Mapping journeys to drive transformation

Eventbrite is a global ticketing platform that brings the world together through live experiences. As a senior content designer on the Service Design team, I design experiences for event organizers and attendees who need help. My team’s mission was to empower customers to find a solution to their problem and connect to human support when needed.

I embarked on research to better understand customers’ needs, preferences, and expectations as they sought help from Eventbrite. My team explored the user experience across numerous channels, over time. And we leveraged these insights to meet their needs.

Target audience: the folks who organize and promote events on Eventbrite.

Why map this journey?

In 2022, my team at Eventbrite transformed the customer support experience. We overhauled the design, information architecture, content, and user flows for the Help Center.

The purpose of this project was to provide deep customer insights the Service Design team needed to create user-centered experiences. The problem: I discovered the team relied on several assumptions about our customers and their needs.

We decided to map our customers’ journeys to:

• Identify the most important customer needs to address in the help experience transformation
• Cultivate hypotheses around how to segment and prioritize key audiences for help transformation
• Guide design of a user experience that meets our customers’ needs and expectations
• Make sense of our customers’ contexts and build empathy for their experiences

The research process

As the research lead, I used a technique called experience mapping: I interviewed 8 customers, then combined their stories with other data to create a journey map.

1. The interviews happened virtually. For each interview, I started with a few questions to learn more about the participant and their world. We craved more context about our customers. How did they approach organizing events? What do they struggle with? What do they love about their job?
2. Then I asked them to recall a recent experience when they needed help from Eventbrite. As they told the story, I mapped the journey on our shared screen. I captured the participants’ actions, emotions, thoughts, and steps.
3. At the end of each session, I asked about specific moments and encouraged the participant to describe their ideal experience using Eventbrite and getting help.

Example journey, zoomed out to hide participant information:

Crafting the customer journey

The interviews and mapping yielded plenty of rich data. I partnered with researchers, designers, and strategists to synthesize the findings and visualize our users’ end-to-end journey. We sought patterns in their stories and experiences. Then crafted a story that captured the combined experiences of these different customers.

Challenge: battling biases

One challenge I faced on this project was guiding UX writers who had limited user research experience. Their biases surfaced as we analyzed the data: I noticed one writer seeking out evidence to support his hypothesis and ignoring facts that disputed it. So I noted all the themes the team mentioned, then required each team member to find supporting quotes for each theme. We deprioritized themes with only one or two pieces of evidence, and focused on more prevalent themes.

Journey map

I built a journey map that depicted the help journey. It included these elements:

• Stages: The chapters of the customer’s journey as they work toward a goal. Stages describe needs from the customer’s perspective, at a high level.
• Moments of truth: Critical interactions that determine whether the customer continues with their journey. The moments of truth noted here were consistently mentioned by research participants. These moments shape customers’ opinions of a brand, build or erode trust, and tend to be highly emotional.
• Actions: What does the customer do in each moment? What are their needs? What actions could they be taking as their journey progresses?
• Success: What does a successful interaction look like, in this moment?
• Failure: How might this moment go awry? What struggles may arise?
• Key pain points: If this moment does not meet the customer’s needs or expectations, what consequences might they suffer?
• Thoughts and feelings: What might the customer be thinking or feeling in this moment?
• Touchpoints: Points of interaction between the customer and the brand.
• People involved or affected: Who else is involved in this journey, both on the customer’s side and the business side?
• Data: What data do we have about this experience to support this moment is true for our customers? For example, survey data, web analytics, usability testing, etc.

Final journey map. Zoomed-out to hide proprietary/confidential information:

Impact

I presented the research, journey map, and key themes to leaders at Eventbrite and to my fellow designers and strategists. More than two years later, they still use the journey map to make design and strategy decisions. New hires explore the journey map to learn about our customers and their needs. And we consider moments of truth as we vet new ideas.

The journey map and customer research drove a new digital strategy. Guided by these insights, the team launched a redesigned Help Center that proved 52% more usable than the old design.

As we began improving the user experience, we received glowing feedback from customers: