Journey Mapper

Facilitate structured & better directed research

A good UX is about removing obstacles, making processes efficient and intuitive, and mapping out the best path for the typical customer journey. Journey Maps are among the most powerful tools to do this. While journey maps provide a clear grid of phases and aspects, many items within them often begin as unvalidated assumptions. Good research essentially is systematic testing of hypotheses, or in other words assumption validation.

By helping teams see every item on the journey map as a potential hypothesis that requires validation, the tool enables mapping to be a foundation for structured research. It encourages teams to assess risk magnitude per item, automatically highlights areas of uncertainty, and guides conducting bias-reducing exercises that foster synergy. This process helps teams get to know how risky different journey phases are, providing better direction for future efforts and highlighting where their attention and resources are most needed.

Empathise with & better understand our stakeholders

The next step after research is creating a model that helps visualize and communicate the research & insights clearly to those who need to consume it. Our visualisation approach followed a natural & simple journey mapping grid - phases & aspects - to break down the experience journey into manageable parts, allowing teams to consider every phase from every relevant aspect. To enrich the visualisation, the tool offers the ability to add other media types like metrics, photos, videos and graphs.

To further enhance its power, the tool has inbuilt templates for amalgamating popular models like empathy maps or the business model canvas into a journey map, as each focus area of such models simply becomes an aspect (a row) within the journey map. That effectively creates an empathy map etc., for each phase in the journey map - giving teams the tools to explore each journey phase from multiple perspectives and uncover deeper insights. The journey map even includes summary views like heatmaps that reveal levels of risk, validation done, effort needed etc. and help to prioritize focus.

Synergise, communicate & collaborate among the team

To create a comprehensive understanding of the user journey, it’s crucial to bring together different teams and members, each offering unique insights. Communicating complex insights across teams is often challenging, leading to misunderstandings or missed opportunities for improvement. The tool synergised people by providing a structured space where everyone automatically speaks the same language, or evolves the common language, but together.

As an example, during journey mapping exercises, teams could discover that one phase should actually be broken down into two or three separate ones, or that a few should be clubbed or renamed - and get an agreement on this from all other departments - thereby improving everyone's shared understanding of the page everyone was on and ensuring that particular phases of the customer journey received the support they needed from all quarters of the organisation providing the service.

That's how teams are no longer working in isolation but instead collaborating on the same goals—understanding the user experience and improving it together. This collective approach ensures that ideas are not overlooked or lost but are transformed into impactful, actionable insights that drive real change.

Provide a contextual, validated, data driven bird's eye view

By starting with a clear user persona, goals, and quotes, the tool lays a robust contextual foundation for journey mapping. Recognizing that every persona has different scenarios, the tool ensures teams consider the unique needs and perspectives that define each journey.

The tool not only treats each item in the journey map as an assumption, but provides an integrated interface for research teams to plan and conduct different forms of validation exercises such as one-on-one interviews, phone calls, surveys, and track their status. The tool allows teams to easily create validation rules for each assumption and connect them to planned validation exercises.

As research teams conduct validation at their own pace, the journey map updates dynamically in real time—reflecting the status and results of each exercise and linking them back to real data. Different kinds of filters, highlights, spotlights, and heatmaps offer a clear bird’s eye view of this contextual, validated, data-driven, and structured journey map—ensuring teams see the full picture while staying rooted in the user’s true experience.

Prioritise better & minimize assumption risk

Teams often have to work with limited resources and decide which ideas or assumptions to validate first and how deeply. Hence, it is important to direct the teams energy in riskier or more meaningful areas for best impact and risk minimisation. To do this in a data driven manner, starting with the foundation of having a risk score associated with each item on the map is a great start.

Similar to t-shirt sizing exercises in agile planning, team members get together and jointly estimate risk for each of the items on the journey map. The discussions that happen to drive synergy during this period are an important component of the overall exercise. As time progresses, newer assumptions are added, estimated and validated, thereby dynamically changing the focus of the validation team to where it is actually most needed.

Continue to keep up with evolving business dynamics

Journey mapping's true value is about the collaborative and synergistic process and not as much about the artefact. Any synergy building process (like retrospectives) or documentation system (like wikis) remains valuable when it is periodically conducted or updated. Otherwise it becomes stale and begins to lose relevance. Same for experience journey maps.

This tool was designed keeping these challenges in mind. Hence it allows for user researchers, designers, testers, validation teams, product managers and other stakeholders across service delivery ecosystems to work on their parts of the process independently and in parallel while automatically keeping everything in sync and always upto date under the hood. This way, by not interfereing in the natural workflows of people wearing different hats, yet automatically keeping the shared map updated with everyone's work, the tool facilitates journey maps to truly stay alive and relevant within organisations and evolve with the business.