In order to fulfill your company's goals and create better experiences for users, it's crucial to understand how your customers have arrived to where they are in the first place.

What does their journey look like with your product or service? How do they feel and react during different stages of that process? Instead of sending out team members to market products or add new features in the dark, building out a customer journey map lights the way. It shows a path that will help your company improve its offerings on many different levels.

This roundup illuminates where to get started, and how to improve your own processes along the way. Whether you're looking for a quick snackable article, fill-in templates, video explainers or demonstrable case studies, you'll find it all here.

Getting started (and improving your practice)

Building out your first—or even fifth (!)—journey map is intimidating to say the least, but the articles and guides below help you scope out everything from project goals to research timelines, including the best ways to synthesize and present your findings.

• Your Guide to Mapping the User Journey: Learn best practices for researching user journeys and common mistakes, With sample study designs and additional resources.
• The 6 Research Process Pillars of a More Dynamic Customer Journey Map: Too many customer journey maps focus entirely on what your users are doing. Let's take a moment to talk about why they're doing it, and how you can pave the way to make their path-to-decision smoother.
• 5 Stages of Successful Customer Journey Maps: A customer journey map gives you insight into how your users interact with your product. Here are five best practices to help you make one.
• User “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories: A Creative Research Deliverable You’ll Actually Have Time to Execute: Journey maps are often linear, but your customer’s experiences almost never are. Here’s a new spin on an old research tactic that’ll engage and energize your stakeholders.
• See Your Product from Your Participant's Perspective. Try a "Walk-the-Store" Interview: Use this "show-don't-tell" remote interviewing technique for insight into your users' workflow.
• Shopalong or Remote Research? Managing Director of Chase Design Myles Proudfoot shares how he uses Dscout to create more engaging shopper journeys that take him right to the aisle.
• Harness the Power of Users' Unmet Needs: Tapping the unmet needs of users is a hidden gold mine. So, what's the right approach to get that valuable information? We have a few tips.
• Use These 3 Exercises to Become a More Creative Researcher: Use these techniques to break out of a research rut and generate compelling insights with your next journey map.

Real-world examples

Sometimes it helps to see how other companies have successfully executed and leveraged their own journey maps. From Credit Karma to Enterprise, learn how these industry-leading companies created journey maps that had a real impact.

• ‍Motivating Mindfulness: Headspace's Cross-Functional Commitment to Delighting New Members: As new users turned to Headspace for mental wellness, Headspace turned to Dscout to pinpoint their key motivations.
• ‍Equitable Access as Experience Strategy: See how OJO Labs' Larcombe Teichgraeber used Dscout to inject empathy into the home-buying process, and support an equitable experience design.
• ‍Using Journey Mapping As a Tool for Cross-Functional Research: When Credit Karma wanted to understand the car buying experience, they approached journey mapping to engage stakeholders from insights to activation.
• ‍How Credit Karma Created Insight-Rich Journey Maps During Quarantine: When the global pandemic hit, Credit Karma relied on remote research, experimentation, and distributed analysis to build an insightful and impactful journey map.
• ‍How Enterprise Used Dscout to Optimize Their Hybrid Rental Process: An experience insights team leveraged Dscout's mobile app to conduct in-the-wild product research to ensure a frictionless experience across their hybrid product suite.
• ‍Innovation From The Edges: Using Dscout to Learn From Users with Access Needs: See how Motional conducted remote “ride-along” research to gather product-shaping journey data.Field report

Using Dscout to improve your journey mapping

Working with a tool specifically designed for user research can make your workflow go more smoothly and create better results. Here's how to use Dscout to up your journey mapping game.

• ‍Best Practices for Using Contextual Research to Inform Customer Journey Maps: See what it means to create a "contextual" journey map (and why it matters) with Dscout.
• ‍Insights Arts & Crafts: 7 Ways to Co-Create, Ideate, and Engage Your Research Participants: Use these go-to strategies to encourage your participants to capture more rich journey mapping data with Dscout.

About the author

Kris is a content creator and editor based in Chicago.