97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 12. Know the Difference Between Experience Mapping and Journey Mapping

Darren Hood

Have you ever been curious about experience mapping and journey mapping? Let’s take a quick look at some of their key factors, distinctions, and benefits.

Let’s Level Set

To ensure we’re communicating properly, let’s level set by covering the terminology. The term journey refers to experiences and touchpoints from a holistic perspective. We would look to create a journey map when we seek to understand experiences and touchpoints in a broad sense. This approach provides a full-blown set of references that can highlight pain points, opportunities for improvement, system engagement, and sentiments. It can also foster needed discussion.

The term experience is focused on specific, extracted touchpoints and factors across an experience. While it can contain many of the same elements as a journey map, an experience map is not as broad (for example, it might focus on five to seven specific aspects of the experience). Also, because of its absence of breadth, an experience map can be produced in far less time than a journey map. For this reason, the creation of experience maps is far more popular. Time constraints (such as agile sprint lengths) may also limit your practice of and affinity to experience maps.

Alignment and Challenges

Now let’s look at some of the similarities:

• Both types of maps ...