Customer journey mapping with Figma | Figma Blog

Customer journey maps help teams build a shared understanding of how people experience a process, including emotions, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. The article explains how Lextech uses Figma to research, create, refine, and validate these maps collaboratively. Figma’s component libraries, collaboration tools, version history, and comments make journey mapping more consistent and easier to share with clients and customers.

When Customer Journey Maps Are Useful

• Journey maps visually tell the story of a customer process, such as shopping for a car or purchasing a product online.
• They combine process steps with customer emotions and pain points.
• A shared map helps people with different perspectives understand research and identify improvement opportunities.
• Journey maps are less suitable for highly nonlinear processes with many branches or dependencies; a two-dimensional user-flow diagram may work better.
• They may also add limited value when a process is already well documented through other visual methods.

Building a Journey Map Component Library

• Teams can create reusable components and styles specifically for journey maps.
• A shared library improves visual consistency and speeds up the creation of new maps.
• Global style or component updates can be applied efficiently when the design changes.
• Lextech provides a sample Figma file and component library as a starting point.

Keeping Maps Organized with Tidy Up

• Figma’s Tidy Up feature helps adjust spacing between journey steps.
• It makes it easier to insert or reorder steps without rebuilding large portions of the map.

Research and Real-Time Collaboration

• Multiple designers can work on the same journey map simultaneously.
• Lextech also records interview notes directly in Figma, keeping research and map development in one location rather than spreading information across multiple tools.

Using Version History

• Before sending a map to clients, the team manually timestamps a version in the file’s history.
• This creates a reliable reference point if the team needs to revisit an earlier state.
• Showing how a map evolved can help clients understand how research findings changed the team’s understanding of the customer.

Gathering Feedback with Comments

• Lextech shares rough journey maps with customers to validate research and uncover missing steps.
• Comments provide a centralized feedback channel tied to precise locations on the map.
• Teams can ask follow-up questions directly in comment threads.
• For asynchronous reviews, the team duplicates the file, shares the map as a single-screen prototype, and invites users to comment.
• During live reviews, a designer records participant feedback directly in the file.
• Separate file copies can prevent earlier comments from biasing new reviewers and make it easier to compare feedback from customers, clients, and other groups.

Figma is most effective when journey maps are treated as collaborative, evolving research artifacts rather than static deliverables. Start with reusable components, keep research and feedback in the same file, and validate the map with real users before using it to guide design decisions.