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name: user-journey-map description: Use when the user needs to understand a person’s experience across stages, touchpoints, actions, thoughts, emotions, pain points, and opportunities.

User-journey map

What and why

A user-journey map tells the experience story from a specific persona’s point of view across a goal-driven journey. It makes moments of friction, uncertainty, and opportunity visible to product and service teams.

Choose it for experience discovery and service improvement. Avoid it for a technical request sequence (sequence-diagram), a dated delivery plan (gantt-chart), or a generic process with no user perspective (flowchart).

How

  1. Name the persona, situation, goal, scope, and journey start/end. State whether evidence is observed, reported, or hypothesized.
  2. Choose 4–8 stages that follow the user’s mental model, not internal team ownership.
  3. For each stage capture user actions, touchpoints/channels, questions or thoughts, emotional state, pain points, and opportunities.
  4. Add backstage dependencies only in a separate lane so the user’s experience remains primary.
  5. Rank opportunities by evidence, impact, and feasibility; do not turn an empathy map into unsupported demographic claims.

Story and styling

Use stages as columns and experience dimensions as rows. Keep the persona and goal prominent, and use a small, labeled emotional curve only when it is evidence-based. Use icons sparingly, ensure labels carry meaning, and encode pain/opportunity with text plus shape or pattern—not color alone.

If no renderer is specified, use mermaid for a simple journey/timeline-like layout or diagramsnet when the user needs a hand-arranged workshop canvas. plantuml can produce a structured activity-style approximation, but no available renderer is a dedicated journey-map model. Preserve an explicit renderer choice and explain any approximation.

Review

  • Is one persona, goal, and journey boundary explicit?
  • Are stages based on user behavior and evidence rather than org-chart phases?
  • Are touchpoints, backstage causes, pain, and opportunities distinguishable?
  • Are emotions framed as evidence or hypotheses?
  • Can a decision-maker see the next opportunity and its rationale?

Prior art and limitations

Use the journey-mapping practice described by Nielsen Norman Group and service-design principles in ISO 9241-210:2019. These are guidance for research and communication, not a machine-readable interchange standard.

The supported renderers do not encode research provenance, accessibility of workshop artifacts, or prioritization semantics. A dedicated journey-map schema with evidence and opportunity fields would be a worthwhile integration opportunity.