user journey map vs service blueprint

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Customer Journey Maps vs. Service Blueprints: What’s the difference?

When it comes to design research tools, two of the most frequently used are Customer Journey Maps and Service Blueprints . Both are incredibly valuable communication tools that show the end-to-end processes and experiences of your staff and customers. BUT, what’s the difference, and how do you know which one is right for your project?

Whenever we meet with a new client or read a project brief, we’re faced with some of the same questions. Today we’re answering those tricky questions and breaking it down for you:

What is a Customer Journey Map?

What is a Service Blueprint?

What is the purpose of each tool and why are they helpful?

What are the key differences between each tool?

How to choose the right tool for your next project?

Core Concepts of Service Design

Before we can really dive into the differences between the mapping tools used in service design, we need to explain the core concepts of service design — and we’ll use the analogy of a theatre or play.

One of the biggest differences between journey maps and service blueprints is the actors or people that are considered in each one. In service design, actors are anyone involved in customer interactions and supporting business activities and processes that directly impact the customer’s experience. For example, store clerks, customer service/support, warehouse staff, and customers themselves.

Service design also uses a theatre analogy to explain the different parts of the service, all that goes into making it work, and which parts of the service are customer facing versus operational.

Front-Stage : The front-stage includes everything the customer sees and experiences. These are activities conducted by the people involved directly with your customers. Using the analogy of a theatre, they could be the play actors, ticket sales people, snack kiosk workers, ushers… and more!

Back-Stage : Back-stage activities are behind the line of visibility and involve the people and activities that your customer’s don’t see. Back to the analogy of a play, back-stage activities can include lighting, sound, rehearsal, costumes, and a lot of people reading lines getting ready to take their turn on the front-stage. Without these activities, the show would not go on and it certainly wouldn’t be a great experience for the audience. Applying the back-stage theatre analogy to business, these jobs are often customer support representatives, warehouse workers, managers, etc.

Behind-the-Scenes: These are all of the activities that customers don’t see, but they ensure that the production goes off without a hitch. It’s all of the support processes, administrative work, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and organizational tasks that need to happen to ensure the organization is running smoothly.

Customer Journey Maps

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the end-to-end experience your customers have when they interact with your service or try to accomplish a goal through something you offer (e.g. trying to renew their driver’s license). We always recommend that journey maps are created using in-depth research (such as interviews and observations ) with your company’s real customers and users. The “actor” in customer journey mapping is the customer or end-user themselves. It’s an artifact that is created from the perspective of your customer or end-user. Typically, a journey map will also consider the front-stage experience, but won’t dive deep into the activities of other actors (or staff).

A journey map will include all of the tasks and activities of a user or customer, their pain points and challenges, and the brand touchpoints they encounter (e.g. your website, an app, a customer support person, and more). It also includes the thoughts and feelings they experience as they go along their journey. These among other attributes of the map help to tell a story of what that person’s experience was, and all of the steps and miss-steps they took along the way.

Why is it useful?

Customer journey maps are useful for highlighting key areas in the customer’s journey that provide a poor experience and highlighting opportunities for improvement within your product or service. Customer journey maps can also show major inefficiencies in the customer experience. Take for example someone who is trying to use an online system to remedy a billing issue and update their payment information — If for some reason the online service doesn’t work or provide the information they need, your customer resorts to calling the support team. Here, they wait on hold before having to explain themselves to a few different people and their goal of fixing their credit card information be accomplished. As you can imagine, and have probably experienced in your own lifetime, this is a bad experience. By outlining this arduous journey, we discover key areas of improvement and places where processes could be streamlined.

The ultimate goal of customer journey mapping is to:

Identify areas for improvement and places to reduce friction – ultimately making things easier for the customer.

Identify new product, service, or feature opportunities!

Prioritize which areas of the experience should be fixed first – (journey maps are great at showing the relative importance of one issue over another, since they are all in one map together)

Bridge the gap between siloed teams. Not every department is focused on customer experience, but surely the customer’s experience throughout different parts of the journey will impact your organization’s various departments (such as marketing, IT, and customer service).

Build empathy for your customers by stepping into their shoes. You’ll find out what their experience is really like, what’s motivating them, and most importantly, what’s bugging them! So you can fix it and design a better experience.

Service Blueprints

Okay, so now you know what a customer journey map is and why they are helpful tools. Let’s dive into service blueprints.

What is a service blueprint?

Service Blueprints focus on how an organization supports the customer journey, keeping customers, staff, and other key players at the forefront. Blueprints depict the business’s processes and operations that occur within the front-stage (customer facing), backstage (internal) and behind-the-scenes!  Ultimately, a service blueprint is a business process mapping tool. The main differentiator between service blueprints and other mapping tools? Instead of “swimming lanes” used in traditional workflow diagrams to depict different task owners, we approach service blueprints from a human-centered lens . Similar to customer journey maps, service blueprints should be created through research with the actors (in this case, staff) involved. This might mean shadowing employees as they interact with customers and go about their day-to-day work, or conducting several interviews over a few days or weeks with employees. By doing this, we can understand what the back-end processes are and where your employees think things are going wrong/could be improved.

Service blueprints also tend to be a bit more specific – zooming in on a single business process vs. looking at an end-to-end journey with an entire service.

Service blueprints usually focus on actions and physical evidence (aka tools and technology needed by the actors to do their work). To summarize, the anatomy of a service blueprint includes:

Physical Evidence (tools, technology, websites, resources, etc.)

Customer Journey (actions/steps taken by customers)

Front-Stage (actions taken by employees who directly interact with customers, as well as the technology they’re using)

Back-Stage (actions taken by employees who help front-stage staff behind the line of visibility, or front-stage staff who complete an activity outside of the view of customers)

Behind-the-Scenes (actions taken by employees who support the business internally)

Pain Points (issues or challenges that staff might experience when completing certain tasks)

Time (the length of time it takes to complete certain tasks or a series of tasks)

Why are service blueprints useful?

Service blueprints are an amazing tool to outline the inner workings of your business. They look at all of the activities (good, bad, and useless) that your employees are doing and highlight the reasons why parts of the customer experience are failing. In particular, service blueprints help to:

Pinpoint weaknesses in the current business processes.

Find opportunities to optimize business and support processes – with a detailed breakdown of all the steps involved.

Tie the customer journey together with the inner workings of the company.

Understand complications and inefficiencies within your organization

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Outwitly | UX & Service Design (@outwitly)

Journey Maps vs. Service Blueprints over on Outwitly’s Instagram account!

Key Differences Between Journey Maps and Service Blueprints

Now that we understand both of these mapping tools, let’s call out their key differences:

Customer Journey Map:

Depict an end-to-end experience as a narrative

Focus on customer/users

Focus on the customer’s experience, thoughts and feelings, and pain points when trying to accomplish their goal

Focus on the customer actions and some front-stage (customer facing) tasks, tools, and touchpoints

Service Blueprint:

Depict the business processes and operations

Focus on customers and mostly on staff (and any other actors involved)

Focus on how the organization supports the customer journey (what activities, tasks, and physical evidence are needed)

Focus less on the actual visceral experience – but will usually show pain points

Focus on the front-stage, backstage, and behind-the-scenes tasks (using the customer journey as a foundation)

How to Choose the Right Tool?

Ultimately, these tools are complementary to one another. The customer journey map provides the step-by-step tasks that form the foundation for a service blueprint. To be specific, the activities completed by customers are the first row of tasks in a service blueprint. Journey maps can help you understand where to focus and which business areas may need further investigation using a service blueprint and service blueprints will breakdown all of the processes involved in making that experience a reality.

