 In this video, you'll learn how to use Miro or formerly known as real-time board to create customer journey maps. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you build organizations that put people at the heart of their business. And a way to do that is by using customer journey maps. They seem to be the go-to tool for a lot of service designers. Now you probably have been in the situation where you created a journey map in a workshop and then want to digitize it. Now there are a lot of tools out there that help you to digitize a journey map. It could be just as easy as making a photo out of it, but there are more advanced tools that allow you to do that. The tool that we're going to use in this video that I'm going to show you how you can actually use to create customer journey maps is called Miro or is formerly known as real-time board. What's really important to note is that the goal here is not to create a one-off static image of a customer journey. We want to use customer journey maps on a day-to-day basis to drive customer-centric change. This is super important. This video is not about what are customer journey maps or how do you actually create one. I've got a video on that that should pop up over here. This video is really about how practical is Miro in your day-to-day activities. This is the first video of a series of two. In this first video, we're going to dive into the tool and create a basic structure of a journey map. And in the second video, we'll look at the more advanced features and the pros and cons and give a final conclusion. Now Miro also has a mobile app and a desktop app. We're not going to use that in this video. We're going to use the browser-based environment. And I want to say that this video isn't sponsored in any way, but Miro is just my experience with using the tool to create customer journey maps. So I guess let me just share my screen, jump into the tool and let's create a customer journey map. So I'm logged into my Miro dashboard. I have the free version. They have a free version available. And we're going to create the model of all maps, the basic structure. The goal here is not to create a complete elaborate map. It's just to show you what the building blocks are of a customer journey map and how you can use them in Miro. So Miro has already, I think, two templates available for a customer journey map. We're not going to use them. Of course, we're going to create our own. So to prepare for this video, I've made a basic structure of a map that we're going to try to recreate. And it looks something like this. And we're going to use the example of going to the zoo. Now, again, this is not an elaborate map. It's just to show you the basic building blocks. So this is what we're going to try to recreate a few lanes, some information cards and the emotional curve, some photos and some icons. So let's go and create a blank board. Now, like I said, Miro offers a lot of templates. We don't want to use them. We're just going to start out blank and let's start with giving our map a name like going to the zoo. Right. We don't want to share. Let's go. Now, this is a blank canvas. Miro is really a white. More of a think about it as a whiteboard. So it allows you to do a lot of things. It gives you a lot of flexibility. The first thing we would want is probably to create our four lanes. The four lanes that we got is phases, customer activities, needs and emotions. So how do we do that in Miro? I would start off using a text field. They have different options, but I would start off using a text field and say phases. Let's make it bold. Miro actually has a lot of formatting options that make it pretty easy to create stuff that looks good. All right, phases. That's the starting point of our journey map. Now, I like to think in lanes and make sure that the lanes are really clear. And the way I like to do it is by adding a background color. So I'm going to select the shape here and just a rectangle. And let's draw a shape over here. Now you see it has border. We don't want a border, so we're going to select blank. And we want the background color. And this is yellow. Now we don't see our text. We'll fix it in a second and we're going to decrease the opacity. So the text is now behind the rectangle and we want to bring it forward. There are shortcuts available for everything. All right, so now we've got our phases lane, which is pretty awesome. What I would do next is replicate this. So I would select, make sure both are selected and just copy and duplicate it below here and do it again and do it again. Miro, what I really like about Miro is that it makes aligning stuff really easy. I'm not going to spend too much time with that. Now, let's start with changing our colors. So we have different lanes. We can separate them and let's give this one a right. And this one was customer activities. This one was needs. Now, of course, it all depends on your needs, what kind of lanes you should have in this map. But we call this the model of all maps. These are basically the lanes you should almost always have in your map. So now we have four lanes. Let me see if I can. Yeah, I'm not going to spend too much time aligning this right now. What I would do next is select everything and make sure it's locked. You can do it by command L or just select press right key on your mouse, trackpad and lock everything. So now this is like our basic canvas. So the next thing we want to do is, of course, add information in there. And let's start again, Miro offers a few options to add information onto these lanes. The default, I would say, most people start using sticky notes. And let's try doing that. Let's say we have before stage. We have a gearing stage and we have out there. Again, this is not an exercise to create a perfect journey map for going to the zoo, but just to show you what the base kind of means now. I've played around with sticky notes and the problem is that you can't make them bigger. And that's a problem later on. So sticky notes might work in some places, but there's a better option that I want to show you. And that is by using just another shape and just a rectangular shape. And let's call this again before. Miro, remember the last color that we used, which is nice, but we want a different color here. I want to increase the opacity. So let's change the size a bit, 24. So this could be the shape we want. And now we just duplicate it and then we say gearing. What I like about using these kind of shapes rather than the posted notes is that you can make them smaller and bigger. And