User Journey Comparison

USER JOURNEYS vs. USER FLOWS – The Blueprint for Seamless Experience   Ever launched a product only to hear: “This flow is confusing” or “It doesn’t solve my actual problem”? 😧 As product managers, we often juggle multiple priorities, but one distinction we can’t afford to blur is user journeys vs. user flows. Misunderstanding these can result in friction-filled experiences or worse, users abandoning your product entirely. 🔍 Let’s break it down USER JOURNEYS – The Big Picture ❓ Why: Focuses on your user’s end-to-end experience, tracking emotions, motivations, and pain points across touchpoints. ⚙️ How: Map your journey with tools like empathy maps or storyboards to capture the "why" behind user actions. 📌 Example: Think of a user exploring a new fitness app. They’re seeking motivation, tracking progress, and celebrating wins. What emotions drive them at each stage? USER FLOWS – The Step-by-Step Guide ❓ Why: Details specific steps users take to complete a task. It’s about clarity and efficiency. ⚙️ How: Use flowcharts to identify bottlenecks and streamline actions like account creation or checkout processes. 📌 Example: Onboarding for the same fitness app - how quickly and easily can a user create a profile and start their first workout? 🔗 WHY YOU NEED BOTH Ignoring user journeys risks missing the “why” behind user actions. Ignoring user flows can frustrate users with clunky processes. Together, they create a seamless user experience. 🔑 TAKEAWAY: Start with the journey to empathize with your users. Refine with flows to make tasks intuitive and frictionless. 💬 Your Turn: How do you balance user journeys and flows in your product design process? Do you start with one or tackle both simultaneously? Let’s share tips in the comments! #ProductManagement #UserExperience #UserJourneys #UserFlows #PMTips

🗺️ User Journey Maps vs. Service Blueprints (+ Templates) (https://lnkd.in/d8tNmKe2), a fantastic article explaining differences between the two, when to use each, along with a free practical guide to get started. Kindly put together by Morgan Miller and Erika Flowers. As Morgan and Erika write, mapping experiences is a key part of a human-centered business. We need to look at both perspectives — what the person experiences (UX, front stage), and what went on outside of their view to make it happen (Service Design, backstage). With user journey maps, we visualize and document user’s experience. We interview customers to capture their insights, then map patterns. We list steps and actions they go through to meet their goals — sometimes with storyboards, or Jobs-to-Be-Done, or emotional responses. The outcome is an aggregate, real-world experience (front stage) — framed as a narrative. Those user journeys often start way before users start interacting with your product — so we need to include non-digital touch points as well. Customer journey maps are just like user journey maps, just for a different persona: e.g. in B2B, customers might not be end users. Service blueprints are not about documenting the user experience. They apply user experience as starting point, and unpack it to expose how it is *internally* created — with technology, people, operations, processes involved (backstage). Journey maps and service blueprints highlight different sides of the experience story. But they have one thing in common: they help us understand the broken parts and fix them. The outcome, then, is a great UX and great internal processes that shape and enable it. Useful resources: Guide to Journey Maps + Templates, by Stéphanie Walter https://lnkd.in/erheegtf UX vs. Service Design, by Sarah Gibbons https://lnkd.in/d5mw3vVu UX Mapping Methods: A Cheat Sheet, by Sarah Gibbons https://lnkd.in/eSnExG4h Guide To Customer Journey Mapping (+ free template), by Taras Bakusevych https://lnkd.in/e-emkh5A User Journey Maps: Guides and Templates, by yours truly https://lnkd.in/dY5NtqSf ✤ Service Blueprints Service Blueprint Design System (Figma), by Jacopo Sironi https://lnkd.in/d-qrSFRY Service Blueprint Kit, by Julien Fovelle https://lnkd.in/dXmkCPDm Service Blueprint Templates, by Theydo https://lnkd.in/dUsDzYCA A Guide to Service Blueprinting (PDF), by Nicholas Remis https://lnkd.in/ejY82P5M Your Guide To Blueprinting (free PDF + Miro), by Morgan Miller, Erika Flowers https://lnkd.in/efFPAeU9 #ux #design

This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but in my experience, Critical User Journeys, Jobs-to-be-Done, and Task analysis are the same thing, just at different levels of granularity and altitude. Let’s take a look. (Mario Callegaro this one is for you :)) ➡️ Describing user goals and tasks: All three start with understanding what the user is doing (or wants to do) in a product or a product space. JTBD has a higher altitude and is looking more at motivations behind actions, while task analysis is looking at a more granular level of individual tasks. CUJs encompass both higher level goals and more granular tasks that fall under each goal. ➡️ Uncovering issues and friction points: All three methods then allow for the evaluation of the goals / tasks / jobs in the product to see whether users are able to achieve their goals and tasks successfully and to identify issues and friction points. This is normally done in usability-type studies, but could also be evaluated with logs and sentiment metrics / surveys. ➡️ Guiding product development: The three have the same ultimate goal - guide product improvement through identifying user goals/tasks and evaluating product headroom and opportunities. ‼️ Differences: There are some differences among the methods of course. For example, task analysis requires a product to exist, while JTBD could be used in a product space for early explorations. CUJs could be used for both, although in practice I’ve only seen CUJs and JTBD used as a tool to evaluate existing products. ❓What do you think about the three? To learn more about these methods check out these resources: ➡️ Critical user journeys - https://lnkd.in/gFHs39w2 ➡️ Jobs-to-be-done - https://lnkd.in/gN5gDRYu ➡️ Task analysis - https://lnkd.in/grpB_BgJ #ux #uxresearch #userexperience #userexperienceresearch #userresearch

Experience maps and journey maps both serve as fantastic research activities producing many invaluable insights — but they do differ slightly in scope, feature and characteristic. Journey maps track a user's linear path through a specific product or service, documenting predefined touch-points and interactions, in a structured sequence. Experience maps, however, provide a more comprehensive view by capturing the current emotional journey, contextual factors, and pain points that influence a person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors across multiple channels and environments. While journey maps effectively document the "what", experience maps reveal the crucial "why" behind decisions, actions and outcomes. Although some teams like to merge these two approaches, I have always found that keeping them separate enhances clarity, impact and decision making. I created this template many years ago. It's far from perfect, but it has since become an invaluable tool throughout the early stages of research and discovery. #research #insight #discovery #design

A newbie mistake I made early in product management was thinking a user journey and user flow were the same Turns out, they’re not 😅 🔹 𝗨𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 = It maps the full experience From discovering the product to (hopefully) becoming a loyal customer It comes first, high-level and emotional. Think of it as the story of what the user feels, needs, and does 🔹 𝗨𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄 = The specific path a user takes to complete a goal inside the product. Think screens, buttons, decisions, what the user clicks and when It comes after, detailed, functional, and UI-focused 𝗕𝗼𝘁𝗵 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 But they serve different purposes Mixing them up = broken experiences and missed needs So if you're starting out in product management, don’t just map flows Zoom out and ask: 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦?