User journey design
Skill viktorbezdek/skillstack/user-journey-design/skills/user-journey-design
Skills I use and develop to deliver better outcomes faster and with less effort.
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Map user journeys with touchpoints, emotional states, pain points, and opportunities across the full arc of a user's experience over time. Use when the user asks to map a user journey, create a customer journey map, design a service blueprint, document touchpoints and friction points, or visualize the end-to-end experience of a user across multiple interactions. NOT for static navigation structure or sitemaps (use navigation-design). NOT for creating user personas or archetypes (use persona-definition). NOT for designing research interview flows (use elicitation). NOT for writing microcopy at specific touchpoints (use ux-writing).
SKILL.md
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User Journey Design
Map complete user experiences from awareness through mastery.
When to use this skill
- Mapping how a user experiences a product or service end-to-end over time
- Identifying friction points and emotional lows in an existing experience
- Designing a future-state experience for a new feature or product
- Creating service blueprints that show both user and organizational actions
- Documenting the touchpoints between a user and your product
When NOT to use this skill
- Static navigation structure or sitemaps → use
navigation-design - Creating user personas or archetypes → use
persona-definition - Designing research interviews → use
elicitation - Writing microcopy for specific UI elements → use
ux-writing - Technical flow diagrams or process flows → use workflow/systems tools
Decision tree
What are you trying to understand?
│
├─ How users experience our EXISTING product over time
│ └─ Current-state journey map: observe → document → identify pain points
│
├─ How users SHOULD experience a NEW or redesigned product
│ └─ Future-state journey map: define ideal → map stages → identify gaps
│
├─ How both the user AND the organization act across touchpoints
│ └─ Service blueprint: map front-stage (user) + back-stage (org) + support processes
│
└─ Where users drop off or struggle in a specific flow
└─ Focused journey fragment: zoom into the problem stage → map in detail
Journey scope?
│
├─ Full product lifecycle (awareness → mastery)
│ └─ 5-7 stages, broad but structured
│
├─ Single flow (e.g., checkout, onboarding, API integration)
│ └─ 3-5 stages, narrow and deep
│
└─ Documentation path (getting started, troubleshooting, API reference)
└─ Use pre-built templates: Getting Started / Troubleshooting / API Integration
Journey Types
| Type | Focus | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Current state | As-is experience | Auditing existing UX, finding friction |
| Future state | To-be design | Redesigning or building new experiences |
| Service blueprint | Org + user view | Aligning front-stage and back-stage processes |
Core Elements
- Stages: Awareness -> Evaluation -> Onboarding -> Usage -> Mastery
- Touchpoints: Interaction points (where the user meets your product)
- Actions: What users do at each stage
- Thoughts: Questions, assumptions, mental models
- Emotions: Confidence <-> Frustration scale (1-5)
- Pain Points: Friction, confusion, blockers
- Opportunities: Improvements, quick wins, strategic changes
Journey Template
# [Persona] Journey: [Goal]
## Stage 1: [Name]
| Element | Details |
|---------|---------|
| Goal | [what they want at this stage] |
| Actions | [what they do] |
| Touchpoints | [where the interaction happens] |
| Emotion | [1-5 scale: 1=frustrated, 5=confident] |
| Pain Points | [what goes wrong or causes friction] |
| Opportunities | [how to improve the experience] |
Documentation Journeys
Getting Started: Land -> Find quickstart -> Setup -> Run example -> Success Troubleshooting: Error -> Search -> Find article -> Try fix -> Resolve API Integration: Discover -> Credentials -> Read ref -> Test -> Production
Anti-Patterns
- Mapping the happy path only — showing only the ideal flow without error states, detours, or alternative paths. Fix: for each stage, ask "what if this goes wrong?" and map the recovery path.
- Journey without a persona — mapping "the user" instead of a specific persona with defined goals, context, and constraints. Fix: always anchor the journey to a named persona from
persona-definition. - Ignoring emotional state — documenting actions and touchpoints but not how the user feels at each stage. Fix: the emotion score is the most actionable data point; friction always correlates with emotional lows.
- Too many stages — 10+ stages make the map unreadable and unfocused. Fix: group into 4-7 major stages; use sub-stages only when zooming into a specific section.
- Service blueprint without back-stage — showing only the user-facing experience without the internal processes that enable it. Fix: a real service blueprint has three layers: front-stage (user sees), back-stage (org does), support processes (systems that enable).
- Journey map as artifact, not tool — creating the map once and never revisiting it. Fix: treat journey maps as living documents; revisit after feature launches, user research, or quarterly reviews.
- Mixing personas in one map — mapping "users" without differentiating personas causes pain points to average out and hide critical differences. Fix: create separate maps per key persona; a power user's troubleshooting journey differs fundamentally from a beginner's.