What is a customer journey map

UX storyboards are early sketches of a user’s journey through a specific flow. They show how users navigate your product, what happens when they use it, or both.

A customer journey map is a visual overview of the steps users take when interacting with your brand. It charts the actions, emotions, and touchpoints your customer goes through, giving you valuable insights to improve their experience.

For instance, a food delivery company may use a customer journey map to outline the process a user takes when ordering a meal on its app. By mapping out each stage—from browsing food options to tracking the delivery—the company can spot potential pain points, like long wait times. With this information, they can then fine-tune the process to ensure quicker deliveries and happier, returning customers.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

A customer journey map includes the following components:

Stages. Every journey map outlines the phases a customer goes through, from initial discovery to post-purchase interactions.

User personas. These represent your ideal customer segments, giving you insights into their motivations and needs.

Touchpoints. Every interaction—direct or indirect—between a user and your brand is a touchpoint. Think beyond the screen, from your app and social feeds to support tickets and word of mouth.

Pain points. These are the friction, hurdles, and frustrations that stall a user’s progress. Mapping them reveals exactly where the customer experience is breaking down and where your design needs to pivot.

Actions, thoughts, and feelings. These include the “what,” “why,” and “how” of the user experience. By mapping specific behaviors (like checking out) against internal emotions (like anxiety over shipping), you bridge the gap between what users do and how they actually feel.

Opportunities and learnings. These are key insights from your map. It’s where you turn analysis into action—identifying design gaps, uncovering new features, and refining your strategy based on a deeper understanding of user behavior.

Pro tip:

Focus on pain points when mapping a current state to fix existing problems, but prioritize feelings and actions when mapping a future state to design entirely new visions.

The five stages of the customer journey

Each stage of the customer journey comes with its own touchpoints, actions, and emotions. Here’s what they look like:

Consider using these UX research sources:

Awareness. The customer recognizes a specific need or problem and begins exploring the landscape for answers. Their intent is to educate themselves on potential solutions through touchpoints like search engines, social media ads, and educational blog posts.

Consideration. The customer narrows down their options, evaluating your offering against the competition. They aim to validate fit and value by interacting with touchpoints like comparison guides, product webinars, and detailed case studies.

Decision. The customer is ready to commit and finalize their choice. They want to complete the transaction with zero friction, relying on touchpoints such as the checkout page, pricing tables, and promotional discount emails.

Retention. The focus shifts to successful onboarding and ensuring the customer achieves their desired outcome. They aim to get immediate value from the product, engaging with touchpoints like welcome emails, help center documentation, and customer support chats.

Loyalty. The customer moves beyond mere satisfaction to becoming a vocal supporter of your brand. Their goal is to maximize their long-term success and stay connected, often via touchpoints like loyalty programs, community forums, and word-of-mouth referrals.

How to create a customer journey map

Your customer journey map doesn’t have to be elaborate to be effective. Follow these five steps to outline your customer journey map

Step 1: Start with a goal

Define the specific goal you hope to achieve, whether it’s solving a problem or exploring an opportunity. What do you need to know about your users to improve the customer experience? Is there a customer behavior you’re trying to understand, like abandoning a full shopping cart? Or are you looking for ways to win customers on TikTok? Or maybe you’re just looking for new ways to personalize the customer experience and encourage repeat business.

Once you’ve set your goal, identify the specific customer segment you’re targeting. This will help you focus your efforts and ensure your journey map resonates with their experiences.

Step 2: Collect customer insights

Gather any relevant customer data to identify key touchpoints and actions within the customer journey. Website and app analytics can help track behaviors like cart abandonment, while social media polls might reveal customer habits and preferences.

Since customers interact with brands through multiple channels, collect qualitative customer data through user interviews. By having customers share their experiences, you can pinpoint critical moments in their journey.

Step 3: Develop customer personas

Customers have various needs and behaviors, making personas essential for an effective customer journey map. Think of personas as the characters navigating your map—each taking opposite paths, making specific decisions, and experiencing unique emotions before they reach their destination.

Personas help you empathize with customers, allowing you to create a more detailed and customer-centric journey map. Outline common customer behaviors, then refine personas with research, detailing their needs, goals, and motivations. User testing can help you validate and refine these personas.

Step 4: Plot their journeys

Now turn your research into something visual. Plot the customer’s path from initial awareness to long-term advocacy. In FigJam, you can use stickers to highlight friction points, widget like polls or timers to keep brainstorming moving, and cursor chat to discuss diverging paths in real time.

As you map touchpoints, from support bots to promo emails, layer in the persona’s thoughts and feelings alongside their actions. This way, your whole team is working from the same understanding of the customer experience.

