Co-creating journey maps

Step-by-step guide

1. ‍Define main actor and journey scope Select a main actor, such as a persona, whose shoes you want your workshop participants to walk in. Define the time frame (“scope”) of your story. Are you talking about an experience of 10 minutes, 2 hours, 5 days, or 10 years?
2. Plan and prepare Determine who you’ll invite as workshop participants and prepare your invitations. Describe the aim of the workshop, set expectations for your workshop, and think of an incentive for participating in the workshop if appropriate. Prepare the room (or any other venue you choose for your workshop) and write a list so that you don’t forget any essential material (templates, sticky notes, pens, personas, research data, etc.). Write a facilitation agenda and establish facilitation guidelines to create a safe space through warm-ups and so on.
3. Welcome and split into smaller groups Start your workshop with a welcome, describing the workshop’s aim and agenda, and facilitate a round of introductions. After a warm-up, split the participants into subgroups of 3–5 people and give them clear instructions on what to do. 
4. Identify stages and steps Let the workshop participants start with the rough stages of a journey map, such as “inspiration, planning, booking, experience, sharing” for a holiday. Now fill up the stages with the persona’s story. Sometimes it helps if you start “in the middle” with the most crucial steps and then ask yourself what happens before and what happens after these. Use simple sticky notes for this so you can easily add or discard steps and stages.
5. Iterate and refine Refine the journey by going through it from end to end to check if you missed a step or if you need more/less detail in certain parts. You can always break up a step into two or more steps or condense several steps to one. Depending on the project, it might make sense to find a consistent level of detail throughout the whole journey map or to highlight a specific part of the journey in more detail.
6. (Optional) Add perspectives Add more perspectives, such as a storyboard, an emotional journey, channels, involved stakeholders, a dramatic arc, backstage processes, “What if?” scenarios, etc.
7. (Optional) Emotional journey exercise Ask the subgroups to number the steps of their journey maps, and let a participant from one subgroup present their main actor and journey map step by step to either the entire group or a partner group. Each workshop participant should write down on their own how they think the main actor feels at each step – for example, from –2 (very dissatisfied) to 0 (indifferent) to +2 (very satisfied). In a second step, let each participant mark their values on the emotional journey of the journey map. You’ll see steps where the entire group agrees that it is a positive or negative experience, but you’ll also discover steps with very diverse ratings. Use this as an input for discussion and try to find out if you need to clarify the main actor (persona), or the description of the step, or if there are other reasons why the group is not yet on the same page.
8. Discuss and merge Give participants some time to reflect. Discuss similarities and differences between the journey maps of the different subgroups. Let the group merge the different maps into one map (or several), but make notes on different opinions and insights – they might be useful for you later.
9. Follow-up Go through your notes and check different positions taken by your workshop participants. Index the generated data and highlight important passages. Sometimes it is useful to schedule follow-up interviews or further workshops with some or all participants. If needed, process your journey map into a format that is easier to comprehend (physical or digital). Write a short workshop summary that includes your conflated key findings as well as the journey map and raw data you collected during the workshop from your participants, such as quotes, photos, or videos. 

Method notes

• ‍Define the situational context of the experience you want to map in your workshop (weekdays vs. weekends, daytime vs. nighttime, summer vs. winter, rainy vs. sunny, etc.). This will help workshop participants to develop a shared frame of reference.
• Consider repeating the workshop with different participants, or a different situational context, or basing your journey map on different personas to identify patterns and understand particular distinctions between these.