User Flow and Journey Map
Steps taken from what the product actually forces, routes ranked by how many people walked them, and every claim on the emotion row evidenced.
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A journey map is five or six boxes across the top of a grid, one path, and an emotion line drawn by whoever held the pen. The stages come from how the product was designed, so they hold the steps somebody drew and none of the ones the product forces afterwards. At the fictional Kingsmoor the map had five boxes. The product made people pass through nine, and the largest loss in the whole journey was on one of the four that were missing.
Three kinds of step go missing every time. A wait is a step, and nobody designs a progress bar. A silent failure is a step, because a report that renders empty is not the same screen as one that renders. A prerequisite is a step, because sharing needs somebody to share with. Kingsmoor lost 1,764 accounts, 18.7% of everybody who signed up, waiting a median of thirty minutes for a first sync.
So this pack derives the steps from event data and ranks every route by how many people took it. Kingsmoor's 2,806 successful accounts took 214 distinct routes, and the designed path was the most common of them at 15.4%. Every claim on the emotion row carries a recording, a ticket or a quote joined to that step, or it is counted as an assumption. It reads the product the way funnel and retention analysis does, assumes the instrumentation behind it has been checked, and hands the steps nobody drew to the handoff register.
What is in the pack
Step Register
Every step the product actually makes people pass through, marked designed or not, with accounts lost, median time on step, repeat rate and back-navigations. Kingsmoor's had nine rows against a map with five boxes, and four of the nine had never been drawn by anybody.
Path Inventory
Every distinct route from entry to outcome, ranked by accounts. Kingsmoor had 214 of them, the top five covered 62.7%, and 1,047 accounts sat in a tail of 209 routes that a path exploration report collapses into a single grey node.
Emotion and Evidence Map
Every experiential claim with the recording, ticket or quote joined to that step by account and timestamp. Kingsmoor's existing map had thirty-four filled cells, six cited evidence, and four of those six predated a rebuild of the screen they described.
Effort measured separately from loss
A step people repeat and then pass is failing for them. A step people leave from is a wall. Kingsmoor's field picker had the highest effort of any screen, six minutes and thirty-six seconds with 58% returning, and lost 267 accounts against the sync wait's 1,764.
Path Map and Journey Narrative
The volumes on every route and the story behind them, written so each section stands up without the interpretation. The detour that appears in most successful journeys and on no map gets its own section, because it is usually the most interesting thing in the analysis.
Friction Findings and What They Cost
One entry per finding, ranked by accounts lost, each classified honestly. A wait is not a copy problem, and a silent empty result is not a layout problem, so a document that proposes wording changes for either is a quarter spent on the wrong thing. Where the fix genuinely is the sentence, that is copy work with a standard of its own.
How it works
- 1
Send the events, not the report
Path data at account level, plus whatever research and recordings exist with their dates, and the map you already have. The map is there to be checked rather than followed.
- 2
Enumerate the real steps
Waits, silent failures and prerequisites included. Kingsmoor's five-box map turned into nine steps, and the biggest loss in the product was on one of the four nobody drew.
- 3
Rank every route
Deduplicate the sequences and count accounts per route. The designed path is often rank one and still a minority of a minority, which is the finding rather than a reprieve.
- 4
Evidence the emotion row
Every claim gets a recording, a ticket or a quote joined by account and timestamp, or it is marked as an assumption and counted. The count is the map's honest confidence level.
Frequently asked questions
Why not use the path exploration report in our analytics tool?
Because it hides the tail. Google's own documentation says the graph shows the top five nodes per step, expandable to twenty, and everything past that is grouped into an Others node. With 214 distinct routes, most of Kingsmoor's inventory lives inside that one grey box.
How does a thirty-minute wait become invisible?
A session ends after inactivity, and the default is thirty minutes. Kingsmoor's sync had a median wait of thirty minutes and forty seconds, so a session-scoped funnel reported the largest loss in the product as a clean exit. Stitch by account across the whole window instead.
Our page paths have record IDs in them. Does that matter?
Yes, and it breaks the analysis before it starts. Google treats a dimension with more than 500 unique values in a day as high cardinality and condenses rows past the report limit into an other row. Normalise paths to templates first.
Does this replace research?
No, it aims it. The evidence map shows which steps have research, which have stale research, and which have none. Kingsmoor's biggest loss had no research at all, because nobody schedules a session on a progress bar, and that blank was the finding.
The workshop said our hardest screen is the field picker. Were they wrong?
About the experience, no. It genuinely is the hardest screen: six minutes and thirty-six seconds median, 58% returning to it. They were wrong about the consequence. It loses 267 accounts and the sync wait loses 1,764, which is 6.6 times more.
What if most of our users take one path?
Then the count says so and you have lost an afternoon. In practice a designed path carrying more than a third of successes is rare, and the number that changes the conversation is not the share but the count of distinct routes people found instead.
Find out how many routes your product really has
Send the events and the map you already have. The first thing back is the step count, and it is usually larger than the number of boxes anybody drew.
Map the real routes