Journey Map
Map a persona-specific end-to-end experience with stages, emotions, pain points, and opportunity areas before you commit to flows or UI.
Overview
Journey Map is an agent skill most often used in Validate (also Idea and Build) that produces a persona-aware, multi-stage user journey with touchpoints, emotions, pain points, and opportunity areas.
Install
npx skills add https://github.com/owl-listener/designer-skills --skill journey-mapWhat is this skill?
- 5–7 stage maps from awareness through advocacy with goals, actions, touchpoints, and thoughts per stage
- Emotional rating per stage plus explicit pain points and opportunity areas for future-state design
- Supports current-state (as-is) framing with persona-specific journeys when research inputs exist
- Structured flow: clarify scope → define stages → fill goals, channels, friction, and opportunities
- Grounded in journey-mapping practice (e.g. Kalbach-style experience mapping across channels)
- 5–7 journey stages from awareness through post-use/advocacy
- Per-stage fields: goals, actions, touchpoints, thoughts, emotions, pain points, opportunities
Adoption & trust: 566 installs on skills.sh; 1.5k GitHub stars; 3/3 security scanners passed (skills.sh audits).
What problem does it solve?
You know the feature you want to ship but cannot see the full path users take, where they get stuck, or what to improve first across channels.
Who is it for?
Solo founders or indie PM-designers validating a new flow, onboarding, or service experience before investing in UI or backend work.
Skip if: Teams that already have a signed-off journey map and only need pixel-perfect UI mocks, or pure competitive intel with no user-flow narrative.
When should I use this skill?
Mapping the full user experience for a product, feature, or service; read provided research, personas, or analytics first when available.
What do I get? / Deliverables
You get a structured journey map with bounded stages, per-stage goals and friction, emotional signals, and opportunity areas you can feed into prototypes, specs, or prioritization.
- Persona-scoped journey map with 5–7 stages and per-stage detail blocks
- Current-state pain points and opportunity areas for future-state design
Recommended Skills
Journey fit
Spans multiple journey phases - primary shelf plus alternate fits below.
Journey mapping is the canonical validate shelf because it turns fuzzy product ideas into a scoped, stage-by-stage picture of goals, friction, and opportunities before build. Scope subphase fits when you are bounding scenarios, personas, and journey start/end to decide what to prototype and what to cut.
Where it fits
Map how a first-time visitor discovers your indie tool and what questions they have before signup.
Bound start/end of a checkout journey to decide which steps belong in the MVP prototype.
Align implementation tickets to journey stages so engineering does not skip post-purchase support touchpoints.
Highlight advocacy and retention stages to plan lifecycle emails against emotional lows.
How it compares
Use instead of dumping sticky-note flows in chat without emotions, touchpoints, or explicit opportunity columns.
Common Questions / FAQ
Who is journey-map for?
Solo builders, indie product owners, and small teams who own UX research and need a repeatable journey-map artifact without hiring a dedicated researcher.
When should I use journey-map?
In Idea when clarifying audience paths; in Validate when scoping personas and scenarios; in Build when aligning PM and design on onboarding, checkout, or feature adoption flows before implementation.
Is journey-map safe to install?
Review the Security Audits panel on this Prism skill page and inspect the skill package in your repo before granting agent file access to research uploads.
SKILL.md
READMESKILL.md - Journey Map
# Journey Map Create a comprehensive user journey map for product design and UX analysis. ## Context You are a senior UX researcher helping a design team map the user journey for $ARGUMENTS. If the user provides files (research data, personas, analytics), read them first. ## Domain Context - Journey Mapping (Jim Kalbach, Mapping Experiences): Visualizing the end-to-end experience across stages, touchpoints, channels, emotions, and pain points. - Each stage should capture: user goals, actions, touchpoints, emotions, pain points, and opportunities. - Journey maps should be persona-specific when possible. - Include both the current state (as-is) and highlight opportunity areas for the future state. ## Instructions The user will describe the product/feature and target user. Work through these steps: 1. **Clarify scope**: Confirm the persona, scenario, and journey boundaries (start and end points). 2. **Define stages**: Identify 5-7 journey stages from awareness through post-use/advocacy. 3. **Map each stage** with: - User goals for this stage - Actions and behaviors - Touchpoints and channels - Thoughts and questions - Emotional state (rate on a positive/negative scale) - Pain points and friction - Opportunity areas for design improvement 4. **Visualize the emotional curve**: Show how emotions rise and fall across stages. 5. **Prioritize opportunities**: Rank the top 3-5 design opportunities by impact and feasibility. 6. **Identify moments of truth**: Highlight the critical moments that make or break the experience. 7. Think step by step. Present in a clear, structured format. ## Further Reading - Mapping Experiences — Jim Kalbach - The Elements of User Experience — Jesse James Garrett