When to choose a Customer Journey Map

Start with a journey map when:

You want a broader understanding of your end-to-end customer experience

You need to learn about how your customer is experiencing your offerings (services, products, user interfaces, customer support, online touch points)

You don’t have a lot of clarity about where things are going wrong or why your customers are unhappy

Then once, you have a deeper understanding of the areas which need improvement — launch a service blueprinting activity to find out what is happening behind-the-scenes in the company.

When to choose a Service Blueprint

Create a service blueprint when:

You feel confident in your understanding of the customer’s all-encompassing experience, but need to alleviate friction with a specific pain point

You want to take a more detailed look into a specific process and find efficiencies!

Getting Started

If you want to know more about how to create a journey map, dive into our three-part blog series all about customer journey mapping!

The Power of Customer Journey Mapping: 101

How to Research and Build a Customer Journey Map: 201

How to Make your Journey Map Actionable and Creating Change: 301

Resources we like…

The Difference Between a Journey Map and a Service Blueprint by Practical Service Design

Defining Service Blueprints by Nielson Norman Group

Similar blog posts you might like...

Making your Journey Map Actionable and Creating Change: 301

Service Design, UX, & HCD: What’s the difference?

7 Steps to Better Customer Experience (CX)

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Service Blueprints vs. Journey Maps: differences & use cases

August 25, 2023

by Clockwork

Investment in customer experience drives customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and more. We use a few key tools to help our clients improve their customer experience—Service Blueprints and Journey Maps.

What are Service Blueprints and Journey Maps?

Before we delve into the differences and use cases, let’s get a grasp of what these tools are all about.

Service Blueprints

Service Blueprints visualize the service journey from both the customer’s and the employee’s perspective.

Service Blueprints consist of three layers:

• Top layer: the steps and interactions the customer has while using the service.
• Middle layer: the visible touchpoints where customers interact with the service provider.
• Bottom layer: the behind-the-scenes processes and resources involved in delivering the service.

Journey Maps

A Journey Map is a visual representation of the entire customer journey, weaving together each touchpoint and interaction.

Unlike Service Blueprints, Journey Maps focus solely on the customers’ emotions, thoughts, and experiences at each stage of their journey. They are valuable tools for businesses to connect emotionally with customers and improve their experience.

Complementary tools

Service Blueprints and Journey Maps have the same goal of improving customer experience, but they use different methods to achieve it. Let’s dive into the key differences of these tools:

Depth of detail

Service Blueprints delve deep into the nitty-gritty of service delivery, mapping out internal processes, resources, and frontline interactions. They provide a detailed view of how the service operates from an organizational perspective.

Journey Maps show the overall customer experience, including emotions, problems, and happy moments at each interaction. Their strength lies in presenting a holistic, empathetic view of the customer’s experience.

Service Blueprints empower service designers, process managers, and frontline staff to streamline processes, optimize resources, and ensure seamless service delivery.

Journey Maps, on the contrary, are the perfect companions for customer experience strategists, marketers, and product designers. Understanding customers’ emotional highs and lows enables strategies that delight customers and earn their loyalty.

Service Blueprints are more quantitatively focused, allowing businesses to measure and analyze specific service metrics. This includes metrics like service efficiency, average handling time, and resource utilization.

On the other hand, Journey Maps offer a qualitative perspective by capturing the emotional and experiential aspects of the customer journey. Metrics like customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer loyalty metrics align with Journey Maps.

Now, let’s look at their real-world applications.

Service Blueprint use cases

Service Blueprints help optimize service efficiency and streamline internal processes by identifying bottlenecks and optimizing resource allocation. This empowers businesses to deliver services with speed and precision. Additionally, Service Blueprints support smooth integration of new services into existing processes and provide a consistent customer experience.

Service Blueprints also help businesses create effective training programs for frontline staff by showing how service delivery works. This ensures employees are well-equipped to provide exceptional service.

Journey Map use cases

Journey Maps display customer emotions throughout their journey. This helps businesses create products that meet customer desires and needs. Creating a customer journey map helps find and fix problems in the customer experience. Building strong customer relationships by understanding customers’ emotions throughout their journey helps companies build deeper connections and foster customer loyalty.

Service Blueprints and Journey Maps can support business leaders in creating great customer experiences . While Service Blueprints delve into the organizational intricacies of service delivery, Journey Maps focus on customers’ emotions, experiences, and motivations. Remember, both tools are equally essential to customer experience excellence.

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Service Design

Service Blueprint vs Journey Map | The Complete Guide

Navdeep Singh Gill | 13 Dec 2022

Table of Content

In this article, additional resources.

• Introduction to Digital Platform Strategy?
• Service Design Tools and its Processes
• Service Blueprint Benefits and its Elements
• How to get started with Application Modernization?
• Visual Perception in User Experience Design
• CSS Animation Keyframes and its Advantages

Introduction to Service Blueprint and Journey Map

A customer journey map's primary focus is learning more about your end users, while a service blueprint's primary focus is documenting how your organization creates that experience.

What are Customer Journey Maps?

How can we provide value to the customer? can be answered using a customer journey map, which focuses outwardly on the customer's perspective. Understanding the customer's circumstances or behaviors as they interact with the offer, service, or experience forms the basis of a customer journey map. A customer's interactions with the company can also be included, helping to chart their journey and exposing any pain points along the way. The customer journey or perspective is mapped out in the top lanes as the first stage in a standard service blueprint.

The process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users and enhancing user satisfaction/ experience. Click to explore about our, User Experience Design Principles

When to use a Journey Map?

It often entails the thorough study and precise note-taking of the steps your clients must take to transact with your business. You might need to plan out various customer types with various journeys, needs, and micro journeys' inside the various stages of the overall experience. The client journey can be difficult to visualize, but using this technique will help your business give the trip a narrative foundation. It gives everyone involved something concrete to concentrate on and aids in their understanding of their role in delivering the desired Customer Experience from the client's standpoint.

What are Service Blueprints?

It asks, "What are we doing to give the service?" from an internal perspective on an organization's processes. The Service Blueprint is relevant to anything that has to do with providing an answer to that inquiry. The real heart of it lies in the lanes underneath the customer journey. To provide the experience, they envision the many support systems, team member operations, and actions that take place invisibly from the client's perspective.

When to use a Service Blueprint?

When it comes to the elements that could make your customers' experiences the greatest they can be, blueprinting goes much deeper than path mapping. It's time to consider how you can enhance that journey and what your business can do to surpass expectations once you thoroughly understand your customer's journey. You may begin to comprehend the work at hand by adding the (often) cross-functional actions that would need to occur for that to be repeatable and scalable. To boost your company, it's a good idea to start with the smallest adjustments.

UX is the most important building block in software development. Even its priority is higher than User Interface. Click to explore about our, UX in Software Product Development

Customer Journey Maps Vs. Service Blueprints

Consider it as the sequel to service plans. Blueprints depict complicated situations encompassing numerous service-related offers, similar to it. A cross-functional effort (i.e., coordination of various departments that all contribute to a user's end-to-end experience) is necessary for omnichannel, multiple touchpoints, or blueprinting experiences.

Both may share several elements. The customer-actions swimlane in the customer-journey map and it, for instance, will be the same if the two maps are based on the same persona and have the same scope. The other swim lanes, though, will be unique.

Understanding the end user's journey is the aim of customer journey maps. Their feelings and thoughts are part of this adventure. In contrast, it reflect the organization's viewpoint and consist of front-, back-, and support-stage activities. While the primary goal of a service blueprint is to describe how the company creates that experience, the main goal of it is to understand more about the end user.

