Customer Journey Map (CJM for friends) is a UX tool that can be really useful to analyse and improve everyone’s day life. In short, a CJM is a visual representation of customer experience while using products or services. Generally used to make accurate marketing evaluation of such experiences, it can be extremely useful for our daily activities as well.
Customer Journey Map: let’s go deep!
For example, there are some periods when you feel very stressed out but you don’t know why.
You are trying tonics, vitamins, drinking more water, changing your eating habits but nothing seems work. Maybe you should go on holiday? Yes, maybe… but normally you can’t! You have to work in order to pay for your next holiday. That’s part of the fun!
Alternatively, you can try to understand what’s stressing you. You can start designing your Customer Journey Map, or, better to say, your PJM (Personal journey map) and I can guarantee your life will change!
First, there is something you should know before starting to design a CJM. You have to design a sort of table where columns are phases of your journey and rows are:
- Actions you daily do: describe step by step the meaningful actions you do during the day;
- Goals: describe what do you want to achieve with the actions described before;
- Channels: software, app or services you use;
- Touchpoint: physical products you interact with;
- Emotions: how do you feel in a specific moment;
- Problems: which problems you can find while doing actions described previously;
- Ideas: how you can improve your journey and solve problems.
Here is a simple example of Customer Journey Map, designed using UXPRESSIA tool, describing my morning training day.
Please note that you can use other tools, everything you prefer: paper and pen, specific software, post-it, even Excel. It just depends on your preferences and availability. Personally, I love post-it but I love forest too, so, I think a digital tool for me is the best fit.
Right now you know something more about me and my habits but, above all, you can try to do by yourself. Just do the same Customer Journey Map describing your routine or every other experience you think would be useful to record or to be examined in depth.
I believe it’s very important to better understand about our own life and feelings because, at the end, we are the user for whom we will design and for whom we should take more care about experiences. Because we are this user.
Let’s put it this way: life is a marvelous “product” and we can really improve it after a bit of user research!
Before leaving, I’d like to highlight that it’s necessary for you to have in mind who you are and what you need. Because your first necessity, when designing a “Customer Journey Map”, is to properly know your user in order to make the best and most satisfactory design.
Cover image by: Jamie Haughton on Unsplash
