Mapping the Customer’s Journey

The path a customer takes while discovering, evaluating, and ultimately using our product is known as a user journey. A user journey map depicts the user journey in a visual format alongside the user’s activities, goals, touchpoints, and responses.

User journey maps are very useful in understanding how our customers connect with our brand, product, or service. User journey maps vary from company to company and might vary from industry to industry. However, they always show a timeline of the user’s trip that summarizes the most crucial steps.

As we apply the user journey mapping methodology for API products, we'll notice that “user” and “developer” are often used interchangeably. In the following illustration, we'll see how the user journey across discovery, evaluation, integration, testing, deployment, and observability is mapped to the various questions customers have, customer touchpoints, the activity customers complete in each step, and how they respond to the current offerings that enable them at each step.