Experience Map

What is an Experience Map?

An Experience Map is a visual representation of the end-to-end experience people have when trying to accomplish a goal, regardless of a specific product or service. Unlike customer journey maps that focus on interactions with a particular brand or product, experience maps take a broader view of the entire experience around an activity or need, including interactions with multiple products, services, and channels—both from your organization and others.

Experience maps typically document the stages people go through to accomplish their goal, their actions and behaviors at each stage, their thoughts and feelings throughout the process, pain points and opportunities, and the various touchpoints and channels they interact with. This holistic view helps organizations understand the complete context in which their products or services exist and identify opportunities to better serve user needs across the entire experience.

Why are Experience Maps Important?

Experience Maps are important because they provide a holistic view of the entire experience around a human need or activity, beyond just interactions with a specific product or brand. This broader perspective helps organizations understand the complete context in which their offerings exist and identify opportunities to better serve users' needs across the entire experience journey.

By mapping the full experience, organizations can identify gaps, pain points, and opportunities that might be missed when focusing only on their own touchpoints. Experience maps foster empathy by showing the complete user journey with all its challenges and emotions. They also help teams think more strategically about how their products or services fit into users' lives and how they might create more value by addressing unmet needs or improving problematic aspects of the broader experience.

How to Create an Experience Map?

To create an effective experience map, conduct research to understand the complete experience from the user's perspective, including interactions with your organization and others, define the scope by identifying the beginning and end points of the experience you're mapping, create a framework that includes key components like phases, actions, thoughts, feelings, and pain points, and visualize the map in a way that communicates insights clearly and compellingly.

Best practices include focusing on human goals and needs rather than specific products or channels, involving diverse stakeholders in the mapping process to gain multiple perspectives, using real user research rather than assumptions to inform the map, highlighting both pain points and positive moments throughout the experience, and using the map as a strategic tool to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement. Remember that an experience map should be a living document that evolves as you gain new insights about the user experience.