Although the phases in customer journey maps and service plan frequently line up, the two visualizations show various angles on each step. Phase 1 (the blue area) of it is seen through the eyes of the customers' deeds, musings, and feelings. The same phase 1 is seen from the company's perspective in the similar service blueprint, and it shows what the organization is doing throughout time to generate a consistent customer experience.

Take it for purchasing a car as an illustration. The research and discovery phase would be the first on the customer journey map. It would provide information on what consumers do (search online and visit car showrooms), how they feel (overwhelmed and enthusiastic), and what they think. The service plan would describe, for instance, what the auto dealership does at this point in the client experience—welcoming the client, adding new vehicles to the website, and providing knowledge and advice.

A designing process which focuses on creating engaging web Interfaces with logical thoughts, behaviors, and actions. Click to explore about our, Interaction Design Principles and its Best Practices

What are their key features?

The key features of Journey Map are below:

• Follows a single persona's journey through a key workflow with a persona emphasis.
• Each trip is broken down into key workflows (or stages), which might be linear or discrete tasks completed over predetermined intervals (end of the week, once a month, etc.).
• Next, user trips can be divided into discrete tasks. Every step shows typical workflows, specific tasks, touchpoints, problems, and opportunities.
• A line that depicts the emotional state at each stage of the journey and icons that capture the step's main notion are two more visual ways to present additional information.

Following are the key Features of a Service Blueprints

Service plans can be used in a variety of ways but typically include the following sections and content:

• Include opportunities for both the backstage (where employees are focused) and the front stage (where customers are focused).
• The client is the one who experiences the front stage.
• What is experienced behind the scenes is what goes on inside the business.
• Opportunities A summary of opportunities per step is provided by swim lanes.
• Describe the main procedures that the client experiences from beginning to conclusion.
• Divide those essential functions into essential journeys. These travels may be linear or comprise smaller groups of journeys with more intricate workflows that need to be recorded.
• Each journey is broken into basic workflows, which may be linear or comprise discrete tasks completed over predetermined periods of time (end of the week, once a month, etc.).
• Then, journeys are further divided into discrete tasks. Each stage shows typical workflows, specific jobs, problems, and opportunities.
• Finally, you can use visual aids to present further information, such as a line that depicts the emotional state at this stage of the journey and icons that capture the step's main notion.

Service Blueprints are companions to Customer Journey Maps. It helps organizations get a complete picture of how services are implemented by the business and consumed by customers. However both are just vehicles for planning and communicating journeys and experiences, so they are as reliable as the inputs used to inform and create them. Journey mapping and service blueprints are essential for optimizing the customer experience. They focus on slightly different things, but both are important if your organization wants to optimize the customer experience and streamline internal processes effectively.

• Discover here about Customer Experience (CX) vs. User Experience (UX)
• Click to explore about Conversational User Interface

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Journey mapping 101.

December 9, 2018 2018-12-09

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Journey maps are a common UX tool. They come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. Depending on the context, they can be used in a variety of ways. This article covers the basics: what a journey map is (and is not), related terminology, common variations, and how we can use journey maps.

In This Article:

Definition of a journey map, key components of a journey map, journey-map variations, why use journey maps.

Definition: A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.

The terms ‘user journey map’ and ‘customer journey map’ can be used interchangeably. Both reference a visualization of a person using your product or service.

While the argument can be made that the term ‘customer’ does a disservice to the method (because, especially for certain business-to-business products, not all of end users are technically customers, i.e., product buyers), alignment on what you call the map is far less important than alignment on the content within the map.

Journey maps come in all shapes and sizes. Regardless of how they look, journey maps have the following 5 key elements in common:

Scenario + Expectations

Journey phases, actions, mindsets, and emotions, opportunities.

The actor is the persona or user who experiences the journey. The actor is who the journey map is about — a point of view. Actors usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data.

Provide one point of view per map in order to build a strong, clear narrative. For example, a university might choose either a student or a faculty member as actor — each would result in different journeys. (To capture both viewpoints, the university will need to build two separate maps, one for each of the two user types.)

The scenario describes the situation that the journey map addresses and is associated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations. For example, one scenario could be switching mobile plans to save money, and expectations for it include to easily find all the information needed to make a decision.

Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated — for products that are yet in the design stage.

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events (such as shopping or taking a trip), describe a process (thus involve a set of transitions over time), or might involve multiple channels .

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario.

Here are some examples:

• For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be discover, try, buy, use, seek support.
• For big (or luxury) purchases (like buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
• For a business-to-business scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.

These are behaviors, thoughts, and feelings the actor has throughout the journey and that are mapped within each of the journey phases.

Actions are the actual behaviors and steps taken by users. This component is not meant to be a granular step-by-step log of every discrete interaction. Rather, it is a narrative of the steps the actor takes during that phase.

Mindsets correspond to users’ thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey. Ideally, these are customer verbatims from research.

Emotions are plotted as single line across the journey phases, literally signaling the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience. Think of this line as a contextual layer of emotion that tells us where the user is delighted versus frustrated.

Opportunities (along with additional context such as ownership and metrics) are insights gained from mapping; they speak to how the user experience can be optimized. Insights and opportunities help the team draw knowledge from the map:

• What needs to be done with this knowledge?
• Who owns what change?
• Where are the biggest opportunities?
• How are we going to measure improvements we implement?

There are several concepts closely related and thus easily confused with journey maps.

It is important to note that this section is only meant to help your personal understanding and clarification of these terms. It is not advised to debate or attempt to shift a whole organization’s language to abide by the definitions stated here. Instead, use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of another method that your team has not previously considered.

Journey Map vs. Experience Map

Think of an experience map as a parent to a journey map. A journey map has a specific actor (a singular customer or user of a product) and specific scenario (of a product or service), while an experience map is broader on both accounts — a generic human undergoing a general human experience.

The experience map is agnostic of a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding a general human behavior; in contrast, a customer journey map is specific and focused on a particular business or product.

For example, imagine the world before the ridesharing market existed (Uber, Lyft, Bird, or Limebike, to name a few). If we were to create an experience map of how a person gets from one place to another, the map would likely include walking, biking, driving, riding with a friend, public transportation, or calling a taxi. Using that experience map we could then isolate pain points: unknown fares, bad weather, unpredictable timing, paying in cash, and so on. Using these pain points, we would then create a future journey map for specific product: how does a particular type of user call a car using the Lyft app?

Journey Map vs. Service Blueprint

If journey maps are the children to experience maps, then service blueprints are the grandchildren. They visualize the relationships between different service components (such as people or processes) at various touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. They are extensions of journey maps, but instead of being focused on the user (and taking the user’s viewpoint), they are focused on the business (and take its perspective).

For the Lyft scenario above, we would take the journey map and expand it with what Lyft does internally to support that customer journey. The blueprint could include matching the user to a driver, contacting the driver, calculating fares, and so on.

Journey Map vs. User Story Map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities. Each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view; the description focuses on what the user wants to do, and how that feature will help. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”

A user story map is a visual version of a user story. For example, take the user story above (“As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”) and imagine writing out the different steps that the team plans for the user to take when using that functionality. These steps could be: logging in, beginning deposit, taking picture of check, and entering transaction details. For each step, we can document required features: enabling camera access, scanning check and auto filling numbers, and authorizing signature. In a user story map, these features are written on sticky notes, then arranged based on the product release that each functionality will be added to.

While, at a glance, a user story map may look like a journey map, journey maps are meant for discovery and understanding (think big picture), while user story maps are for planning and implementation (think little picture).

