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Welcome to the jungle, friend,

As you can maybe tell from my greeting/song choice, I'm feeling stoked for the end of the year and getting to take some time off. It's been a great year for Made Manifest and Ask A Service Designer, so I want to send all our clients, collaborators, and YOU, our reader, a boatload of gratitude and thanks. It means so much that you read this newsletter and reach out to share your thoughts and feedback by tweeting, posting, and hitting reply. Thank you!

On the service design front, I wanted to share some really quick and easy ways to improve your journey maps. These are some of the tips I find myself coaching people on over and over again - hope they might be helpful to your practice.

Q. How can I make my journey maps better?

Journey maps are ubiquitous tool in service design. Some common ways they can help in a project are:

Visualize and story tell the current end-to-end journey of a service user or actor, in order to build a shared understanding across teams.
Cut through a siloed, organizational view of the experience by organizing around a holistic experience.
Identify the highs and lows in journey, and opportunities to deliver an improved service.

For journey maps to be useful, they need to inspire action and build towards next steps. The process of making the map can be hugely valuable in building shared understanding, and is often where a lot of the value lies, rather than in the artefact itself. I always like to remind people that the map is not your destination, it's something that help you to get to your destination!

With that said, here are three easy ways to immediately improve your journey maps. They might seem simple, but are often overlooked and can make a big difference.

This diagram from Nielsen Norman Group shows a simplified version of a journey map, containing the journey phases, steps, emotional journey, quotes/thoughts and opportunities.

1️⃣ Give your map a specific, descriptive title with a start and end point.

❌ 'Insurance Journey Map'
✅ 'Current State Term Life Insurance Purchasing Journey (from trigger to receiving and signing policy)'

Far too often, I see journey maps with very generic titles, that don't articulate the specific focus area and experience the map represents. Some easy ways to brainstorm your specific map title are to consider:

What does the map show - current state or desired/future state?
What is the journey context and specific type or stage of product/service experience?
Where in the customer lifecycle is this map zooming in to?
What is the start and end point of the journey shown on the map?

2️⃣ Include the sources of data that the map is based on, and dates.

✅'Based on 12 interviews with recent customers, 8 non-purchasers who received a personalised quote, 8 competitor customers, internal document review, and stakeholder interviews with tech, marketing and data, Sept-Oct 2021'

Remember, these artefacts are typically a snapshot in time. Including all of the research that went into building the map (whether that's working sessions, stakeholder interviews, document review, qualitative research with customers and/or quant data analysis) will help to anchor the map. It also build credibility for the audience to understand the level of work and rigour that went into the map. It's generally just good practice for posterity too, so when the map gets dusted off or come across many months or years later, people can quickly and easily contextualize it.

Better still, link to relevant reports, data or notes so that those who want to can go even deeper.

3️⃣ Ensure you have a lane on your journey map that connects to the 'so what' or next steps. Options include:

✅ insights and opportunity areas
✅ key unmet customer needs
✅ how might we questions
✅ net new initiatives coming from the mapping exercise

Say it with me: my journey maps need to be actionable! Help your teams and stakeholders answer the inevitable 'ok the map is cool and all, but so what / now what?!' How you do this will be dependent on your specific project goals. For example:

On a library project exploring the potential for digital library account sign up and the impacts of this strategy on digital rights management, we included swim lanes for digital opportunities and risks. This enabled the team to consider the tradeoffs in a digital strategy and make informed decisions on what needed to be in place if they offered a digital only library sign up.
In a life insurance purchase journey map looking at how channels could work more holistically together, we included a swim lane of 'unmet needs', showing where customers were under served throughout the process. This provided jumping off point for teams to consider how to better meet customer needs across the experience in an integrated way.

If you really wanna nerd out on maps, my talk on the Designer's Cartography of Complexity might be for you.

➡️ Journey mapping resources to help you on your way.

✅ Adaptive Path's Guide to Experience Mapping remains one of the best and most pragmatic resources to help you think about how you want to build and frame your maps.
✅ Don't Make a Journey Map by Shahrzad Samadzadeh is one of my all time fave posts on the topic. Check out the Gartner Hypecycle of Journey Mapping and some amazing examples of how things can go of the rails.
✅ My talk, the Designer's Cartography of Complexity, is for those who want to go deep down the rabbit hole of mapping. Keep an eye out for the story of my trip to the Sweden Solar System, used to illustrate the tricky issue of map-territory relation.

I'd love to hear about tips and resources that you've found helpful in creating more effective and impactful journey maps!

Holiday vibes 🎄

Some of my favourite holiday traditions coming from my Swedish side include glögg (those tiny cups are too cute!), pepparkakor and adventsfika.

Where ever you find yourself, whatever your (non)beliefs and however you're celebrating, I'm sending you peace, love and chill vibes as we wrap up 2021.

And if you have ideas for what Ask a Service Designer should cover in 2022, I'm all ears! Find me on twitter or just reply to this email.

See you on the other side,
Linn