How to make a user-centred service journey map?
Mapping is just the artefact you make to express the research you uncover. It is only ever as good as the quality research and service design effort you put in.
Mapping in this way can be complex, it doesn’t need to take forever and can be done quickly, but to do this it’s important to engage people with both research and design experience as well as those with deep domain knowledge.
It needs a clearly defined design system that you have spent time defining that makes sense for your organisation. Doing this involves getting the right experts involved from the outset.
A mother thing to keep in mind is that this kind of work can force some uncomfortable truths about what the organisation thinks it knows vs what it does. It’s important for the practitioners that leadership is comfortable with raising this level of honesty.
The map itself will likely need rounds of iteration to refine it, but doesn’t have to be perfect. So long as you keep adding as you learn. Start with something and keep adding to it. Having a printed copy can be a good working tool, and something you see every day and change daily as you learn.
How is this different to a service blueprint?
This mapping is at a way more zoomed-out view, so the scale of the journey is not appropriate for the channel mapping approach used in a service blueprint. It is more like a systems map, just a user-centred one. The journey is connected by a flow of known eventualities. For example process loops from the point of view of user experience, or actions that make them happen.
Example in a transformation kick-off sessions
Recently used user-centred service journeys in kick-off sessions for Land Registry’s digital transformation. Working with with Emily Webber we created them as a tool to identify service change opportunities for the programme. The map was created with team experts and then used as an ideation tool in workshops to find new opportunities, pain points, unknowns and prioritisation.
It is a great tool to get team discussion and engagement around a service area. Also, it’s a fun process that gets to results fast and allows teams to get immersed quickly! Building up the team’s domain expertise from nothing to deep expertise in week of workshopping. It helped the team understand the complex business processes and impact in the context of the user’s experience over s complicated and lengthy journey. Finishing up with a set team defined and prioritised opportunities to share to leadership and ready for the following week for work to commence.
The map was essential to doing this and to be honest I actually can’t imagine this process working without it!
