01 / UNDERSTAND
What is an Experience Map?
An Experience Map shows how people work towards a goal across services, settings and time. It brings activities, needs and significant moments into one view without organising the story around a particular company or product.
Use it to understand the wider context before deciding where a service should help. A Customer Journey Map usually examines a more specific relationship with a product or service. State the scope explicitly: mapping terminology varies in practice.
Why map the wider experience?
A product boundary is rarely the boundary of a person’s problem. People may need information, documents or support from elsewhere before they can continue. Improving one screen may leave that difficulty intact.
An Experience Map makes dependencies and coordination work visible. Use it to agree which part of the experience deserves closer research, which opportunity you can influence and what sits beyond your team’s control.
When to use an Experience Map
USE IT WHEN
People combine several services, channels or informal workarounds to achieve a goal.
Research describes individual episodes, but you need to understand how they connect.
You are deciding where to focus discovery before committing to a product response.
When to choose another method
Use a Customer Journey Map for a defined audience and service relationship.
Use a Service Blueprint when delivery processes and internal handoffs are the focus.
Start with User Interviews or observation when you have no evidence. Label an initial map as a hypothesis, not an established account.
What you’ll need
Start with a defined situation, a clear boundary and a question the map should help answer. Bring research accounts and source references that others can follow. Include people who understand the evidence and someone responsible for the next decision. Keep observations, reported experiences and assumptions distinct.
What belongs in the map?
Keep the elements that help answer your question and support a decision.
Name the goal, circumstances and where the experience begins and ends.
Show meaningful changes in what the person is trying to accomplish.
Include providers, personal networks and settings that affect the experience.
State what people need to know, decide or secure, separately from proposed features.
Show prerequisites, alternative routes, pauses and returns that affect the decision.
Connect claims to sources and distinguish evidence from inference.
Describe a change worth investigating and the evidence behind it.
02 / PUT IT INTO PRACTICE
How to create an Experience Map
Keep evidence and assumptions distinct. Revisit your work when new information changes your understanding.
01
Frame the question
Define the people, situation, start and end points, and the decision the map should support.
For relocation, end with a workable daily routine, not a provider’s confirmation screen.
02
Assemble the evidence
Collect relevant episodes and give each source an identifier. Separate accounts and observations from interpretation.
Record what happened before deciding which need it represents.
03
Reconstruct individual paths
Lay out complete accounts before combining them. Include waiting, abandoned attempts and help from others.
Compare arrival with housing secured against arrival in temporary accommodation.
04
Find meaningful phases
Group activities around changes in purpose. Use the person’s language and allow overlaps or returns.
Preparing to arrive and finding a stable home may happen together.
05
Add needs and dependencies
Show what the person must resolve and what must happen before the next activity becomes possible.
Mark the housing details needed to make other arrangements.
06
Preserve meaningful differences
Use branches or separate maps when circumstances change the sequence, available choices or consequences.
Access to temporary accommodation may determine whether arrival is possible.
07
Challenge the interpretation
Check the map against the original accounts. Look for unsupported transitions and missing perspectives.
Replace “people need a dashboard” with the underlying coordination problem.
08
Choose the next action
Select a consequential question. Record its evidence, uncertainty, owner and the next investigation.
Test whether unclear dependencies cause important rework before proposing a combined service.
Experience Map example: settling into a new city
Illustrative example: a person has accepted a job in another city. They need somewhere to live and a workable daily routine. The map starts with the decision to relocate and ends when housing and travel are usable. All episodes and E1 to E5 references are invented to explain the method.
Choosing a permanent home changes the travel options, so the person returns to an earlier question. That loop suggests investigating coordination between arrangements before building a combined booking product. It is a hypothesis to test with real accounts, not a research finding.
03 / BELOW THE SURFACE
Below the surface: who disappears in the shared story?
A shared map gains clarity by compressing several accounts. It can also remove the circumstances that explain why an experience is difficult. In the relocation example, arriving before finding permanent housing assumes access to temporary accommodation. A map built only from completed moves may hide people who had to delay or abandon the move.
01 / QUESTION
What condition makes this transition possible?
Name the resource, support or information that enables movement.
02 / QUESTION
Whose account would contradict this sequence?
Look for accounts from people who stopped, returned or took another route.
03 / QUESTION
Would the same intervention help both paths?
Preserve the difference when circumstances change who benefits.
Preserve differences that change the decision. If an intervention helps only people with temporary accommodation, show that condition or split the path. A shared phase label does not establish a shared need. These questions are an editorial synthesis, not a validated framework.
Choose one consequential transition and record the claim, supporting accounts, uncertainty, next action and owner. State what would change your mind. The map should lead to a testable question or decision, not simply a polished diagram.
Experience Map template
Use the draft two page canvas to map the situation, phases, needs, dependencies and evidence. Then compare two paths and record the next decision. Both pages can be filled in using a compatible PDF reader. Adapt the columns to the experience; five phases are a starting arrangement, not a requirement.
Practical tips
Start with a few traceable accounts, then simplify.
Keep source identifiers beside the claims they support.
Show a return or branch when it changes the design question.
Review the map when new evidence challenges its structure.
Common mistakes
Blending different circumstances into one supposedly typical person.
Treating workshop consensus as evidence of behaviour.
Inferring how common a pattern is from a small set of accounts.
Finishing without a next action or decision owner.
What you’ll get
A shared interpretation of the wider experience, its dependencies and the opportunities worth investigating. Keep scope, sources, uncertainties and next actions with the map so others can question it and revise it when new evidence arrives.
Sources and references
Sarah Gibbons, UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet, Nielsen Norman Group. Supports the distinction between experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints, and the need to distinguish research from hypothesis maps.
Why Map in Discovery: 3 Mapping Methods, Nielsen Norman Group. Further reading on choosing a mapping view during discovery.
Jim Kalbach, Rapid Techniques for Mapping Experiences. Further reading on mapping as a practical activity and connecting the result with subsequent design work.
This guide is an original practical synthesis. The step sequence, relocation example, decision note and deeper editorial discussion are proposed for Design Iceberg; they are not reproduced from these sources. The sources do not validate the illustrative scenario.