Although a journey map and user story map may contain some of the same pieces, they are used at different points of the process. For example, imagine our journey map for Lyft indicated that a pain point appeared when the user was in a large group. To address it, the team may introduce a multicar-call option. We could create a user story map to break this feature (multicar call) into smaller pieces, so a product-development team could plan release cycles and corresponding tasks.

The benefits of journey maps (and most other UX mappings ) are two-fold. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model for the whole team. Fragmented understanding is a widespread problem in organizations because success metrics are siloed; it is no one’s responsibility to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical goal of journey mapping, because, without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used to communicate an understanding of your user or service to all involved. Journey maps are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise, and that creates a shared vision. The maps can also become the basis for decision making as the team moves forward.

Journey mapping is a process that provides a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to address customers’ pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, create a better experience for your users.

Additional articles are available, discussing: 

• When to create customer journey maps
• The 5-step process
• Journey mapping in real life

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User Experience Maps vs. Service Blueprints

Alex Fedorov • VP of Design

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Experience mapping has become a very popular approach to visualizing and aligning an organization around the experiences they are creating for their customers. A simple Google search will reveal several types of maps, however, they can only be useful if you know what each is designed to accomplish and which to use when.  Journey Maps , Experience Maps, and Service Blueprints are three common visualization tools and strategies that look very similar and work to accomplish similar objectives, but they have different applications. Knowing the difference between these tools is similar to knowing the difference between a flathead, a phillips head, and a hex head screwdriver. Choose the right tool and it will make your objective significantly easier to achieve. Choose the wrong tool and you may not fully accomplish what you set out.

You can read the extended version below or if pressed for time, you can jump to the essential takeaways

People often confuse and interchange these maps when discussing and labeling them. Although somewhat different, maps and blueprints each help to build a holistic, end-to-end picture of a user experience. Each of them includes a different point of view, scope, and focus, but the point in constructing them is the same — to identify opportunities for improvement in a product or service.

Timing is Everything

Maps and Blueprints should be considered at three different stages of product development.

• When an offering is beginning to hit critical mass . Most startups adapt their product for each new customer they can sign on. While this approach is necessary to get off the ground, there comes a time when it can no longer scale.
• When a more mature product needs a more strategic approach . It’s very easy for a seasoned product to fall into the trap of constantly playing catch up with a backlog of user requests. Maps and blueprints allow product owners to make the case for a more deliberate and more forethoughtful approach to product development.
• When a product is approaching a rebuild . Before diving into a 2.0 effort, it is wise to take a step back and analyze the current experience from a comprehensive point of view.

Anatomy of a Map

As the name suggests, maps document a course from one place to another highlighting milestones, obstacles, and alternate paths along the way. They both focus on the current (flawed) state of an experience, not the future (idealistic) state.

Let’s start with basic map anatomy. Maps should always include stages, goals, emotional state, and pain points/opportunities.

Stages:  major chapters and milestones ex: discovery

Goal(s):  what  the stakeholder  wants to accomplish at each stage ex: drive impressions

Emotional State:  the reactive sentiment of the stakeholder at each stage ex: user is feeling uncertain

Pain Points/Opportunities:  aggravations identified as part of the experience (Opportunities are pain points reworded as How Might We… statements.) ex: C2A is unclear (or, How might we make the C2A clearer?)

Maps can optionally include additional swimlanes like user actions, logistics/channels, compelling forces or other custom dimensions.

User Actions:  tasks a stakeholder must take to progress to the next stage ex: upload contacts

Logistics:  channels, locations, or tools a stakeholder uses to accomplish their actions ex: Excel

Compelling Forces: the external and internal pushes and pulls a stakeholder experiences when making choices at each stage in the experience (based on Bob Moestra and Chris Spiek –  Forces of Progress ) ex: upcoming off-season

Custom Dimensions:  any other measurable aspect specific to your experience ex: trust

Journey Maps vs. Experience Maps

Some distinguish between the two maps by what part of the user experience they cover:

• Journey maps cover the path from discovery of a need/desire through to finding brands and products appropriate, to purchase (essentially, the journey up to becoming a customer).
• Experience maps include the customer journey (from need discovery through finding brands) but also including the time through ownership, usage, service, support, recommendations, reviews, references, responses and referrals (essentially the full experience of a customer).

At Fresh Tilled Soil, we consider them as part of the same timeline — encompassing the entirety of the experience from before a user is aware of a pain/need, through solution discovery, to after they are done using it. Where we split the two maps is in the point of view/perspective, the depth of detail they include, and the validation they require.

Journey Maps

Journey maps typically view the individual as a  customer  of the organization. They are drawn from the perspective of the customer only. They are unique in that they are more brief and only include one, generic stakeholder perspective. This means when referring to the stakeholder, the map could be alluding to multiple people depending on the stage or user actions. For example, the buyer and the user are often different people when mapping enterprise software but in this case they get lumped together into one representative “customer.” If there are points in the journey where customers have varying reactions, a simple branch in scenarios is made without trying to assign or organize that branch of behavior to a particular user group.

One advantage of a journey map over an experience map is the amount of time investment required. If you need an expeditious way to get things moving, journey maps can usually be charted in two or three hours. For this reason they are a popular tool during the Understand phase of Design Sprints, however they are not restricted to use within the entirety of a Design Sprint. The downside, of course, is lack of depth. Because it genericizes the stakeholder it can overlook the insights you would get by examining a unique user set.

On rare occasion journey maps can be employed to chart out a future state of a not yet existing product or service which helps a team to understand what might need to be considered in the design process. However, these future facing journey maps tend to be more idealistic than realistic so use with discretion.

Experience Maps

Experience maps include all the touch points from both the customer and business perspective. They provide an objective view of all interactions. They also include multiple personas. One thing to remember when executing this effort is not to confuse personas with roles. It can be valuable to include different user roles (ex: buyer vs. daily user) however, your best insights are going to come from examining personas based on behavioral characteristics (ex: frequent diner vs. special occasion diner).

Another thing that distinguishes experience maps from journey maps is the amount of research and polish that goes into the composition of the experience map. While journey maps are a quick-get-started tool, experience maps go through a validation process to ensure that elements were not overlooked or incorrect assumptions made. This validation occurs after the experience maps have been developed to ensure their integrity. The additional work to research and validate experience maps can cause them to take a week or two complete, longer than the journey map but still shorter than most development sprints, which makes them a very reasonable strategic activity to attempt.

The output of an experience map, similar to journey maps, is to illuminate opportunities for improvement. They can also be used as an internal communication tool for companies who want to demonstrate to employees how each contributor impacts the bigger picture. While some organizations use experience maps to capture a snapshot in time of an offering experience, they can also be treated as living document, updated regularly as the experience evolves.

Service Blueprints

A distinct feature of blueprints is that they are internally-focused. They view how a service is experienced by a customer. Much like an architectural blueprint details the construction and inner workings of a building, a service blueprint illustrates many layers of supporting structural components of a single solution. Service blueprints are especially helpful if you are looking for ways to reform internal systems in an effort to cut costs or provide a superior offering. They are an ideal approach to experiences that are omni-channel, involve multiple touch-points, or require a cross-functional effort (e.g., coordinating multiple departments). As the name indicates, they are a better tool for pure service offerings or hybrid product/service offerings than for pure products.

Like maps, service blueprints contain stages (sometimes a limited set) and user actions, however they also contain several tiers of actions by the organization offering the product or service. This includes frontstage actions, backstage actions, and supporting services.

