Experience and journey maps as a common language tool
First I want to thank my colleague Rujuta Autade’s and her excellent work for inspiring me to reflect on different uses of experience map / journey maps / service models and blueprints. How I’ve used them, how people I have worked with have used them in both expected and unexpected ways.
My own experience
I have made maps to help with my own understanding of a process or journey. I have used maps in the expected way to visual an experience or a journey highlighting the pain points and the opportunities, this was common when I was a consultant.
I have made maps that were used in ways that diverged from the original intended outcome, but were still immensely useful. One such example was a service model I created of building a service. This may sounds very meta, and it is, but entirely appropriate as I was working in the service design, standards and assurance programme at Government Digital Service. This is a programme that focuses on support government to build services. I made this map because it had just been announced that the service standard was being updated and my team at the time needed to understand what updating the standard would impact, we were particular concerned interested in what guidance, such as the service manual, would be impacted. So we could scope work we’d potentially need to do.
Making this map kicked started many things. It highlighted that we need to redefine and agree our definition of a service as gov’s understanding had changed and matured, I wrote about that work here. It became the basis of starting to work improve how GDS assess services, it helped us analyse research data when working on the update of the service standard and the supporting guidance.
The map could support all these different streams of work because its most enduring use was as a tool to make sure people were taking about the same thing when talking about building services, assessing services, supporting others in building services. People within the same team, people within different teams in the same department, people in different gov departments could point to the map, a visual artefact and say ‘are you talking about this point in the process’? or ‘I am referring to this thing here’ and actually point to the thing you are referring to.
The map helped ground conversations, analysis, other work, etc. in specifics and shared understanding, it contextualised potentially abstract ideas, and helped people think/work through complex and messy things such as updating a service standard for an entire government and all the ramifications that has. It gave people a common language in which to collaborate more effectively.
I experienced these uses of the first hand but people also shared anecdotes with me of their own use of the map.
Let me know in the comments if you have had similar experiences with your experience and journey maps!