that's really useful, as you'll see later on. All right, so now we've got our basic phases in going to the zoo. Let's have a look at customer activities. What I like to do here is use a different kind of information layer. And that's the third way you can actually add information. And it's hidden over here in this menu, and it's called a card. Let me show you. So when you add a card, you just type something here. And the first customer activity would be buy tickets. Now, as you see, the card is pretty big, and I can resize it to make it smaller. And then my text goes small. And we might be thinking this isn't really practical, the text being so small, stuff like that. But what I like about the card, and this will be really powerful, is that it has an option to sort of expand and go into a deeper level. So now we're sort of in the detail level of a card. And we can type, here is our research data. And we could add quotes from customers, links to additional resources, stuff like that. And that is super useful later on. And you can even do some formatting in this card. You can even give it a color. So as you see, my card now, although the text is pretty small, we can make it bigger, but then we would have to make everything bigger. The card is super useful, because you can see and expand details, right? So let's make another. I'll just copy this one. And let's say this is Park your car, right? Park your car. Now, as you'll see, we need to expand our face a little bit, and that's quite easy to do. I like to use these kind of cards. The only downside would be really nice, which I haven't found a way to do. Maybe there is. Tell me in the comments if you know how. So I would like to add images in here. Maybe there's a possibility I haven't found it, but I would like to add images here. So these are the three ways to add information. A shape, a post-it note, and a card. And when you have research data or one depth in your information layer, I'd recommend using cards. All right, now let's look at the other two lanes. Needs, that's basically the same as the top lanes above. So that would be, it depends on your needs. Like I said, you could add clear navigation. You could add a card or a shape. It really depends on what you need, how much information do you want here. So Needs is not really exciting. The emotions layer, that's the layer where we want to have a curved line, right? That's, I would almost say, that's the iconic thing in customer journey maps. So for that, we have a few options. They have a pen. We could start drawing the emotion. That doesn't work really well because it's hard to edit later on. And there's a much, much better way to do that and really easy way to actually do that. And that is by using the line tool. So they have a line tool and we're going to just first draw our basic grid. Let's use another line. So to access and what I'm doing is, right, I'll make sure it's aligned properly. There we go. And then I'm going to lock these two. So we sort of have our access, you can make it bigger, smaller, but we can't move it around. So that's great. Now we want to have showed the up and down emotions, the positive, negative emotions and that's the way to do that. Once you know it, it becomes really easy. It's again to use a line. So I'm going to draw a straight line over here and it will all make sense in a minute. Then I'm going to select a different color. Let's say, I don't know, red might not be the best color, but at least it's clear. And I'm going to make it a little bit thicker. So now we have a straight line and we can even position it if we want over here. And how do we how do we make this into a curved line? Well, it's really easy. We grab this blue dot over here and then we start adding more dots. So once you start creating curves, as you'll see, Miro is adding a new curve, a new dot for you, which allows you to make the shape you want to make. And you can really easily expand this. You can really easily change the curve. So this is this is awesome. I really like how they've implemented using the line tool. So as you see, we now have the emotional curve, the iconic image of a customer journey map using the line tool. Now, the final thing I want to show you in this journey map is how to add metadata to to the map you have over here. So we already seen that cards allow you to add data, but there's another way you can actually do that. And that is it works with any shape. You can add a comment. So there are a few ways to actually add a comment, but I'll right click on the shape and I say add comment. And this would be additional information about this card. And that's pretty cool. It adds it adds a comment and you can open that and you can do that on any shape even here, not on the line, but most shapes allow you to add comments. So this is a way to add metadata when you're not using a card. The other forms of metadata would be more visual forms of metadata. So what you've probably off to see is like icons or images. Miro has two cool features. When you go here to apps, you'll see icon finder, which is pretty cool. And we're ticket because we might want to add a ticket. Let's use the most basic tickets and you can just search for icons. So we'll add a ticket over here, make it a little bit smaller. And they also have integration with Google image search. Here's car park. I already searched for that. So let's use this awesome image as a car park. I always recommend if you use photos, of course, use real photos from your research. But this would be a way to add visual metadata to the map. And there's one more thing with the curve line. You often see like emotions and you could say, I don't know, can we find a grumpy grumpy icon? Would it be there? Oh, yeah. Look at that grumpy icon. A grumpy grumpy person over here. Not sure why. Oh, man. All right. So that's an icon. And I would when I see an icon like this, I would want to know what's going on. So what we can do is again, add a comment and say, this person is super hungry. Right. And that would be a way to add metadata to icons. So I think right now we have all the building blocks that you want to build a basic structure of a customer journey map used here. And you can use it to elaborate and make it as big and as small as you want. Now, in the second video, we're going to take a look at some more advanced features of Miro and customer journey mapping and actually look at how practical is Miro in using customer journey maps in a day to day basis. So head over to this next video where we'll dive into that and I'll see you over there.