Service mapping is the umbrella term for a family of visual techniques service designers use to represent how a service works, how it is experienced by the people who use it, and the wider organisational, technological and policy factors that shape it. Rather than one fixed method, it covers a range of techniques including journey maps, service blueprints and ecosystem maps, each built to answer a different question about the same service (Kalbach, 2020).
Larkin and Simon (1987) showed that a well-designed diagram can make information that stays implicit in a written description explicit and easy to search, because a reader can scan relationships in a picture far more quickly by working through equivalent sentences. Applied to services, a map lets a team see at a glance how steps connect, where responsibility passes between teams and where a customer’s experience and an organisation’s internal processes pull in different directions.
Speaking to a range of users and consolidating what they say into a single map reveals how a service is genuinely experienced, how things work or do not, interdependencies between departments or services, and where things are broken, insight that is easy to miss when it is scattered across separate written reports (Government Digital Service, 2017).
A journey map, also called a customer or user journey map, visualises the process a specific user goes through to achieve a specific goal, showing their actions, thoughts and emotions stage by stage (Gibbons, 2018). It is built from the user’s point of view rather than the organisation’s, which is why it differs from a process map and puts the experience of the process first (Local Government Association, n.d.).
A service blueprint extends the journey map behind the scenes. It adds the people, technology and processes an organisation uses to deliver each step, organised above and below a ‘line of visibility’ that separates what the customer sees from what happens out of view (Gibbons, 2017). Because it makes cross-department dependencies explicit, a blueprint is particularly useful for complex, omnichannel services where several teams contribute to a single customer experience.
An ecosystem map takes a wider view again, visualising the full range of touchpoints, interactions and stakeholders that make up a service across its whole lifecycle, without going into the detail of any single journey. It is often produced early in a project, before detailed journey mapping or blueprinting begins, to give a team a shared sense of a service’s overall scale and complexity (Grimes, 2019).
Across all these techniques, service designers typically produce two versions of a map. A current-state, or ‘as-is’, map documents a service as it genuinely operates today, workarounds included, and builds a shared, evidenced understanding of the existing service. A future-state, or ‘to-be’, map then sketches how the experience could look once identified pain points are addressed, giving teams a shared target to design and deliver towards (Grimes, 2019; Kalbach, 2020). Journey maps are especially widely used this way: an as-is journey map exposes where a service currently lets users down, while a to-be journey map communicates the improved experience leaders and teams are working to create.
Choosing which map, or combination of maps, to use depends on the scope of the problem and the intended audience for the output. A single journey map may be enough to build a business case for a small change, while a blueprint or ecosystem map suits complex, cross-organisational services where the challenge is coordination rather than a single touchpoint (Gibbons, 2017).
Action Point
Select one service you are responsible for and sketch a simple current-state map of it, whether a journey map, a rough blueprint or an ecosystem map. Note where steps are duplicated, where ownership is unclear and where the experience breaks down. Use what the map reveals to identify one realistic opportunity area, then outline what an improved future-state version of that map would look like.