Experience map

An experience map follows a person through everything they do to reach a goal, whether or not your product is involved. Someone moving to a new city does not only use your banking app. They search for flats, sign a lease, set up electricity, change their registration. The experience map covers all of it, with your offering as one small region within a wider landscape.

Experience map vs journey map

This is the distinction that matters. A journey map follows a person through your product or service and is anchored in your touchpoints. An experience map is anchored in the person’s goal and stays neutral about who provides what.

That neutrality is the value. Because it is not tied to a brand, it can show the stages where nobody serves people well, and those stages are where new offerings come from. A journey map tells you how to improve what you have; an experience map helps you decide what to build next.

What it contains

Typically the stages of the path across the top, with rows for what people do, think and feel, and the pain points they hit. Because it is generic, it is usually based on research with several people and sometimes on a persona or a few of them.

Common mistake

Quietly turning it into a map of your own funnel. If every row starts at “visits our site”, it is a journey map with a bigger title. Start earlier than your product does, and end later.