Part 2: How to Create a Simple Journey Map
Let’s say you’ve built a persona like Maria, as previously described. Now how does she move through her day? How does she get from leaving work exhausted to sitting down to dinner with her family? What problems, challenges, and frustrations does she encounter along the way?
That’s what a useful journey map reveals. This post will show you how to create a practical, human-centered journey map, without special tools, jargon, or complex procedures.
Keeping It Simple
Journey maps are empathy tools, not documentation. Keeping them simple helps your team stay focused and prevents the work from getting bogged down in details.
To create a simple journey map, you don’t need complex software. You don’t need a big team. And you don’t need perfect data about every aspect of your community partners’ lives. You just need a pad of paper, some sticky notes, and your interview notes from your discussions with community partners.
Like so much in design thinking, journey maps are iterative. Your first maps are rough first approximations, which you develop over time.
Start Small: Choose One Time Span That Matters
Getting the scope right is your first and most important decision.
Ask yourself three questions:
- Whose experience are you focusing on?
- What goal or time span will this map cover?
- What events will the map include?
Here are a few examples of experiences you might create a journey map for:
- Finding a healthy meal for the family on a tight budget
A caregiver tries to stretch limited money, time, and energy to put a decent meal on the table without sacrificing dignity or nutrition. This is Maria’s situation. - Returning to complete education or get job training as an adult learner
A learner balances work, family, confidence, and unfamiliar systems while trying to improve long-term prospects. - Communicating with a school about a child’s needs
A parent navigates meetings, language barriers, and power dynamics while advocating for their child.
In each case, you are looking at small, specific steps within a larger experience. Most journey maps work best with 5–10 phases. Aim to capture meaningful shifts in experience without losing the story in the detail. Think of a journey map like the story a comic strip tells or a storyboard for a movie.
Begin with a Persona You Already Created and Tested
In our previous posts, we showed how to create a persona and why personas matter. This is one of the places where they really come to life.
Personas anchor the journey map in real experience drawn from your interviews. They help keep you from drifting into averages or assumptions about your community partners.
Journey maps extend personas by showing how someone moves through an experience over time. Personas and journey maps work together and you need both. They are the actors and the script, the nouns and the verbs.
Gather Just Enough Real Experience
This is not a new research phase. Instead, you are drawing from work you’ve already done, such as your interview notes, quotes from community partners, and observations you’ve made.
As you review this material, pay special attention to moments of stress, surprise, or confusion. Notice where things feel harder than expected. Pinpoint moments of anxiety and distress. This is where opportunities for improvement exist.
Remember, this is a draft. The goal is not completeness, but an accurate sketch of what people actually experience.
Sketch the Experience Over Time
Journey mapping is a way of thinking on paper, so keep the structure simple.
Lay out the experience over time using phrases or moments drawn directly from interviews or conversations with your community partners. This might look like a short timeline or a simple list of stages, written as someone from the community would.
At this stage, aim for clarity and getting it down on paper. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done.”
Thoughts and Emotions: The Heart of the Journey Map
Focus on the emotions real people feel as they move through this experience.
Two guiding questions can help:
- What are they trying to figure out right now?
- How does this moment feel to them?
This matters deeply in social entrepreneurship. Emotional states such as stress, dignity, trust, and a sense of agency shape decisions. Paying attention to these emotions helps you see where your offering could genuinely help.
Notice Friction, Workarounds, and Gaps
Now step back and look across the map.
Ask:
- Where does your community partner have to expend extra effort?
- Where do they improvise workarounds?
- Where are there delays or interruptions?
These are the insights journey maps are designed to reveal.
Ask A Forward-Looking Question
Use this guiding question:
Where could support make this experience easier for my community partner?
This key question helps you focus on the most important areas and prioritize the biggest benefits.
Sense-Check, Revise, and Keep It Alive
Share your journey map with teammates, mentors, and, whenever possible, community partners themselves. Encourage their feedback and revise collaboratively. Journey maps evolve as understanding deepens. They are living, iterative documents.
From Journey Maps to Better Problem Statements
Journey maps don’t solve problems, but they do help you frame better ones.
As you move into defining a problem and designing solutions, your journey map will help identify leverage points and shape clearer problem statements.
Following this process will help you learn more about your community partners and their lived experience in a way that is honest, respectful, and grounded in reality. The next post will show complete examples and provide a template.