Frontstage Actions:  performed by the organizations that the user can clearly observe through touchpoints ex: deliver contract

Backstage Actions:  performed by the organization that the user cannot directly witness ex: composition of contract

Supporting Services:  third party services an organization employs to perform a certain task ex: digital contract signing

Time:  actual or expected time to complete action or stage ex: 20 minutes

Quality Measures:  KPI or other internal metric by which to quantify success ex: number carts abandoned per sales completed

Additionally, internal metrics like time and quality measures can also be added to add a quantifiable element to a service blueprint. Whereas user roles or personas are detailed in maps, organizational departments or teams are specified in the service blueprint. This helps to understand the flow of information and responsibility between internal teams.

Another unique step in blueprinting is to detail the flow of actions and how each one relates to another. Not only are you organizing actions by different groups along a timeline, you are connecting them to each other, dictating order and often times including how information or responsibility is transitioned from one party to another.

At Fresh Tilled Soil, we did our own blueprinting of the process behind our Design Sprint offering.

After completing our blueprint we realized that we were not doing all we could to help set expectations for Design Sprint participants. Since then we’ve instituted a pre-sprint webinar with all those who plan to take part in an upcoming Design Sprint and it has had a significant impact on setting expectations for the week and starting strong on day one. We also realized that a new Keynote was being created for every new Design Sprint. We’ve created one master Design Sprint facilitation deck that can be copied and customized for each Design Sprint, saving us approximately six hours of prep time per engagement.

Essential Takeaways

• Employ a Journey Map, Experience Map, or Service Blueprint effort when you want to take a strategic approach to product management or product redesign. It’s a small enough effort to fit into a single design or development cycle and can help set the right perspective for a longer series of work.
• All three tools chronicle the user experience in a holistic snapshot and highlight opportunities for improvement.
• Journey maps are quick (1–2 hours), simpler, and contain only the lens of a single, generic user. You should use a journey map if you know where you want to focus or if you know the source(s) of most of your customer’s friction. (e.g., the checkout process of a retail website)
• Experience maps contain more detail, the perspectives of multiple personas, and are validated for assurance. You should use an experience map if you don’t know exactly where the problem is. (e.g., online sales of a retail website are dropping, and you want to discover where/why)
• Service blueprints examine the internal processes used to deliver on a customer experience.

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Talk to customers better with a user journey map

Georgina Guthrie

May 15, 2024

From the second a customer sets eyes on a brand, they begin what’s known as a ‘user journey’. It might not be a particularly long journey, or one with a happy end — but whether they buy, pass, cheer, or complain after that initial ‘hello’, it’s a journey nonetheless. 

In the world of product management , knowing the journey your users go on when they interact with your brand gives you the competitive advantage. Why? Because knowing where your potential customers are, what they’re doing, and how they’re feeling means you can tailor your touchpoints to mirror their state of mind and intent. 

It’s the difference between someone with a microphone yelling their offering in a stranger’s face and an empathetic salesperson who’s done their research sitting down with a customer to hear about their needs and then offering a tailored solution to match their goals. Who do you think will have more success? 

Let’s dive into the world of user journey maps. 

What is a journey map?

A journey map (aka a ‘user journey map’ or ‘ customer journey map ’), is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes while engaging with a company. That could be buying a product, visiting a site, liking a TikTok post — anything. 

As with all journeys, there is an endpoint (usually a sale, but not always), that is reached via a series of steps. Both of these are called ‘conversions’, and they fall into two distinct categories:

• Macroconversions are the primary goals of your website or app. It’s usually a sale, but it could also be a donation, signing up, contacting the sales team, getting a quote, and so on. 
• Microconversions are small, positive interactions that lead towards a macroconversion. Or not. 

Ultimately, a user journey map gives you insight into your customers’ movements as they move from one stage to another. 

As you can probably imagine, this isn’t a straightforward path — users abandon carts, shop around, sign up before making a purchase, and so on — and that’s fine. This is what the journey map is all about. Showing businesses where their touchpoints are, plus how smooth the journey is as a whole.

The key stages of the user journey

Typically, it’s split up into several key stages that represent different points of interaction or decision-making. While not every user journey will be the same, here’s a breakdown of the main stages. 

1. Awareness

Maybe it was a banner ad, word of mouth, or a photo on social media, or stumbling onto your website — at some point, the prospective user has noticed you. This is where it all begins. The focus here is on first impressions and sparking interest.

2. Consideration

At this stage, potential customers are aware of your brand and start considering it as an option. They compare your offerings with competitors, which usually involves reading reviews and delving deeper into your story to understand what you offer. Content that educates and informs tends to be influential here, along with genuine testimonials. 

3. Acquisition

This is when you achieve your conversion. The customer has decided to purchase or engage with your product or service. Your focus here is on making the buying process as smooth as possible so you don’t lose customers due to frustrations or complications.

We’ve all experienced a bad company that’s overzealous when it comes to getting you on board but totally disinterested once they’ve got your cash. This is what you want to avoid. Once your customer has made a purchase, it’s your job to give them the support they need post-sale. This stage is about keeping satisfaction high and helping with any issues.

If customers are happy with their purchase and the support you offer, they move into the loyalty zone. Loyal customers are often repeat shoppers — which means you don’t need to spend as much on new customer acquisition. Loyalty programs and ongoing engagement are important strategies here. 

6. Advocacy

Want to keep marketing costs even lower? Turn loyal customers into brand advocates. These folks don’t just repurchase — they actively promote your brand through word of mouth, social media, and other channels. It’s a powerful form of marketing as it is driven by genuine customer satisfaction and trust. Allowing for reviews on your site is a great way to provide a platform for your happy shoppers to preach your offering from the rooftops.

User journey examples

Let’s take a look at how various user journeys play out in the real world with some fictional examples. 

Example 1: Jane, the online shopper

Let’s take a look at your average online retailer. This journey map starts from the moment a potential customer first hears about the brand and extends right the way through to the post-purchase experience.

Jane, our fictional customer, discovers the online store through a social media ad featuring a summer sale. She clicks through because the ad captures her interest with the kind of dress she’s been looking for, coupled with a promising discount.

Intrigued by the offerings, Jane browses through various product categories. She reads product descriptions, checks customer reviews, and compares items with her other online go-tos. The website offers helpful filters and comparison tools that aid her decision-making process.

3. Decision

After narrowing down her choices, Jane adds a summer dress to her cart. She proceeds to checkout, where the process is streamlined — no unnecessary steps or information required, just simple fields for payment and delivery.

The retailer sends Jane a confirmation email immediately after purchase, followed by a tracking link once the item is shipped. The communication is clear and keeps her well-informed.

After getting her dress, the company invites Jane to join a loyalty program offering points for future discounts. She’s also encouraged to share feedback on her shopping experience.

Satisfied with her purchase and the overall experience, Jane leaves a positive review and recommends the store to her friends. She also follows the brand on social media to catch future deals.

Example 2: Alex, the office worker  

Alex is stressed and busy and is seeking a way to relax from work. He doesn’t have time to go to yoga classes. He wants something more seamless and effort-free, so he considers signing up for a meditation app to add some zen to his day. Here’s his journey. 

Alex hears about a meditation app from a podcast discussing mental health and wellness. The host mentions a free trial, which piques Alex’s interest.

He downloads the app and starts the free trial. The app offers a variety of guided meditation sessions for sleep, anxiety, and focus. Alex explores the offerings to see what suits him best.

Impressed with the quality of the guided sessions and the app’s user-friendly interface, Alex subscribes to the premium version to access more features.

Throughout his subscription, Alex receives personalized session recommendations based on his usage patterns. The app sends gentle reminders and motivational messages to encourage regular practice.

As a subscriber, Alex is invited to exclusive webinars and given early access to new features. He regularly uses the app and starts noticing improvements in his sleep and stress levels.

