To design a great product, you need to understand your customers’ needs. Customer experience and product designers use the customer journey map in the beginning of the design process to empathize with users, identify pain points, and find opportunities for innovation. It helps you track their emotions: curiosity, confusion, anxiety, frustration, etc.

Journey maps help designers, marketers, and other stakeholders empathize with a customer's motivations and experiences. These maps can cover specific features or apps, the customer's overall experience at each touchpoint, or the escalation process from point A to Z and beyond.

Mapping is an exercise of connecting concepts and data. All great design begins with research. The more one knows about a customer, the more accurate a map will be. Conducting proper research helps designers avoid basing assumptions about their users on false consensus. Feedback surveys are direct ways of asking users about their needs and what they’re already doing to meet those needs. Users will respond to a product within the framework of completing a particular task. This means the customer journey starts before users even engage with a single product and continues after they leave. Capturing a customer's perception of their experience relative to their goals and needs informs how a designer can improve upon it.