Journey Map

Journey mapping helps you understand, record, and share the experience of a person using your service.

It is a powerful tool to visualise complex journeys and is key to understanding users' needs, emotions, challenges, and opportunities.

Why use a journey map?

Structure conversations with your users: The map tool itself provides a guide for facilitating discussions.
Show your service as your users experience it: It demonstrates their agenda and the challenges they face in achieving their needs from you.
Avoid prejudging what you should explore: This approach helps identify problems and opportunities that are important in your users' daily experiences.
Show challenges and opportunities in the context of the entire experience: It helps you understand the implications of any changes you might make across the full user journey, ensuring you focus on the right changes at the right points.
Uncover frustrations and workarounds: This process highlights areas ready to be resolved while also identifying things that work well and should be supported. A journey map can reveal opportunities for improvement.
Collect suggestions for improvement from your users: This allows you to gain direct feedback on how to better serve their needs.

Journey Map package

This reusable package has a series of Journey Map Templates that can be used across NHS Scotland to visualise user's journeys within or across services.

When to use a journey map

Before the interview:

Create a Conversation Guide to help you lead the interview
Print the Conversation Guide
Print the Event Cards

During the interview:

Use the Event Cards to help you capture data

As it is often difficult for people with lived experience to remember when some things have happened, you can cut the Event Cards sheets so participants can move things around

Take verbatim notes and quotes

After the interview:

Organise your Event Cards and take a photo to capture their order
Choose one of the journey map templates in the package - Reflect on the themes that came out in the interview and what information you want to highlight
Create your journey map

Download event cards

How to use this tool

There are many ways to approach journey mapping and to visualise a user's journey. We included some templates to get you started, but they are not prescriptive.

It is important to take a moment to think about the purpose of your journey map and what information you'd like to highlight.

Template A

Highlights a sequence of events, feelings and challenges.

Template B

Highlights opportunities resulting from challenges.

Template C

Highlights internal processes, policies and data.

Download template A Download template B Download template C

More templates from the Design Community

Source: NHS National Services Scotland

Download NSS template

Example from practice

Isobel's journey with Mental Health and Substance Use services

The Mental Health Substance Use team has conducted interviews with people with lived experience to understand their biggest challenges and concerns when engaging with services in different pathfinder sites. After the interviews, the team visualised the participant's journey using the journey map templates, which highlights the different people and organisations one of the participants - Isobel - has engaged with.

Find out more

Transforming respiratory services through pathway mapping in Highland

The Highlander Pathfinder aimed to co-design a transformation of services available to people who experience respiratory symptoms with a focus on facilitating prevention, early intervention and self-management. A key part of this process was mapping of patients’ pathways through the healthcare service during the discover phase, with Highland having come to learn the complexity of these pathways for people requiring respiratory services.

Transforming Respiratory Services through Pathway Mapping - Case Study