Alex writes a detailed review about his positive experience with the app on the app store and shares his progress on social media, tagging the app. He recommends the app to friends looking for similar things. Alex has gone from casual shopper to loyal advocate, all thanks to the app’s great offering and well-tailored user journey.

Are journey maps really worth the effort?

Journey maps are incredibly useful for understanding your customers’ experiences. Here’s why they’re worth it.

• Know your customers better: These maps give a clear view of the customer journey, making it easier to see where customers are getting stuck or losing interest. This is something that directly translates into revenue.
• Find and fix problems: Identifying pain points is straightforward with a journey map. Once you know where the issues lie, you can start making targeted improvements to enhance the overall experience.
• Improve teamwork across your company: When everyone can see the customer journey laid out, it’s easier to align your team’s efforts. This helps ensure that everyone, from marketing to product development , is on the same page.
• Make more accurate (and profitable) choices: With a good understanding of the customer journey, decisions become more data-driven. Knowing which touchpoints matter most lets you better allocate resources to improve those key moments. 
• Add empathy to your comms : Data also means you can tailor your communications to match your customer’s mood. Will they be eager to buy, or in the considered and critical research stage? Get under their skin to talk to them in a way that is empathetic to their state of mind.
• Keep improving : Regular updates to your journey maps can help you stay ahead of the curve, adapting to changes in customer behavior and market conditions quickly.

Journey-map variations

Journey maps come in different shapes and sizes and sometimes get mixed up with similar diagrams. Each type serves a specific purpose, so let’s take a closer look at what those are. 

• Current state journey maps: These show you the customer journey as it currently stands, including real-time interactions and emotions at various touch points. Use them to spot immediate areas for improvement. 
• Future state journey maps: Unlike current state maps, these show your ideal future journey. They are strategic , focusing on where you want your customer journey to be (rather than where it is right now).
• Day-in-the-life maps: These offer a broader view of your customer’s daily activities, not limited to interactions with a specific product or service. They help you get to grips with the customer’s overall lifestyle.
• Micro-journey maps: These are focused on a specific interaction or short sequence within the larger customer journey. They’re useful for giving you a detailed look at particular aspects of the customer experience.

Journey map vs. user story map

User story maps are used in Agile development . They help developers organize and prioritize user stories (short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the user). While journey maps visualize the end-to-end customer experience, user story maps focus on how features and functions will be developed to meet user needs throughout a project lifecycle .

Journey map vs. experience map

Journey maps focus specifically on the interactions between the customer and a company’s product or service, whereas experience maps cover a wider range of interactions. 

These include the customer’s entire ecosystem and multiple touchpoints that may not involve the company directly. Experience maps offer a broader understanding of the user’s overall experiences and context — ideal for when you need a bird’s-eye view.

Journey map vs. service blueprint

While journey maps are focused on the customer’s external experience, service blueprints delve into the internal operations that facilitate these experiences. Use them when you need operational insights and improvements.

How to create a journey map

First, let’s take a look at the key components that will form the backbone of your map. 

• Personas : It’s tricky to talk to a big faceless mass — but much easier one-on-one, when you can focus on details. A user persona is essentially a fictional representation of your typical customer, and based on real data (demographics, behaviors, goals, etc). Personas help you tailor the journey map to reflect the experiences of entire user segments while staying specific and personal. 
• Timeline : The timeline is the backbone of the journey map. It outlines the stages or phases that a customer goes through as they interact with your product or service. This could range from initial awareness, to post-purchase reviews.
• Touchpoints : These are the points of interaction between the customer and the business. Working out your various touch points helps you understand where customers engage with you, whether online or in real life. 
• Emotions : Charting the customer’s emotions throughout their journey lets you understand their feelings at various stages. This emotional graph helps you locate moments of delight or frustration, guiding improvements to enhance the overall experience.
• Channels : Knowing which channels these interactions take place is also vital. These can include physical locations, digital platforms, or indirect mediums like social media or advertising.
• Pain points and opportunities: Finally, identifying both pain points and opportunities within the journey allows businesses to pinpoint areas needing attention and areas where they can further enhance the customer experience.

Now we know the key terms and phrases, let’s look at the journey.

1. Identify the persona

Start by defining the persona at the heart of your journey map. This is more than just a sketch — it’s a rich, detailed profile built from real user research. Go beyond basic demographics to dive into what really makes your users tick: their motivations, the challenges they face, and their everyday behaviors. This in-depth understanding sets the stage for a journey map that truly reflects the customer experience.

2. Set the scene and expectations

Next, pinpoint the specific scenarios where your persona interacts with your service or product. This could range from their initial discovery of your brand to how they handle a service issue. Alongside this, map out what the persona expects at each step of their journey. These will act as benchmarks, helping you determine whether the journey is hitting the mark or needs further tweaks.

3. Break down the journey stages

Each stage should represent a significant part of the experience, from initial contact through various touchpoints to the final outcome. This might include stages like discovery, research, purchase, and post-purchase support.

 4. Analyze actions, thoughts, and emotions

Hold a magnifying glass up to each stage, and document what the persona does (actions), thinks (thought processes), and feels (emotional response). This detailed analysis helps you understand the context and the emotional journey of the customer, which are essential for helping you identify the good and not-so-good moments.

5. Pinpoint improvement opportunities

Throughout the mapping process, use your new insights to identify where you can improve the customer experience. Look for discrepancies between expected and actual experiences, unnecessary complexities, or emotional dips that could be turned into moments of joy.

6. Tailor the approach for different contexts

Consider how the journey might differ across various contexts, such as B2B vs. B2C or luxury vs. everyday purchases. B2B journeys, for example, might involve longer decision processes and multiple stakeholders, requiring a more detailed analysis at each stage to cater to different influencers within the buying process. In contrast, luxury purchases may focus more on emotional engagement and high-touch interactions at each point.

How to improve a user’s journey: Tips to takeaway 

Improving a user’s journey is key to creating a standout user experience ( UX ). 

Start by really listening to your users through surveys and direct feedback . This insight lets you work out where they’re thrilled and where they’re stumbling, guiding your improvements.

Personalization can transform the UX. Tailoring the experience to fit individual user preferences — from customizing communications to adapting interfaces — makes users feel special and improves engagement.

Simplifying processes is also a big part of the effort. Streamline everything from signing up to checking out to make the user’s path smoother and keep frustrations at bay. And when things do go wrong, good customer support can save the day. Ensuring users can easily get help when they need it, whether through a quick chat with a support bot or a friendly human, keeps the journey on track.

Above all, keep your communication clear. Cut the jargon and make every message straightforward and friendly. Staying up-to-date with tech trends can also give your UX a boost, offering users new and exciting ways to connect with your service.

Diagramming tools were made for user journey mapping

Cacoo was made for product development teams that need to plan, design, and present their user journey.

More than just streamlining the mapping process, diagramming tools boost the accuracy and impact of the maps you create. With template libraries, easy drag-and-drop interfaces, live commenting, and more, Cacoo offers a seamless way to turn that data into a tangible journey. It’s cloud-based, too — so you can create and share with a click. 

No more weird MS formatting, no more muddled version control, no more limited accessibility. It’s the perfect blend of creativity and functionality, helping teams map their user journeys with ease. 

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How to make effective service blueprints

How to make a service blueprint — with examples.

Imagine it’s your first day at a new job. A request comes in from a customer asking for your company’s product or service. It should be easy enough to authorize what they’ve asked for. But as you dig into the tools and processes you need to work with, reality hits: to finish a single task, it turns out you need to navigate through several types of systems and at least half a dozen different departments.

Before you know it, your day-to-day tasks become confusing, slow, and filled with unnecessary details. Service blueprints can help your team map a way forward if you find yourself here. Their purpose? To shine a light on hidden weak spots in your business operations and help you solve them.

