 The people who create great customer journey maps know exactly how detailed the map should be, and in this video I'm going to show you a simple framework that will help you to determine how much detail you should add to your map so you can always hit that detail sweet spot and make better maps faster. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business and an important part of a service design journey is of course the customer journey map. One of the big challenges regarding customer journey maps and customer journey mapping is that people don't have real good criteria on how to decide how detailed a map should be, how many details should be in the map. So this results in the fact that maps get over complicated, contain too much detail or become oversimplified and just contain the high level journey which doesn't really allow you to get some good actionable insight out of them. A big misconception is that the perfect customer journey map needs to be complete, that it needs to contain a lot of details because a map without a lot of details surely can't be helpful, well as I said that's a big misconception. So if you're not mapping on the right detail level you're probably wasting a lot of time because if your map is too complicated or oversimplified you probably won't be able to draw any useful insights out of it. Now before I continue I'd really like to know if you've ever seen maps that felt oversimplified or over complicated leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation there. All right so how do you know how much detail your map should be? Well for that I use a simple framework that I borrowed from my friend Daniel Joramand which basically shows four detail levels in a map that you can use and let's go over these detail levels one by one. So to explain this framework let's use a real-life scenario of something like doing groceries and look at the detail levels that we can use to map this journey of doing groceries. Well on the top level the highest level let's call this level one you can of course just create the most basic thing and I hope you can see this the journey would be something like before doing the groceries during doing the groceries in store and maybe after the groceries. Let's call this level one this is like the highest level you can map the journey there are different phases you can use before during after it's the most common one but there are some other ones. Okay so this is level one let's look at mapping or adding details on level two. So level two doing groceries if we dig a little bit down the before phase before you go out to do groceries so that's level one. Level two is something like if we take the before stage maybe you're going to check your schedule your agenda to see what your evening appointments are because you want to know how often you'll be at home and thus how many groceries you need and based on that you're going to make a grocery list. So level two is really dividing up the before phase into multiple smaller steps like checking your agenda and making a list and of course you do this also for the during and the after phase but it's breaking down level one into smaller bits. Now what is level three or about? Level three is about again breaking down level two in smaller bits so our example regarding the groceries if we go further down and we're going to break down the check agenda then checking our agenda before you do groceries might contain steps like first you check your phone to see your own calendar then you consult with your girlfriend or boyfriend to see how's their schedule and finally you maybe check what kind of work appointments you might have that might prevent you from eating at home. So level three is really breaking down this each stage each phase each activity into smaller bits and the final level the final detail level we're going to look at is level four. All right so you probably guessed it level four breaks down level three even further so for instance checking the schedule with your girlfriend might consult a few steps you know texting her on whatsapp checking their shared google calendar stuff like that and that is what you create on a level four detail. Now why are these levels important and how do they work in practice? Well in practice you might say that on a level four detail usually this is this this goes down into so much detail it's almost if you compare this to an app it's like clicking the button you know it's like a flow almost like a flow chart what happens when the user clicks on log in which steps does he take on our website this is really really detailed and you probably wouldn't be making this for the home journey because it would take too much time level three is really about understanding more or less the the integrating processes that go on in such a map level two is really somewhat in a lot of cases the sweet spot on which you might want to be creating a map so it's breaking down all the stages uh of level one into real customer activities or user activities or employee activities and on level one the top level that is so high level that uh yeah you need you'll always need to start with that level but it usually doesn't give you any meaningful insight so how do you know on which detail level you should be mapping your map well the answer to that is pretty straightforward because you'll have to think about what are you going to do with the map how are you going to use this map what kind of decisions do you want to be making based on the map you're creating I've made a video a previous video on how you can use a customer journey map so check that out for more info on that but if you think about I want to be improving the user flow specifically on our website then you need to be probably quite specific in the user journey so that's a reason why you might want to create a map on a fourth detail level but if your goal for instance is to get stakeholders on board get them to understand how the journey looks and get their perspectives then you probably have enough detail by just mapping level two so how do you know how much detail you need think about the next step what is the goal of your map and that usually gives you a pretty good answer on how detailed your map should be if you can't or don't know what the next step is of the map just aim for level two level two tends to be the sweet spot regarding the insights you can get out of the map versus the time you need to invest to actually create a map so if you if you're looking for starting point start on level two and level two will always help you to find new answers to start a discussion so sweet spot for me is always level two and then take it from there iterate from there but for instance if you know that you want to be improving a very specific flow in the journey you might even want to go down deep as level four so this is a really simple framework that works really effectively for me to decide how detailed our maps should be but I'm sure you'll also have some ideas and tips on how to decide how detailed a map should be and I'd really love to hear your tips and trips for creating customer journey maps on the right detail level please leave a comment and let's continue their conversation down below and if you'd like to learn more about customer journey mapping I've created a few videos that are in the playlist which you can find next to me so check them out if you want to learn more about that and if this is your first time here on this channel I'd love to have you to subscribe so we can keep bringing you more videos like this thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing the next video