“A populated customer journey map is a neat visual that allows you to see the relationship between the touch points you’re delivering and the customer’s subjective experience. “ – Hustle Badger Customer Journey Mapping Template & Guide
In this article, we’ve pulled together real customer journey map examples from companies like Spotify, Miro, Airbnb, USA.gov, ASOS, Hubspot, and more.
Customer journey maps break down user journeys towards an outcome into steps, and then log the customer’s goals, emotions, thoughts at each touch point.
They can be centred on one specific product experience, for example how people experience your website, or on a user’s end journey towards a goal, for example, buying a service which may or may not include your product.
Journey maps can be used for many different things
- Workshop exercises: taking an outside-in look at a product as a user might, and collating the experience live
- Internal audits: a product or user journey audit to try and find improvement areas, conducted by an individual or by a team
- Stakeholder communication tools: a way to quickly convey information about issues to others to explain why changes are being proposed
They can be swift exercises to surface key information, or detailed, multi step exercises with a lot of data.
The format depends on the outcome you’re trying to achieve. Ultimately it’s all about finding out what your users actually experience and thinking about how you can improve your offering.
Customer journey map examples show you different types of maps for different use cases, and give you ideas for the level of detail, and the format which is most appropriate. Let’s get into it now.
This is a persona-led customer journey map example that was created at Spotify that resulted in making the webplayer the homepage on desktop.
It was the starting point for prototypes which aimed to remove friction from the user journey by making it easier for Spotify users to start playing music. What followed was the output of a 2 year exercise, with multiple design sprints and rounds of A/B testing.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
It’s a good example of using detailed breakdowns of the friction points in particular parts of your product experience to improve.
It tracks different personas, every touch point they might have and the frictions or pain points they experience.
In essence the pain points – when a user experiences negative thoughts or emotions – are at the heart of a customer journey mapping exercise’s value. Good customer journey maps don’t only focus on the positive moments in a user’s journey.
Other ways Spotify optimize customer journeys: Predictive CX
Once someone is playing music, the next step in the journey is the next song.
A major component of Spotify’s stickiness as a service is their ability to create personalized and engaging playlists, where the next song keeps the user playing.
You can listen to Spotify’s Director of Data Science and Insights talk about how they predict the best advertising and music mixes for users here.
Maureen Herber is a product designer at Miro, and this is the template she uses with her team to do discovery.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
This is a workshop tool, in a useful format. It comes with a talk track which walks you through how to use it and customer journey mapping best practices.
It’s well structured, covering user activation stages, user needs, actions, emotions, gains and pains. It also has a neatly organized section for ideation.
Finally it comes with an accountability section – who will take the lead on executing what comes out of the workshop.
Get the Hustle Badger Customer Journey Map Template: Miro | Figma
This customer journey map example is a populated Miro template by Syan Khrustalev, a partner at Experience Partners. To populate his template he’s used Auchan, a large French supermarket chain as his study.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
It’s a super detailed desk exercise from someone looking to analyze the existing experience deeply.
Stan goes through each customer journey stage, customer actions, touch points, customer expectations, customer emotions, logs how important each is, their experience, populates the map with screenshots and illustrations, and then adds recommendations.
He uses colour coding for positive and negative experiences, and he tries to stack rank things in order of importance.
If you want to get granular insight on every stage of your customer experience, putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, this is the way to do it.
Published by Brian Chesky on X in 2023, this is another example of Airbnb using persona-led storyboarding to re-imagine their user experience.
Get more examples of Airbnb’s storyboarding in Product Vision Examples
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
It packs a lot of information into a small area. Airbnb is a marketplace, meaning they have 2 personas to serve well – the guest and the host.
This packs the entire 8 step booking, stay, checkout, review, and reward process into a compact and succinct infographic.
There’s simple colour coding used throughout to make it clear which parts belong to which persona.
Not only is the product experience screengrabbed and included, but so are the policy and service elements of the experience. That’s important because there’s expectations of Airbnb as well as potential friction points at every step of the journey.
“Such mappings are often overlooked, but they can be very impactful. Not only is it a very tangible way to visualize UX, but it’s also easy to understand, remember and relate to daily — potentially for all teams in the entire organization. And that’s something only few artefacts can do.” – Vitaly Friedman, Measure UX
Get the Hustle Badger Customer Journey Map Template: Miro | Figma
We created this customer journey map template with a populated customer journey map example from eBay’s customer journey.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
It’s available as a customer journey map template in both Miro and Figma. When created it was recognised as one of Miro’s top creations of the month.
It’s popular because it incorporates many of the elements we’ve selected as positive in other examples: screenshots of the journey, principles, qualitative insights supported by quantitative insights, ideas of where to work, and colour coding.
It’s more holistic than the other examples we’ve looked at so far, since it incorporates 11 components of user emotions, touch points, data types and actions, rather than 5-7.
This format is best for a detailed customer journey map which creates a rich canvas for product and design teams to identify opportunities to create customer impact.
USA.gov is a USA governmental website that helps people perform tasks, such as filing their tax return, and access services, such as unemployment benefits.
This example follows a persona, Linda, a low wage economy worker who has just lost her job in a call center, and is looking to access unemployment support.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
This example is a solid tear down of how information might be shared about what people can get, and how they might struggle to access services.
It’s built from multiple data sources, such as behavioral site analytics and call centre data, making it very robust.
It’s also a great example of a customer journey map which isn’t a one and done exercise, but a living tool that actively informed actions. After the exercise a series of actions were taken, from overhauling customer service queue options, to implementing a customer advisory council.
