handbooksExperience maps
Draw what you already believe about your customer before you go ask them anything. A 90-minute exercise that surfaces what your team disagrees about without anyone having to argue.
- An experience map is a drawing of how customers currently move through the experience you care about, based on what your team believes today.
- Everyone draws alone first. Sharing before drawing produces one person's map with three signatures on it.
- The gaps and contradictions between the individual maps are the output. They tell you what to ask about in interviews.
- Rough sketches, not polished artwork. This is thinking made visible, not a deliverable.
Why draw before you ask
You cannot start interviewing customers cold and expect much. Without a shared picture of what you already believe, every interview produces scattered findings that nobody can place, and the team argues about what they mean afterward.
Drawing first gives you two things. A starting structure to hang new learning on, and, more valuably, an honest inventory of what your team does not know. A gap in a drawing is a blank space that everyone can see. A gap in a verbal description hides behind words like "then they onboard."
Set the scope from your outcome
Start with the outcome you are working toward and let it decide the boundaries of the map. Too wide and you will be drawing the customer's entire life. Too narrow and you will be drawing your existing product's screens, which teaches you nothing.
| Outcome | A scope that works | A scope that does not |
|---|---|---|
| Increase weekly listening sessions | How people entertain themselves in spare moments | How people use our audio player |
| Improve trial-to-paid conversion | How a team decides to pay for a new tool | How our pricing page performs |
| Reduce support contacts | How someone gets unstuck when software surprises them | How our help center is organized |
The right-hand column is the trap. Mapping your own product's flows means every opportunity you find will be a tweak to what already exists.
Map how customers meet this need today without you. There is always a current experience, even if it is a spreadsheet, a friend's recommendation, or going without.
The exercise
1. Alone, silently
Every member of the trio draws their own map of the customer experience. No conversation, no looking at each other's paper. Fifteen minutes is enough.
This is not a formality. Groups that ideate together produce fewer and less varied ideas than the same people working alone, because of social loafing, conformity, and the simple fact that only one person can talk at a time. Drawing alone first is the cheapest available protection against groupthink.
2. Out loud, one at a time
Take turns walking through your own drawing while the others listen. The instruction for the listeners is to get curious about differences rather than resolve them: "you drew a step there that I did not have at all, what were you thinking?"
The differences are the point. They are the places where your team holds contradictory beliefs about the customer and had not noticed.
3. Together, into one map
Now build the shared map. Two building blocks:
- Nodes are moments or actions in the customer's experience.
- Links are arrows showing what follows what.
Where two people drew the same moment, merge it into one node. Where they drew different paths, keep both, because customers really do take different paths. Where somebody drew something nobody else did, keep it and mark it as something to ask about.
Your shared map is working if you can point at three specific places where the team disagreed or admitted it did not know. Those three places are your first interview questions.
Keep it visual, keep it rough
The temptation is to make it presentable. Resist it. A tidy map invites agreement, and a rough one invites correction. Boxes and arrows on a whiteboard are the right level of finish.
Torres's point about external representations is the practical one: a drawing creates common ground that words do not. Three people can nod at the same sentence while picturing three different things, and never find out.
Anti-patterns
- Talking instead of drawing. The room discusses the customer journey for an hour and produces nothing anyone can point at. Draw first, discuss the drawings.
- Endless debate. Constructive disagreement is the goal, but the exercise ends. Timebox it, write down what you disagree about, take it to an interview.
- Treating the map as truth. It is your current best guess, made of assumptions. It should look different in a month.
- One person drawing while the others watch. You now have one person's mental model with a group's name on it.
What happens next
The map does two jobs from here. It gives your interviews a focus, so you ask about the moments that matter rather than everything. And it becomes the raw material for the opportunity space, because the pain points customers describe at each node are the opportunities you will map onto the tree.