 7: Identify opportunities

A journey map is not an end in itself. The most important row comes last: opportunities. Look at every low point and ask: What could we do better here? NN/g advises noting for each opportunity who owns it and how success will be measured. Without an owner, even the best insight just stays on the wall.

The bike shop identifies three opportunities:

• Price guide on the website: A simple list of typical repairs with approximate costs, plus a note on which jobs are usually done the same day. Owner: the shop owner. Measured by the number of calls before a booking.
• Clear booking confirmation: The email states clearly when to bring the bike in and how long the repair is likely to take. Owner: whoever manages the website. Measured by the number of follow-up questions and missed appointments.
• Message when the bike is ready: A short text or email letting people know the bike is ready for pick-up. Owner: the workshop team. Measured by the number of inquiries during the waiting phase.

None of these ideas is expensive. But none of them would have surfaced without the map, because each one sits at a point that nobody looks at from the customer’s perspective in day-to-day work.

What the finished grid looks like

Once you’ve worked through all the steps, your map has a simple structure. At the top are the actor, the scenario and the expectations. Below that, the phases run as columns from left to right. The rows, from top to bottom, are:

1. Actions: What does the person do?
2. Thoughts and questions: What’s on their mind?
3. Emotion curve: How do they feel?
4. Touchpoints: Where do they come into contact with you?
5. Opportunities: What will you improve, and who takes care of it?

This is the basic framework that shows up in almost every template, including NN/g’s free one. You can add more rows, for example for the departments involved or for metrics. For your first map, you don’t need to: Five rows are manageable enough to discuss as a team.

Before and after

What did the map change for the bike shop? A comparison.

Before: The team is debating whether the booking page needs a redesign. An agency has already sent a quote. The theory is that the page is too complicated. Missed appointments are blamed on unreliable customers.

After: The booking page itself works fine, and nobody had trouble with the form. The calls happen because price information is missing before booking. The missed appointments are linked to the confirmation not saying clearly when to bring the bike in. And the biggest frustration sits in a phase nobody had thought about: the waiting time. Instead of an expensive redesign, a short section with price guidance, a revised email and a “ready for pick-up” message are enough.

Whether these changes work will show in the numbers noted next to each opportunity. That’s the real value of a journey map: It replaces theories with a shared, testable view of what people actually experience.

Common mistakes with your first journey map

Starting too big

If you try to map the entire customer relationship over several years, you’ll get lost in the details. Start with a clearly defined scenario. If that goes well, you can create more maps for other scenarios.

Several target groups in one map

Commuters, families with cargo bikes and people with expensive road bikes experience the shop differently. If you put them all on one map, the differences blur, and in the end the emotion curve fits nobody. One map, one perspective.

Drawing it alone at your desk

A journey map created by one person in a design tool may look polished. But it loses its biggest benefit. According to NN/g, the value lies precisely in the team building a shared understanding while creating the map together. So bring in people from different areas: at the bike shop, that might be the person at the counter, the mechanic and whoever maintains the website.

Presenting assumptions as facts

A hypothesis map is a good start. It becomes risky when it’s presented as the truth. Label assumptions visibly and test them before you base bigger decisions on them.

No follow-through

The most common disappointment: The map hangs on the wall for three months and nothing happens. So decide during the session who will tackle which opportunity and by when. And revisit the map after a few weeks to check what has changed.

What tools you need

For your first map, a large sheet of paper or an empty wall, sticky notes in two colors and a pen are enough. Analog maps have one advantage: Everyone stands in front of them together, and notes are easy to move around.

If your team works remotely, digital whiteboards are a good alternative. Miro, for example, offers ready-made journey map templates. Specialized tools only pay off once you maintain many maps on a regular basis. To start with, the tool matters far less than the conversations you have beforehand.

Conclusion

A journey map makes visible what a person does, thinks and feels on the way to their goal. For your first map, you don’t need a big workshop or expensive software. You need a clear perspective, a specific scenario, a few real conversations and a team that looks at the result together.

The most important part comes at the end: turning the low points into concrete tasks, each with an owner and a measure of success. That’s how a poster on the wall becomes a tool that actually makes your product better. And more often than not, it turns out the biggest problems sit in places nobody was looking.

Checklist

• Actor defined: exactly one person or persona
• Specific scenario with goal and expectations written down
• Decided: current state or future state
• Existing data reviewed and a few conversations held
• Four to seven phases defined from the person’s point of view, starting before the first contact
• Actions, thoughts and questions added, ideally with real quotes
• Assumptions visibly separated from evidence
• Emotion curve drawn and low points marked
• Touchpoints and channel switches added
• Opportunities identified, each with an owner and a metric
• Date set to revisit the map

Sources

• Sarah Gibbons: Journey Mapping 101. Nielsen Norman Group, 2018
• Kate Kaplan: Journey-Mapping Approaches: 2 Critical Decisions To Make Before You Begin. Nielsen Norman Group, 2020
• Kate Kaplan: How Much Time Does It Take to Create a Journey Map? Nielsen Norman Group, 2022
• James Kalbach: Mapping Experiences. 2nd edition, O’Reilly