What a journey map should contain to be useful rather than decorative

4 days ago
3 min read

Introduction

Journey maps fail in a specific and recognisable way. They become beautiful. Colours, emotion curves, illustrated personas, twelve rows of detail, printed large and put on a wall where they are admired and never consulted. The effort went into the artefact rather than into what it was supposed to change.

A useful map is plain and short. It holds the small number of things somebody would need in order to decide what to fix, and it omits everything else. The test is whether a person who was not involved in making it can look at it for two minutes and name a problem worth solving.

1. What a journey map should contain to be useful begins with the stages

The spine.

What a journey map should contain to be useful starts here: three to seven stages, named in the buyer's language. Everything else hangs from these, and getting them right matters more than any of the rows below. If the stages are wrong, no amount of detail underneath will rescue the map.

2. What the buyer is trying to do at each stage

The first row.

Their objective, in a short phrase. This is what distinguishes a journey map from a process diagram and it is frequently the row that is missing. Without it the map describes activity rather than intent.

3. What they actually do

The second row.

The observable actions: search, ask somebody, visit, call, compare, wait. Concrete enough that you could count them if you chose to. Waiting is an action and it belongs on the list.

4. What they need in order to continue

The third row, and the most useful.

Information, reassurance, a price, permission, an answer. Everything you should be providing is named here, and the gaps are your content plan. This row alone justifies the exercise for most businesses.

5. Where you are losing them

The fourth row.

Counts or proportions if you have them, an honest guess marked as a guess if you do not. This is what turns a description into something actionable. Marking the guesses also tells you what to start measuring.

6. How long each stage takes

The fifth row.

Median elapsed time. Long gaps are where buyers cool, and this row regularly produces the most surprising finding on the whole map. Most businesses substantially underestimate their own intervals.

7. Mark the moments that decide the outcome

The annotation that matters.

Two or three points where the journey is genuinely won or lost. Identifying them is the main analytical contribution the map makes. Everything else on the page is supporting evidence for these.

8. Leave out the emotion curve unless it changes something

The subtraction.

Emotional states are interesting and rarely actionable. Where anxiety at a particular stage suggests a fix, note it in a sentence rather than drawing a graph. A curve nobody acts on is decoration.

9. Keep it to one page

The format constraint.

If it does not fit, the stages are too granular or the rows are too many. A single sheet is consulted; a wall chart is admired. Print it and see whether anybody picks it up.

Be careful about rows that record what you do rather than what the buyer experiences. Your internal actions belong in a process document, and their presence is the commonest reason these maps drift into describing the business rather than the customer.

Conclusion

Keep it to five rows and a page, because elaboration is what stops it being used.

Put three to seven stages across the top in the buyer's language, then record what they are trying to do, what they actually do, what they need in order to continue, where you lose them and how long each stage takes, annotate the two or three moments that decide the outcome, leave out anything that will not change a decision, and make sure the whole thing fits on one sheet.