How can Journey maps be enhanced with behavioral insights?
For those of us who work in design, innovation, and change, journey maps or service blueprints are tools that are used quite often.
What do most of these maps include:
-Stages -Steps -Actors -Channels/Touchpoints -Emotional Journey -Dramatic Arcs, and on and on.
(And Backstage if you are building a blueprint)
This is all great, however most of the time the analysis could gain from a behavioral analysis approach, where the insights are brought into the journey to understand the things that need to change.
In my consulting work, we have been iterating on this area to try and find a good way of creating and working with behavioral journey maps.
One of the pieces we have been using is an adapted empathy map (which I have written and shown before) which feeds from our behavioral analysis and then feeds to our journey.
How can you adapt this yourself?
Looking at the example in the image from the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF). (**The image is not a whole journey, it’s for representation purposes and I took the image to show how you could adapt a journey with behavior -lanes may be missing )
- The Doing is captured, this is great, clear steps/actions/behaviors a person is doing - we like to go a step further and include sub-actions.
- The Thinking and Feeling are captured, great - I can see that in the first step I get some excellent insights here:
The person is worried and stressed: some insights I would have extracted from our analysis and had then put on the behavioral empathy map
When we work with a behavioral analysis that feeds into a journey - my job is not just to address common pain points, but to go beyond and understand what needs to change for the action to be done. This includes using an evidence-based approach, accounting for context, and ensuring we account for the behavioral psychological, and environmental domains.
By bringing your behavioral analysis into your journeys you easily match the things that need to change to evidence-based behavior change techniques that enhance current or future solutions.
Knowing how to combine Journey Mapping with Behavioral Analysis will help you be more accurate and derisk your projects - meaning a higher rate of success.
It's taken many iterations to get to a point to understand how to enhance journeys with behavioral science - I'll share more on this in the coming months...