What are the best tools and methods for user journey mapping?

One thing to consider while creating a journey map is to look at the perspective taken. Are you writing it as you want it to be? Or writing it based on what currently exists? Creating a real + an actual map can also help guide goals and set a focus on what things need improvement. It also requires the team to be realistic about flaws and product improvements. Lastly, and taking it a step farther, when creating stakeholder alignment, they also make great collaboration and brainstorming activities. Doing it together is a different alignment than telling the team how it is. It can create a more cohesive team and give folks a greater sense of ownership.

I've tried Miro and Figma, and played around with MindNode too. They're all pretty decent, but I prefer a good old pen/paper or Google doc where I can write out each step of the user's journey in a clean table. Google doc also makes collaboration very seamless.

I'm also a fan of LucidSpark's journey mapping templates. They allow for a fun and useful visualization of the phases of the customer's journey as well as the sentiment of the customer at each step. They can be found easily by searching the LucidSpark templates.

I like to keep mine with the projects it’s tied to and so try to keep whatever copy version I can with my project management tool. In this case, we use Leantime and you can embed Google docs into their document manager and edit across both platforms. This makes it great for both stakeholders that don’t need to be in the project while still editable within the space I’m doing all my tracking.

One approach I have found helpful is to combine a few views to gather points of pain and then show current/proposed features mapped to each major user step. Current state - User steps (main five steps with one level down) - Visual row - draw or copy pages currently in app under major step - Points of pain - pain/opportunity associated with each major step - Current features - current product features associated with each step - Now In progress - features in progress associated with each step - Next - features prioritized to do next associated with each step - Later - features prioritized to do later associated with each step

Interesting example from the federal government on the pains of figuring out Medicare and Social security (half way down page is link to customer journey map. https://www.performance.gov/cx/life-experiences/approaching-retirement/

It can be really helpful to work with the product team to create a template version that is used by the entire product org. This makes recognition easier and more streamlined for the external stakeholders and the team to get familiar with them, read them quickly, and get less overwhelmed with the data points (i.e. tuning you out while you present).