A User Journey is an artifact for shaping user interactions with a product or service.

• Contextual to the user’s life.
• Progresses the user towards accomplishing a goal.
• Demonstrates the functionality of a product or service.
• Reveals the user’s emotional state(s) as they interact with the product or service.

 
User Journeys are useful tools for communicating design to stakeholders, managers, and developers.

• Build empathy for the user.
• Frame the problem users experience.
• Portray a transformed experience.
• Reveal user expectations from the product or service.
• Gain understanding of content requirements and functional specifications.
• Understand the structure of a digital solution.

 
There are five elements to crafting a user journey.

1. Define the user. What are the user's goals, motivations, behaviors, and context of use?
2. Define goals for the user journey. Once the journey is created, how will the results benefit the team?
3. Illustrate the user and their context of use. Sketch the journey as a story. Include who, what, where, why, and how.
4. Represent user emotions as they interact with the product or service.  
5. Show progression, functionality, and logical links as the user interacts with the product or service.

Sketching a user journey is most beneficial to the designer.

• Journey sketches provides a space for the designer to conduct micro-experiments on a not-yet-existing product or service.
• Sketches by their nature are disposable, whether in pencil or in software. Designers are free to explore many potential problems, modifications, and outcomes.
• User interactions in the journey reveal a design’s strengths, weaknesses, and needed changes.
• Multiple journeys for one user inform design for complex situations.

 
Design explores possible futures, and user journeys can depict those futures.

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