Importance of Design in a Customer Journey Map
If you want someone to remember your message – tell them a story.
Better yet, paint them a picture.
The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, and people are 80% more likely to remember something they saw compared to something they read. Ask yourself – would you retain more flipping through a 60-page deck or by exploring a colorful, carefully curated map of your customer’s journey from start to finish?
“According to researched complied by 3M, the corporation behind Post-it Notes, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text, which means you can paint a picture for your audience much faster with an actual picture.” – Fast Company
Design maps that matter.
A customer journey map is a visual storytelling tool that captures a customer’s experience with a product or service, from point A to point B, across various touchpoints and channels. They often include emotions like curiosity, confusion, anxiety, and frustration to help deepen customer empathy, identify pain points and discover opportunities for improvements and innovation.
Brilliantly designed customer journey maps can synthesize your entire customer experience into one visual that’s easy to socialize, engage with and understand. Here are just a few examples of how that might look from simple and traditional, to more detailed or game-board like in appearance.
Simple journey maps can be created in applications like PowerPoint to help layout a big picture view of everything that goes into a journey. However, if all the data is presented with the same level of detail, it can be harder to focus in on specific steps or details and see relationships across the journey.
For the more detailed examples, these are often laid out by a professional designer using applications such as Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher. With highly stylized maps, you can start to visualize data points in different ways, more easily define the major flow with on-ramps and off-ramps, and curate the content to better focus the reader’s attention on specific points that are most relevant at each step of the journey.
At Clearworks, no two maps are created equal.
While you may like the style of one map over another, the key to a successful journey map is to follow the data. Your customer journey could be linear, but more likely it will have on-ramps and off-ramps, loops or multiple levels. That’s why we customize the layout, components, and design of each map to match your industry, product, and customers. We also consider what you’ll be using the map for internally, how you’ll be presenting it to others and more.
Let us bring your customer journey to life.
No matter where you are in your journey to creating a customer journey map, we love talking about design! Shoot us an email at hello@clearworks.net.
Read more blogs about journey mapping here
Sarah Collins
sarah@clearworks.net
