Experience Map
Product-agnostic visualization that maps a complete human experience.
What is it
An Experience Map charts a complete human experience — moving to a new city, looking for a job — without limiting itself to interactions with one product or service. It surfaces opportunities your product could address.
The term is used in two different ways, and it helps to know which one the other person means before arguing about it. In Adaptive Path's Guide to Experience Mapping (2013), an experience map captures the interactions that happen across the channels and touchpoints of a product, service or ecosystem: the emphasis is on cross-channel, not on stepping outside the brand. The other reading separates problem space from solution space, and there the map is genuinely product-agnostic. This page uses the second, because it is what makes the artifact useful next to a Customer Journey Map.
The anatomy is worth taking from Adaptive Path, and it holds under either reading. The map has three components: the lens, the filter you view the journey through, usually a persona though it can also be a set of experience principles or a value proposition; the journey model, what people are doing, thinking and feeling, plotted across time, channels and touchpoints; and the takeaways, the findings, recommendations and design principles, which come late, once you have shifted from understanding the current state to envisioning a future one, and answer 'so what?' and 'what now?'.
What it is for
Research methods that feed it
When to make it
When to use it
When NOT to use it
How it is made
How to create it step by step
- 1Define the experience and the lens: Pick a broad human experience, not one bounded by your product, and decide whose view it is told from. Without a lens, the map averages together people who share neither context nor expectations.
- 2Research deeply: Conduct ethnographic research, extended interviews, and contextual observation.
- 3Map life phases: Document the experience stages from beginning to end.
- 4Capture emotions and context: For each phase, document emotions, thoughts, external influences, and unmet needs.
- 5Write the takeaways: Mark where your product or service could step in, and say what you recommend doing about it. A map that describes without recommending leaves the decision unowned.
- 6Present narratively: An experience map works best as a visual story.
Tips for small teams
Contextualized example
Context: Proptech startup mapped the complete experience of 'renting an apartment in Santiago'.
Mapped experience: Decide to move → Search → Visit → Negotiate → Sign → Move → Settle in → First months.
Insight: Renters don't know that the first 3 months are the riskiest for problems (plumbing, electrical). The startup created a 'first 90 days insurance' that no competitor offered.