Journey Mapping Insights

At 5 by 5 Design we believe it’s possible to change the world by posing the right questions, listening to the honest answers, and following the path that emerges from the dialogue. Today’s discussion focuses on using service design journey mapping and service blueprinting to improve your client’s experience with your brand.

Lisa Helminiak is an executive strategist, an experience design leader, and the founder of Culturlab. She helps organizations navigate change by aligning strategy, customer experience, innovation, and emerging technologies. With more than two decades of experience, Lisa has advised leaders across healthcare, life sciences, government, technology, and mission-driven organizations. She founded and led Azul Seven, a 25-person experience strategy and design consultancy acquired by Vervint in 2020, and later served as Chief Experience Officer at RADICL.

Lisa’s work combines human-centered design, systems thinking, and practical innovation to help organizations identify opportunities, reduce complexity, and translate emerging technologies into products, services, and experiences that create real value. We’ve asked Lisa a series of questions about how organizations can use journey mapping and service blueprinting. Here’s what she had to say. 

1. What are service design journey mapping and service blueprinting, and why are they useful when organizations are trying to redesign how work gets done?

Journey maps are a visual output of research and data that help leaders and teams understand the sequence of work—the choreographed interactions that happen at the point of service delivery. These choreographed interactions encompass what your staff is doing, what your technology or operations are doing, and how it all comes together to impact customers, mapped over a meaningful period of time.

The goal is to understand all the elements that go into delivering a product or service and the brand impression it leaves with customers. Journey maps help us identify ways to improve the service experience or enhance what’s working well to help differentiate a company from competitors. Maps often include journey phases, actors (customer and staff), actions, expectations, emotions, channels, physical interaction points, and back-end systems or processes that support the interaction.

One example of a journey map I’ve worked on was for healthcare organizations seeking to improve the end-of-visit experience, so patients knew what to do next and how to access the information they needed after leaving a primary care visit. This work led the healthcare provider to create new print and digital tools to ensure patients didn’t leave a visit confused or unsure about next steps, such as starting a new medication. I’ve also seen this tool help transform sales experiences for companies with complex sales needs or uncover unmet needs to improve product adoption.

People often use journey maps and service blueprints interchangeably, but I define them differently. Service blueprints also depict a time-based, sequential journey and often include many of the elements you’ll see in journey maps, but they depict a newly designed journey you are architecting rather than mapping the current journey. They are the blueprint for what a business wants to create.

Some people call these future-state journey maps. These are great tools to help different departments or siloed groups within a business understand how they need to coordinate to improve the products and services they deliver. I’ve seen these tools help teams align priorities in ways that are difficult when they don’t understand how each element needs to be choreographed in a sequence that meaningfully impacts customers.

2. When you begin a project to improve a service or workflow, what do you want to understand before you start looking for solutions?

Our goal in creating a journey map is to understand what happens during a service interaction, or the customer lifecycle. We want to understand the sequence of events, touchpoints, who they are interacting with, and how this impacts the customer experience. Because the journey map depicts our research findings—what we actually observe—we need to understand what people are doing, thinking, and feeling during each stage in the journey. This work usually involves watching people work through the process both internally and on the customer side.

Using my healthcare example, what is it like to be the patient in a doctor’s visit, and what is it like to leave that visit? Do you know what to do? Funny enough, one finding was that doctors often left patients in the exam room without clearly telling them they were done. And patients were sometimes unclear how to even find the exit. This is a small finding but meaningful in how doctors can improve the visit.

We also want to understand what it is like to be the doctor in that scenario. Do they have time to complete all the steps needed to ensure the patient has what they need and clearly understands what to do next? What tools do they have to help them? What factors are impacting information delivery? Once we have these findings and understand the sequence of events, we can start to find areas to improve or elevate further. 

3. When journey mapping, whose perspective should be included?

Both customer and business operational perspectives need to be included in the research to create a meaningful journey map. When focusing on the customer, research and data often reveal behavioral correlations that help you group customers into clusters of people driven by certain motivations and behaviors.

Back in the day, we created personas that included demographic information and stories to help predict how we thought a customer would behave. This practice came out of marketing and ad targeting. Today, we know that understanding what motivates folks, not just age or where they live, is a truer predictor of interest and behavior. With all the ways to track data, we now work from observed behaviors to understand why users or customers might behave or act a certain way.

For staff and partners whose work affects the customer experience, we need to understand what is happening and why. This goes beyond frontline staff. Your IT department might be the folks impacting customers more than your sales team. If staff can’t get what they need or can’t make the changes they need to improve an experience, that affects them, the customer, and ultimately your organization’s ability to deliver on your promise.

4. What are some of the common pain points, bottlenecks, or moments of friction that become visible through journey mapping and service blueprinting?

I think the most common aha moment comes when companies see how their internal processes or misalignment impede the delivery of the product or service they want to deliver. We had a customer who wanted to show regional pricing differences on their website but couldn’t because their IT department had a two-year project backlog. As a result, no pricing appeared online, and their overburdened sales staff took on many more customer service calls and inquiries.

Once we showed the negative and costly impact on both customers and staff, IT moved this change to the top of the priority list. Ironically, it took them days to fix rather than months, so a constant source of friction was solved, saving time and money and improving customer satisfaction.

5. What does a future-state service blueprint look like when AI is part of the experience? 

Journey mapping and service blueprinting can be important tools for understanding where AI might provide the highest return on investment. Visualizing processes helps us determine where AI could reduce human burden, increase information access, or find novel solutions, so we can be more thoughtful about where it can provide meaningful value.

I also think journey mapping could help with agent orchestration, so we can build in security and understand what agents are doing on our behalf, rather than setting them loose without thinking through every step. I’d like to see more businesses start with understanding the journey before they decide where AI fits best. This could improve outcomes and help us avoid being part of the stats about low ROI on company investments in AI.

I’m a human-centered designer, so I will always say we need to keep humans at the center of our design processes… humans and design that continue to enable us to live well on a healthy, beautiful blue planet. I also think we need to think more about long-term impacts of the systems we live within and touch. Many companies and organizations don't think about understanding their products and services as part of a time-based continuum or the systems they impact. Staying human- and system-centered is a good first step toward designing for AI’s impact on our businesses.