How do you create one? Keep reading to learn more about service blueprinting.

What is a service blueprint?

A service blueprint is a tool that helps teams understand how the customer sees or experiences a business’s service process. It’s a diagram that visualizes relationships between people, processes, and physical and digital touchpoints tied to a specific customer journey.

Think of a service blueprint like a treasure map. Some golden business opportunities may be hidden – even in plain sight. By creating a map, you’ll discover a path to achieving business goals by solving real needs, removing redundancies and silos, or improving an employee’s experience. Service blueprints are designed to reveal the multi-layered nature of how lots of different types of people and technologies either work together or – in some cases – don’t in a business setting.

Wondering when you’d use a service blueprint? For example, with a hotel, you might map out the entire service experience of your check-in process.

View this template in Miro

Every service blueprint, maps out:

The step-by-step of a specific customer journey

The channel-based touchpoints, one by one.

The backstage processes, across different stakeholders and actions.

You’ll know a service blueprint is doing its job when it creates a shared understanding in cross-functional teams who develop products and services for their customers.

When to make a service blueprint

A service blueprint is a useful tool for teams to create together. But when should you make one? Here are the most popular use cases for a service blueprint:

When many departments contribute to a single customer service experience.

When a company would like to check whether its key processes are sufficiently human-centered.

When a service improvement is needed to improve the customer experience.

When a service is changing or needs to be re-designed.

When an organization is transitioning from a high-touch service to a low-touch service (e.g., when you want to design a new cost-effective model with lower audience volume).

Service blueprint benefits

Service blueprints can be a time-consuming and expensive process, but when planned out, they can transform your relationship with your customers. It can also act as a way to bring people and teams across your entire organization together.

“It's a strategic tool. It's also a collective empathy tool.”

“It’s a strategic tool. It’s also a collective empathy tool,” says Kimberly Richards, a senior service designer in the Customer Service Department of the New South Wales Government. “It's a tool that does a lot of things, not just mapping out an organization or what technology is being used,” Richards adds. “I also use it to create alignment and understanding.”

Even if you feel daunted by the task that lies ahead of you, service blueprints can offer these key benefits to your team:

Reminds employees how important it is to have a customer-focused point of view. Connects the ‘this is what I do’ employee mindset to part of a much larger process (‘how what I do impacts everyone around me’)

Establishes opportunities for continuous improvement. Map-base diagrams can point out weaknesses or failures that can be the basis of a process to be refined

Informs your service design decisions. Creates points of shared interactions between employees and customers, to show where the customer experiences value

Encourages a rational approach to service design. Visibility-based mapping means common sense decisions can be made about what customers should see and how employees will interact with customers

Helps you assess how much the business has invested in each process or touchpoint. By seeing which processes create duplicate services, teams can begin to map out where revenue comes from, and suggest efficiencies and cost-saving measures

Offers a rationale to external or internal marketing teams you’ve hired. An external ad agency or the organization’s in-house marketing team can use a service map to identify what they key messages are to be communicated to customers, and keep their language aligned for a consistent experience

Enables managers and frontline workers to better communicate to improve the customer experience. Improving the quality of service can be a shared responsibility as employees communicate their experiences, and managers find and support opportunities for improvement across channels

How to create your own

Service blueprints come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The blueprints can be quick sketches or incredibly detailed and heavily illustrated visual representations, depending on if they’re being used as an internal tool for shared understanding, or an external tool for leadership buy-in.

To get started, create your canvas using a template, and learn the important elements of a service blueprint.

The elements of a service blueprint

Here are four puzzle pieces you need to have when creating a service blueprint.

The customer’s actions : If you’ve already made a customer journey map, you can extract the steps, choices, activities and interactions a customer may go through to reach their goals.

Frontstage actions : These actions happen in front of the customer. They are usually either human-to-human (for example, a customer interacting with an employee at a cash register) or human-to-computer (for example, a customer dealing with an ATM transaction) interactions.

Backstage actions : Behind-the-scenes activities to support frontstage activities, which can either be carried by a backstage employee (a head chef in the kitchen) or a frontstage employee who completes a task not visible to the customer (printing out a bill before bringing it to the table).

Support processes : These are a series of steps and interactions that support employees in delivering a service to their customers.

Physical evidence : This is the proof that the interaction actually happened. Examples can include the product itself, receipts as proof of purchase, physical storefronts, or websites.

Service blueprints also tend to have three key lines:

The line of interaction : direct interactions between the customer and the organization.

The line of visibility : separates what’s visible and invisible to the customer – everything visible is above the line; everything backstage is below the line.

The line of internal interaction : separates employees who have direct customer contact with those who don’t directly support customer interactions.

Depending on your context and business goals of the organization you’re blueprinting for, you might also add:

Timing : if you’re offering a time-based service, you should keep track of how long each action takes

Rules and regulations : this is anything that dictates – by law – what can and can’t be changed, as teams look to optimize the customer experience

Emotion : by understanding how employees and customers are feeling throughout the process, you can start to identify pain points

Metrics : if buy-in is your ultimate goal, you’ll need these. Collect any data and visually represent how time and money is wasted due to miscommunications or other operational inefficiencies.

It is easier to reach a shared understanding and achieve a smooth service process when working in collaboration. Different departments can get to know each other’s responsibilities and challenges and see how they influence each other’s deliverables. Service blueprints made in collaboration can help the service provider teams create not only a service roadmap, but also an aligned action plan for each department involved in the service process.

Tips for service blueprinting

If you’re blueprinting a complex organization or your work has a global impact, Kimberly Richards recommends these tips.

1. Identify how you’d like to use the blueprint—and who it’s for.

“Ultimately, no one wants to create artifacts that don't get used,” Richards says. “If a team is committing to making a blueprint, we’re doing it to make the lives of the employees in an organization easier. As a result of us making this map, they shouldn’t be relying on infinite folders and share drives to make sense of where they are. The aim is to make their working life as quick and easy as possible.”

As workplaces and organizations are figuring out how to keep operating in the new world order, service blueprints can be useful to visualize how the current state of things is different to the past. For example, most offices were not designed to accommodate a pandemic. And it’s likely that most frontline workers are adapting to hyperawareness around increased hygiene, health and safety standards to keep both themselves, and their customers, safe.

For a business owner audience, service blueprints can help...

Figure out what processes and actions are actually needed when you pivot to serving customers in new ways quickly – for example, curbside pick-up or weekly home delivery services across several neighborhoods

Create a phase-based approach for a gradual reopening: after the initial phase, what does phase two, three, four, and so on, look like as restrictions ease or come into place again?

Walk-through several scenarios to prevent the less ideal outcome – for example, reducing capacity in limited space, or managing foot traffic during opening hours

For a frontline worker audience, service blueprints can help...

Create alignment between customer expectations and employee standards – for example, measuring how long it takes to wipe down and sanitize a table service between each customer interaction.

For a leadership audience, blueprints can help...

Executive-level leadership to visualize how their business operations and customer experience are changing. New safety measures and precautionary procedures add time to the overall customer experience, so these new realities need to be apparent across the organization.

2. Make scrappy versions to get buy-in for larger ones

Demonstrate the value of blueprints to your organization by starting small. “Once people see what it is, and understand that’s what a blueprint looks like,” Richards says, “you can start to get buy-in.”

Try producing small multiple blueprints that can be joined together into a longer on later. This can help you identify that some processes – channels such as onboarding and off-boarding – will never meet or interact.