“While the process of journey mapping is enlightening, it doesn’t end with a map. Follow-up and planning for improvement are key.” – Journey Mapping the Customer Experience: A USA.gov Case Study
Say Yeah created this customer journey map for Elder Care, a Canadian company which helps find care providers. The map is designed from the perspective of an adult child attempting to find a solution to their elderly parent’s care. Their goal was to map the user journey in its entirety and fully understand the market landscape.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
This customer journey map example is centred entirely on the user in order to uncover areas for the company to play. It doesn’t only track the user’s interaction with the company’s service or product, but instead tracks all touchpoints and emotions they might experience while researching the best option for their parent.
It incorporates elements of the competitor and surrounding landscape: social media research and all the people the adult child might come into contact with. It also suggests tactics for each stage of the journey.
“Too often, organizations consider only those stages and ways they are already working with a customer or market, ignoring or missing steps where they are not involved. By understanding the decision-making journey from the customer’s point of view, we can clarify additional factors in their process and ask how we might be more involved along the way.” – Say Yeah
Dating from 2019, this example aims to track the customer activation journey, from acquisition to steady state product usage.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
It incorporates all touchpoints – from devices to the names of different job functions that the customer might interact with.
In order to capture this accurately they held a series of workshops with employees across the organization to ensure there was communal agreement on major milestones and interactions.
In addition it uses tactical colour coding to help highlight positive and negative moments. It also uses customer testimonials and feedback verbatim in the map to represent the true voice of the customer.
This customer journey map example captures a user’s interaction with Rail Europe, an online booking platform to buy European train tickets online, which smooths out the difficulty of routing journeys across multiple providers.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
They declare their biases at the top of the infographic: the section called Guiding Principles or Lens makes statements like ‘People value service that is respectful, effective and personable’, meaning that anything which crosses that line is likely to be presented as an opportunity.
The next great thing is the clear delineation between what users are thinking and feeling at every stage, coupled with an attempt to quantify the importance of inputs. There’s neat visualization of the circuits customers might complete trying to make decisions. Finally they pull out some improvement opportunities and additionally log them on the diagram.
This customer journey map example (unfortunately now behind a password) is a case study from a UX designer who has worked at brands like Microsoft and Avast, showcasing his work to improve the ASOS app in 2020.
ASOS is one of the largest European ecommerce fashion brands. In this case study he takes us through research, affinity testing, competitor analysis, customer and user journey maps and shares some prototypes.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
If you’re time limited, have already done affinity mapping and user flows, this is definitely a quick and effective way to put together a customer journey map fast.
You could see this being done in a workshop as a group exercise, or as a snap exercise to create something which could be socialized with stakeholders.
It’s a simple mood mapping of the 5 funnel steps, with the same subheadings (context, goals, behaviours, problems) bulleted out at each step.
This customer journey map example maps the experience of users renewing their mobile phone contract for Telus, a Canadian mobile phone provider.
The map was created to help improve user satisfaction scores, since contract renewals had the lowest satisfaction ratings across the board, and to help the company reduce the cost of renewals, since they were time consuming and largely handled by the call centre.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
It very clearly shows the route through the contract renewal experience of 2 different personas in a clear and minimalistic way.
The Passive Optimist and Proactive Warrior personas can change sides depending on the user journey, and that’s clearly demonstrated here in a neat visualization. The map also captures 3 different ways in which the company and the customer interacts, namely in store, digital and call centre.
This map is an example by Digitas, the marketing agency, after they kept touching on Amazon, and Amazon’s dominance with their clients.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
It’s a marketing first, competitor audit review of a customer journey. The customer lifecycle from no knowledge of Amazon, to repeat purchase provides the framework for the lifecycle stages.
It’s also quite different from other customer journey map examples we’ve looked at, because it covers topics like, customer journey principles, Amazon products that enable and promote the purchase, and success metrics.
Overall it’s a reminder that customer journey maps can also be competitive exercises.
This is a customer journey mapping exercise undertaken by Uber many years ago, with the outcome that they changed payment systems to incorporate tips paid by card.
What’s good about this customer journey map example:
The persona is clearly defined, and which adds credibility to the pain points. It also includes screenshots of the experience and colour coding of positive and negative elements.
4 More Real Customer Journey Map Examples
Finally, here’s 4 more real customer journey examples. They’re often swift exercises done by a UX designer looking to optimize an experience, but they’re useful examples of how snap customer journeys can add a lot of value. They come with detailed walk throughs of the use they were put to, and the insights the designers gained from the exercise.
Wrap up on Customer Journey Map Examples
As we’ve shown with this run through of customer journey map examples for different purposes and in different styles, there’s a bunch of different formats to effectively analyze and communicate your findings. It’s important to select the right tool for the job: be it a team audit, a workshop or a stakeholder presentation.
We’ve also demonstrated that mapping exercises can include off site analysis, metrics, can represent good and bad experiences and can visualize the in product experience imaginatively, so long as they capture the user’s needs, motivations and emotions at every stage of the journey.
The key thing is to use the tool effectively to identify negative experiences and friction points, and make changes so that they evolve into positives that create a sticky customer experience.
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Where can I find some customer journey map examples?
We’ve collated 17 of the best customer journey map examples we could find here. It includes real examples from companies like Spotify, Miro, Airbnb and Hubspot.
What are the best customer journey map examples?
The best customer journey map examples include visuals of the user experience, such as screenshots, and clearly note the friction points in their journey.
