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Skip the journey maps, take the journey — how journey maps went off the rails and what to do next
“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” — unknown
Okay, I will admit the word “journey’ map is a big trigger for me, professionally. There is a story to it, which I won’t get into but most times when I hear other practitioners talking about journey maps, I soon realize that they are not even looking at a journey map, but rather a company’s service maps — an inward-looking artifact looking at the company’s processes rather than getting to the human intents. These similar artifacts are called service maps and are not to be confused with the real journey a user takes to interact with the services and or products we design. So, if you are about to start another journey map activity, you may very well be wasting your time and not be on the right path to capturing real, lived experiences that inform how services can be designed to meet the contexts of those myriad lived experiences.
In the last two years, the covid-19 pandemic has taught us so many lessons that it is very difficult to focus on just one. However, if we tease out those lessons, with respect to our professional experiences as UX…
