Experience Mapping

Overview

Experience mapping is how you get a shared picture of a situation before you start solving it. You take what you know about how people move through a particular context, whether that's applying for a benefit, getting discharged from a hospital, or onboarding to a new job, and lay it out in a way that lets your team see the whole thing at once: the actions, the decisions, the friction, and the emotional texture.

The most important distinction to hold onto is that an experience map is not about your product. It's about the human experience, independent of what you're designing. That's what separates it from a journey map, which maps a specific user's interaction with a specific product or service. If you jump straight to mapping the product, you've already narrowed your lens too early. The experience map captures the broader situation your product will eventually sit inside. That context shapes everything.

A well-built map doesn't just retell what people do. It surfaces the moments where they adapt, where they rely on workarounds, where they depend on other people, and where the emotional stakes are highest. Those are the places worth designing for. Without the map, they're easy to miss or skip over in favor of the parts of the experience your team already understands well.

When to Use It

• Early in a project, when your team needs a shared baseline understanding of the current situation before generating solutions.
• When your research has surfaced a lot of qualitative material (interview notes, observation data, field recordings) and you need a way to synthesize it into a coherent picture.
• When stakeholders have different mental models of the same experience, and you need a single artifact that everyone can react to and build from.
• When the problem you're solving spans multiple touchpoints, systems, or people, and a linear description won't do it justice.

This is not the right tool when your research is still too thin to support it. A map built mostly on assumptions looks like insight but isn't. Do the research first, then map.

How It Works

Start by defining the scope. What experience are you mapping, and where does it begin and end? A scope that's too narrow misses the upstream context that often explains downstream friction. Too broad, and you'll lose the room.

Pull from your research to identify the key moments across that experience. These aren't just actions. They include decisions the person had to make, tools or people they turned to, things that went wrong, and how they responded. Organize these into a sequence that reflects how the experience actually unfolds, not how you'd want it to.

Layer in the emotional dimension. At each significant moment, note what people are feeling: where confidence is high, where confusion builds, where frustration shows up. This is what separates a map from a flowchart. The emotional overlay is often where the most actionable insight lives.

Format is flexible. Some experiences call for a simple timeline. Others benefit from swimlane diagrams that show how multiple actors interact, or a day-in-the-life structure that tracks context across time. Let the nature of the experience guide the format, not convention.

The best maps are built collaboratively, with your team actively constructing them rather than receiving them as a finished document. The conversation during construction is part of the value.

Tips

Resist the urge to jump to solutions while building the map. When a pain point surfaces, someone will always say "we should fix that." Note it, then keep going. You don't yet know which problems are worth solving.

Be honest about what's observation versus inference. There's a real difference between "participants said they felt confused" and "this step seems confusing." Keep those two things clearly separated on your map.

Compare across people. If you've done interviews with multiple participants, map more than one of them. The patterns that repeat are the ones worth betting on. The outliers sometimes reveal the most important edge cases.

The Output

A visual representation of an experience as it currently exists, showing the sequence of actions, decisions, emotional shifts, and friction points your research uncovered.

This artifact typically feeds into problem framing and ideation. It's a natural precursor to persona work, journey mapping for a specific product context, or How Might We sessions. The map gives your team something concrete to point at when asking: where in this experience is the real opportunity?

Related Methods

• Interviewing: Comes before. Your map is only as good as your research. Interviews are the primary source of the material that goes into it.
• Persona Profile: Runs alongside. The person (or type of person) you build the map around often becomes the basis for a persona.
• Affinity Mapping: Comes before. Use affinity mapping to synthesize raw research notes before building the experience map.
• Journey Mapping: Comes after. Once you understand the broader experience, journey mapping zooms in on how a specific product or service fits into it.
• How Might We: Comes after. The friction and emotional low points on your map are natural inputs for generating opportunity statements.
• Rose, Thorn, Bud: Runs alongside. RTB is a useful lens for identifying what's working, what's not, and what has potential within the experience you've mapped.