Customer Journey Map & User Story Map

Public Service design is a holistic approach to enhance public services. It is used by governmental entities
trying to improve, re-design, or launch new services to achieve higher public satisfaction and elevate public
trust in their government’s leadership. The three important outputs of any public service design project are as follows:
1. To Be Journey Map.
2. Set of initiatives.
3. User Story Map.
Note: other outputs can be generated from public service design projects but this article focuses on these three outputs only.

Customer Journey Map

A “Customer Journey Map” is a term mainly used in service design that illustrates customers’ main
steps, customers’ touch points, channels used by customers to reach the service, customers’ feelings at
each touch point, and most importantly customers’ challenges at each touch point.

In other words, a customer journey map is drawn from the customers’ points of view to summarize their
feelings and challenges as shown in Figure (1) below.

Set of Initiatives

The set of initiatives is generated from the design team for each service. Design teams are formed
from multidisciplinary team members, these members are: (Service Owner, Service frontline, CX lead, and
IT members). Based on the challenges mentioned in the journey map or customers’ interviews.
The implementation of design initiatives is usually spread over a specific period of time, in order to
cater to customers’ adaptation needs. In other words, these initiatives are introduced gradually over time
to eliminate the shock factor in customers’ experience.

User Story Map

The user story map is created from the product perspective – backend service activities perspective –
it details all steps needed to complete a certain task. For example, detailing steps and activities needed to
check your bank account balance.

Moreover, the user story map demonstrates a high-level design map that includes the framework and
backend features and requirements needed to complete the task needed from the customer at each touch
point (interaction) with the product (service).

To summarize, the customer journey map is from the customer’s perspective and the user story map
is from Product/Service backend perspective. Each map is an effective tool by itself. It is important to
highlight that the customer journey map can be augmented with the user story map and vice versa. The
augmentation of these two maps highly depends on the client’s expectations.