journey-mappinglisted

# Journey Mapping ## Coverage Journey mapping covers the family of visualizations that lay out a user's experience as a timeline across stages, actions, thoughts, feelings, and touchpoints. The classic **customer journey map** (Jeff Patton's writing on story mapping is an adjacent influence; NN/g has codified the canonical structure) typically has a horizontal axis of stages (e.g., Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Onboarding → Use → Renew/Churn) and vertical lanes for what the user is doing, thinking, feeling, and which touchpoint they are interacting with. An **emotional curve** rendered along the timeline highlights peaks and troughs — the "moments of truth" that disproportionately shape the overall impression. A **service blueprint** (Lynn Shostack, 1984) extends the journey map downward with **front-stage** elements (what the user sees), the **line of visibility**, and **back-stage** elements (what employees, systems, and processes do that the user does not see). Below those, **support processes** show the infrastructure that enables back-stage work. Service blueprints are appropriate when the experience involves human or system handoffs that the user never sees but that determine whether the experience succeeds. The skill also covers **current-state vs future-state** maps (current documents reality and surfaces pain points; future proposes a redesigned experience and is used to align stakeholders), and the choice of **scope** — a single transaction, an entire li