Step 5: Identify opportunities

Based on your insights, identify areas for improvement or ways to enhance the customer experience. Ask yourself these questions to uncover potential opportunities:

What common pain points or obstacles do customers encounter, and how can you eliminate them?

Are there any customer needs you should address?

Can you add touchpoints at each stage to create more personalized experiences that drive engagement and conversions?

How can you reward customers to encourage customer loyalty?

Are your marketing and sales strategies tailored to address customer needs and pain points at the right stage of their journey?

The team at Lextech also recommends sharing your map with user groups to compare their journey with the one you’ve documented. This helps uncover missed steps or new opportunities you may have overlooked.

By analyzing your journey map, you can create an action plan to implement changes that align with your initial goal and foster customer loyalty.

Customer journey map examples

Here are two examples of what a customer journey map can look like in practice.

Example 1: Food delivery app

Let’s revisit the food delivery app scenario and create a customer journey map to identify ways to improve the experience for users looking for quick meal options.

In the awareness stage, the customer realizes they’re hungry and need a solution. As they move into the consideration stage, your customer journey map might uncover the following:

Customer persona: Bill, a busy (and hungry) working professional

User goals: Find food options quickly, compare prices and delivery times

Touchpoints: Restaurant pages, search bar, reviews and ratings page

Actions: Browse options, read reviews and ratings, save options for later

Feelings and thoughts: Hungry, impatient, skeptical about food quality

Pain points: Limited food options, delivery times not displayed in search results

Opportunities: Provide more filter options to improve searchability, include delivery times in search results, sort by the fastest delivery times, offer curated recommendations based on past searches or restaurant saves

The consideration stage is critical for keeping customers engaged and preventing them from exploring competitors. By optimizing search and filters, the food delivery app can help users quickly find their ideal lmeal, reducing the likelihood of abandoning their search.

Example 2: Shopping app

In this example, imagine you’re using a customer journey map for an online clothing app. Your objective is to build stronger relationships with your customers and enhance customer loyalty.

The customer has made their purchase and has just received their items. During the retention stage of the customer journey, your map might uncover the following:

Customer persona: Alex, a returning customer

User goals: Receive product on time, share review via app or social media

Touchpoints: Delivery email, reviews page, social media

Actions: Wears product, leaves product review, returns items if needed

Feelings and thoughts: Excited about the new item, satisfied with the purchase, disappointed that order didn’t come in time for their event

Pain points: Shipping delays, product quality issues

Opportunities: Real-time order tracking and updates, free returns, discounts for returning customers, personalized recommendations based on past purchases

Even repeat customers have frustrating encounters with brands they love. This example includes opportunities for recovery and turning those moments into a chance to strengthen customer relationships, like offering discounts.

Benefits of a customer journey map

Here are some ways customer journey maps can benefit your business:

Enhances the customer experience. By putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, you gain a deeper understanding of their expectations, leading to more personalized interactions and experiences tailored to each customer segment.

Boosts customer retention. A customer journey map helps you identify moments where your brand can shine, turning potential pan points into positive experiences. This leads to better product development and fosters long-term loyalty.

Drives change. Journey maps include data-driven insights that highlight areas for improvement. These insights make it easier to get stakeholder buy-in and implement impactful changes to enhance the customer experience.

Promotes collaboration. Customer journey maps help build a shared understanding of customer experiences across teams. This unified vision ensures that cross-functional teams work together to deliver consistent and cohesive interactions and experiences.

Sparks innovative ideas. By uncovering customers’ frustrations, feelings, and behaviors, journey maps help identify unmet needs. This can help you brainstorm innovative ideas that can transform your current customer journey and inform future improvements.

Start customer journey mapping with collaborative tools

Customer journey maps are essential tools for understanding your customers more deeply and creating better experiences. Ready to begin journey mapping? A variety of collaborative design and whiteboarding tools can support your process—from FigJam and Figma to Miro, Whimsical, Lucidchart, and other visual collaboration platforms.

Here’s how:

Use an intuitive customer journey map template from tools like FigJam, Miro, Whimsical, or Lucidchart to map user paths and identify areas for improvement. Many product teams—including those at global companies like Netflix—rely on visual collaboration tools to map complex user journeys and align cross-functional teams.

Explore template galleries across these platforms to enhance your journey mapping process. For example, empathy map templates can help you better understand your customers’ unique perspectives, motivations, and emotions.

Once you’ve uncovered new opportunities, move into prototyping. Use design tools such as Figma or other UX design platforms to create interactive prototypes that simulate real user interactions and touchpoints, helping you validate ideas before implementation.