Map and Improve a Purchase Journey
Customer Experience · 1–2 weeks · Intermediate
The job
Map how customers actually buy from you, identify friction points and moments of truth, and design targeted improvements backed by evidence.
What the sponsor gets
Each canvas and map from this playbook — Persona Canvas, Jobs-To-Be-Done Canvas, Experiment Canvas, Journey map — exports as a PDF, or as PowerPoint on Pro, straight from the session, and the whole run exports as one PowerPoint for the sponsor. Nothing is redrawn.
The method
Gather customer evidence
Pull purchase funnel data, interview 5–8 recent buyers (including some who abandoned), and collect support tickets related to the buying process.
Tip: Include at least 2 people who started buying but didn't complete — they reveal the friction you can't see from inside.
Build your buyer persona
Create a Persona canvas for your primary buyer. Ground it in research, not assumptions — use real quotes, real frustrations, real goals.
Tip: If you can't fill a section from research, that's your signal to do more interviews, not to guess.
Map the current purchase journey
Create a Purchase Journey map from first awareness through to post-purchase. Fill in actions, touchpoints, emotional curve, and pain points from your research.
Tip: Walk the journey yourself as a mystery shopper before mapping it — your assumptions about what happens are probably wrong.
Understand the real buying motivation
Create a JTBD canvas to understand the functional, emotional, and social jobs your buyer is trying to get done.
Tip: The job is never "buy your product" — it's the outcome they're hiring your product to achieve.
Identify the top 3 pain points
Review the journey map and JTBD canvas together. Where is the biggest gap between what customers need and what they experience?
Tip: Prioritise by impact on conversion, not by how easy the fix is — hard fixes on high-impact problems beat easy fixes on trivial ones.
Design improvement experiments
Create an Experiment Canvas for each proposed improvement. Define the hypothesis, the metric, and the minimum viable test.
Tip: Test one change at a time so you know what caused the improvement.
Present findings and action plan
Package the journey map, persona, JTBD insights, and experiment plan into a stakeholder presentation. Include the baseline metrics you'll measure against.
Tip: Lead with a customer quote that captures the core pain point — it's more persuasive than data alone.
The canvases and maps
- Persona Canvas
- Goals, frustrations, behaviours, motivations and needs side by side, so the person you are designing for is specific enough to disagree about.
- Jobs-To-Be-Done Canvas
- Functional, emotional and social jobs sit apart from pain points and desired outcomes, so the team describes the progress people want rather than the features it plans.
- Experiment Canvas
- Hypothesis, design, metrics and success criteria come before results and the decision, so the goalposts are written down before anyone sees the data.
- Journey map
- Stages run across and lanes run beneath them, so the experience reads in the order people live it and each low point lines up with what causes it.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't run the room for you or decide for the client. The steps, canvases and duration are a starting point you adapt; the judgement stays yours.