2. Blueprint collaboratively

Blueprints are best made collectively. “In my role, I’m often interrogating the group about the whole sequence of events in chronological order,” says Richards. Groups are important so that you can gain understanding of customer flows, and also identify knowledge gaps between every department of an organization. Make sure you:

Have representatives from across the whole organization – from engineers through to directors of specific functions – who speak to their part of the operational puzzle.

Interrogate every step of a process at every level: for example, what does this step look like for an engineer? For a customer service representative? For an executive?

Ask everyone in the room “What’s your opinion of how that affects the customer?”

Document when people agree across the board, and when there’s alignment.

Retarget or recruit customers, or research, or re-identify someone else in the organization who has the information you need when inconsistency or misunderstandings come up.

Be current-state focused, rather than solutions-focused

Service blueprints can encourage people to time travel decades ahead of where they’re supposed to be, but more importantly, it’s a tool to understand where a company is right now. People want to go into solution mode. But really, it's all about capturing the current state. A blueprint is a snapshot in time of your organization across all levels. You can't move forward without an agreement. You need to get aligned to create holistic change.”

Realistically, a customer’s end-to-end journey with an organization can last for over a couple of decades. As such, Richards recommends kicking off a blueprinting project with a scoping session or a workshop to figure out what the start point and end point of the blueprint is.

Service blueprint examples

Now that you’ve learned about how service blueprints work, why not try making your own? Service blueprints can be adapted for any kind of service-based industry, including restaurants, hotels, banks, and hospitals. Here are a few simple examples to get you started.

1. Restaurant service blueprint

In a restaurant environment, you may have different processes for takeaway meals or a dining-in experience. Either way, a consistent, frictionless experience is key for patrons.

2. Bank service blueprint

In banking, customers are increasingly interacting with their financial services provider via non-physical touchpoints such as internet banking apps or on the phone.

3. Hospital service blueprint

In a hospital, customers may be experiencing high levels of stress or uncertainty, which means that every step or process they encounter has to be designed for ease of service, clarity and reassurance.

Try it yourself

Now that you’ve seen examples of service blueprints for different industries, try creating one yourself! Use this  free service blueprint template , or check out these two templates made by real teams in Miro.

Looking to read more about remote collaboration? Start at  Chapter 1  of our guide!

Nathania Gilson, Contributing Writer

Nathania Gilson is a writer and editor based in Melbourne. She's interested in interactive storytelling, building products that can change the way audiences think and interact for the better, and developing tools for social good and public awareness.

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Journey Map vs. Service Blueprint

A Look Into the Two Crucial Tools in Service Design

Plotting out the journey.

Laying the groundwork

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User Journey vs. User Story: How Are They Different?

Are you unsure what the difference between a user journey and a user story is? Both are helpful for your product but have slightly different outcomes.

This article will dive deep into user journey vs. user story and share how they differ.

• Customer journey maps visualize user experiences, highlighting steps, touchpoints, emotions, pain points , and opportunities for improvement.
• User stories describe features from the end user’s perspective, improving development prioritization and communication.
• User journey maps depict the entire user experience, whereas user stories concentrate on specific tasks or features within that journey.
• Visualizing the overall user experiences through journey maps helps identify pain points and areas for improvement. Meanwhile, user stories define particular requirements and prioritize features.
• A user journey map is created early in product discovery to inform strategy, while user stories guide feature implementation during planning and development .
• User journeys are visual flowcharts that map each step and touchpoint to improve interactions . User stories are concise sentences clarifying user needs.
• A user story map combines user journeys and stories, visually mapping experiences into stages and detailed stories, aiding in prioritization and cohesive development.
• If you need help with user journeys or user stories, Userpilot can help. It offers product analytics, so you can map customer journeys and capture user feedback to validate your user stories. If you want to get started, book a demo now .

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What are user journeys?

User journeys, represented by customer journey maps , highlight the entire user experience as they interact with your product or service. They map out the steps a user takes from the beginning to the end of a specific process, identifying key touchpoints, actions, and emotions.

By understanding the user’s path, you can see how they move through different stages and what they experience along the way.

A journey map helps you visualize the user’s entire process, making it easier to understand their needs and expectations. These maps are crucial because they show where users might face difficulties or pain points during their journey.

By knowing where users struggle and where they have positive experiences, you can make more informed decisions about improving your product .

What are user stories?

User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature from the end user’s perspective. They help to answer how a feature will add value to a user’s journey. By focusing on the user’s needs and goals, user stories ensure that development teams create features that truly benefit the end user.

A user story usually focuses on three areas: as a ( who ), I want to ( what ), and so that ( why ). Acceptance criteria follow this.

For example, let’s take the example of a segmentation feature in an email marketing tool. A user story might look like this:

“As a marketing manager, I want to segment my email list based on user behavior to send more targeted and relevant emails.”

The acceptance criteria would specify the conditions that must be met for the story map to be complete, such as:

• The segmentation feature should allow users to create segments based on at least three user behaviors.
• Users should be able to save and edit segments.
• The feature should be integrated into the existing email campaign creation process.

Creating user stories offers several benefits. They help ensure that each feature delivers real value to the end user. By breaking down features into manageable pieces, user stories make prioritizing development work easier and ensure the most important features are built first.

User journey vs. user story: main differences

Understanding the distinction between user journeys and user stories is crucial for creating a seamless user experience and effective product development . Let’s explore the main differences between these two concepts.

Scope of the customer experience

A customer journey maps out a user’s entire end-to-end experience, covering all interactions and touchpoints from start to finish. Journey mapping helps understand the complete user experience and identify a pain point.

A user story map focuses on a single task or feature a user needs to achieve within the broader journey. This approach zeroes in on specific features to ensure they provide value and effectively meet user needs.

Purpose of creation

The purpose of a user journey map is to understand and visualize the overall user experience, helping to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

A user story aims to define specific, actionable requirements for development to ensure features meet specific user needs. Additionally, it aids in prioritization of tasks to focus on the most important aspects first.

Stage of creation

User journeys are typically created during the early stages of product discovery and research to inform the overall strategy . This helps set a clear direction based on user insights gathered during the discovery process .

User story maps are developed after the discovery phase – usually during planning and development to guide the design decisions and implementation of features. This ensures that each feature is well-defined and aligned with user needs, following the product development process .

Representation

A user journey is represented as a visual flowchart or map that outlines each step and touchpoint in the user experience, helping to improve customer interactions .

A user story is a short sentence written in the format: “As a [persona], I [want to], [so that].”

Final outcomes for the product team

A user journey provides a comprehensive and holistic view of the user’s interaction with the product, helping teams identify improvements, pain points, and opportunities to enhance the overall product experience .

A user story results in a clear and actionable requirement for a specific feature, ensuring focused development and preventing feature bloat .

How do user story maps combine both user journeys and stories?

A user story map combines elements of both user journeys and user story mapping.

User story maps visually map out the entire user experience into high-level stages (user journey) and then break these into detailed, actionable customer stories. This integration helps teams understand the overall flow and prioritize specific features for development.

Story mapping allows teams to see how different parts of the user experience fit together, making it easier to identify gaps and opportunities. This approach ensures that key product priorities are aligned with the user’s needs.

A well-constructed user journey map allows product managers and teams to break down complex processes into manageable pieces. This ensures that every feature developed contributes to a cohesive and satisfying user experience.

If you’re looking to understand how a user is experiencing your app, user journey mapping can help. If you want a clear description of a feature that can align development teams on what they are trying to create, write customer stories.

Consider Userpilot if you want to create a customer journey map or user story. It provides detailed analytics that highlights a user’s journey, enabling you to create a journey map. Userpilot also helps you gather customer feedback to validate that your customer stories are what customers expect. Book a demo now to find out more.

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