From Intuit's Design for Delight (D4D) resource center on Intuit Labs: Journey Lines. Use this tool to understand how your customers approach tasks and how they feel about it along the way —understand both their good and bad experiences.

1. IntuitLabs.com | @Intuit 1 © Intuit
When to use it
When you need to understand how your customer approaches
a task and how they feel about it along the way, including the
most delightful — and painful —points.
Why use it
Visualize decision-making, behavioral, and emotional flows to
uncover gaps in customer understanding and surface insights
and potential opportunities to delight.
How to use it
1. Describe the customer and the task. Example:
Sharon, a floral shop owner with three employees.
Task: Take a credit card order for flower delivery called in
by a new customer.
2. Capture each step of the customer’s journey for a specific
experience. What is the trigger for the task? What happens
next? When is the task complete?
3. Emotion code each step of the journey using a five-point
scale, with misery at the bottom and delight at the top.
4. Connect individual events to the larger context. Often,
abstracting up a level can yield a meaningful insight.
5. Vote on one pain point of the journey to solve first.
What would make the biggest difference in this customer’s
experience? Hint: sometimes it’s not the low point.
JOURNEYLINES
Time
About 30 minutes.
DESIGN FOR DELIGHT
Deep customer empathy

2. © Intuit 2 IntuitLabs.com | @Intuit
Tips
• Anchor the start and end points by placing Post-Its with the trigger
and the completed state first. This will focus the conversation on
the journey segment of interest.
• In the field you can create a journeyline on the fly using a stack of
index cards of Post-Its, or just drawing a horizontal line on a piece
of paper. While observing the task, take notes, one task per card
or note. When the process is complete, line them up in order and
ask the customer to explain each step, inserting, deleting, or
moving steps as needed.
• If you can’t observe the task directly, use the journeyline as a way
to get the customer to tell you each step of the task. It may take
a couple of passes to capture the complete journey. Note cards or
Post-Its make it easy to rearrange or insert a process step.
• Abstracting up yields a different view of the problem. Walk through
the journeyline from a touchpoint perspective to see where the
customer interacts with another point or service. Discussion of
these interrelationships can yield insights about dependencies, as
well as opportunity areas for new innovation.
• Discover emergent patterns. Create journeylines for several
customers until patterns emerge. Compare customer journeylines
to understand anomalies and identify overlooked or invisible parts
of the task.
Use with
Collect customer observations and/or feedback before, during,
or after the journeyline to ensure details are correct. Use with
observation and Customer Insight interviewing and as a feeder
to the Empathy Map.
At Intuit, we believe our Design for Delight (D4D)
approach can make innovators 20x more effective.
Three key principles make up D4D: deep customer
empathy, going broad to go narrow, and rapid
experiments with customers. Now go and create some
awesome experiences that delight your customers.