Target Journeys

When journey map is used to capture the pain points of an existing service experience and guide the definition of new ideas and solutions, there is a risk to lead towards ways of fixing the actual problems rather than identifying opportunities for radical innovation. Not all the steps in the experience are equally important for specific service users, and not all the moments can be equally improved - due to internal or external constraints. How can we use the journey to define priorities while moving from analysis to ideation?

The target journey is a visual representation of the desired improvement of a service experience. The target journey is built by first representing the existing perception of the analysed service experience across all its steps, to further identify a delta of improvement for each stage. The definition of the delta comes from a strategic reflection around challenges, opportunities, enablers and blockers: how important is for the user to have a significant improvement in that stage? what obstacles need to be considered? what opportunities have emerged in the research activities?

The target journey helps formulating a strategic vision. Sentences structured as “from (as-is journey) to (target journey)” help integrating the visual with a detailed description of existing versus desired experience at each moment of the journey. The exercise also helps prioritizing among phases in which the goal is simply to fix the basics versus phases in which the goal is to create a signature and memorable experiences.

The focus of the target journey is the gap between existing and desired experiences and the identification of the signature moments within the overall journey. Target journeys could be used to explore different innovation scenarios during ideation sessions or to better understand user priorities during validation activities.