Journey Maps are powerful visual tools that enable everyone on a team to work around a person-centered perspective. It gets teams out of the organizational lens of how products or services should work and into the perspective of the people and what they actually experience. This is a particularly helpful activity to do as you are looking for insights from which you can develop meaningful ideas. Journey Maps are also a great output to share with your teams and stakeholders to convey and align on strategic intent.
GET READY
Identify the user and experience you want to focus on
Within the provided Journey Mapping Template, fill in details on who your target user is, what experience they're going through (i.e., patient visiting a clinic, student engaging in virtual learning, etc.) and what the key steps are for that particular personas journey.
Send to participants and begin the Journey Map asynchronously
Share the template link with the individuals that will be a part of your session and have them begin placing their own contributions into the Journey Map. Their role will be to fill in the "Doing", "Saying", "Thinking" and "Quotes/Data" sections of the template prior to the group session. Prompt them to think expansively about the starting and ending points of that person's journey (e.g., in the case of visiting The Smithsonian - the journey starts with trip planning and actually ends when people go home and share their experiences with others).
Polish and prepare
As the facilitator, make any final edits needed to have the Journey Map ready to begin the workshop.
LIVE ACTIVITY
Read and reflect on the work
The focus of the session together will be on completing the emotional mapping of the journey, gaining insights together, and capturing initial ideas. To kick-off your session, start by re-grounding the team on the contributions made through individual pre-work to the template thus far. It should already begin to provide some insights and aha moments.
Discuss what you notice
What patterns are people noticing? Any surprises? Potential areas to target for change? Post questions and discuss.
Build in more details and emotion
Take another pass and break into groups if needed. Visualize the user's emotions by filling in cells within the "positive, neutral, or negative" section of the template to correspond with the users emotional state along their journey. This visual is the hallmark of a journey map.
Capture initial ideas and make plans
Quickly capture initial opportunities you are noticing. Continue adding to this document and sharing it with others as you evolve it more over time. Consider doing a Journey-Storming exercise to go deeper. Share outcomes and key steps to turn your ideas into actions.
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