The experiential journey: Representing service experience over time

This article presents practical explorations of how the customer experience can be integrated into customer journey maps and introduces the experiential journey. This is a development of the customer journey map, in which a richer and more precise representation of the user experience over time is presented. The article is aimed at service designers, practitioners and researchers into service innovation and service provision. The article presents work that has been carried out over ten years as part of both multiple research projects and MA-level teaching. It uses a research-through-design approach. We compare theory about customer experience with today’s practice and show that customer journey maps do not adequately reflect today’s understanding of service experience. We then introduce ‘the experiential journey’ as a particular kind of customer journey map, in which the experience is in focus. The article describes practical explorations of the experiential journey through ten years of design exploration, and we suggest ways to move forward from today’s predominantly functional journey maps towards richer experiential versions. The article concludes by suggesting core elements that we consider relevant in an experiential journey and the implications that this has for service design. Practical solutions are described that designers can use immediately, and the implications that this may have for research are discussed. The combination of customer journey mapping and experience prototyping is identified as a promising research direction. The article combines multiple individual, and original pieces of work and is a valuable addition to both the fields of service design and service research.