People experience products and services at a variety of time scales. Each of these are potentially valuable to act on, and all of them can be difficult, or even complex, to imagine or remember. Individual exposure to user experience will produce a limited understanding of the flow of a journey and the breadth of experiences users encounter.

In addition, organizations tend to ground their understanding of a user’ sequence of activity in their use of the product or service at stake. However, a user’s scope of activity starts and ends outside of product use, and provides valuable insight into how to better design for them. To design to support a user’s full journey, zoom out and understand how the product fits into their timeline, instead of the organization’s. 

The right granularity and the right scope, will allow for journey models the team can easily understand and operate with. Except for the individuals who build the journey map, its meaning will have to be “loaded” into the rest of the team through some participatory form of engagement.

Consider which specific scopes and scale of experience are crucial to the product or service. Modeling the current state of these journeys—their phases, touchpoints, user experience—and depicting them visually provides clarity and alignment around what is not easily observable. It also provides the framework on which more complex layers of understanding can be built.

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Therefore, identify core journeys and understand their phases. Identify actions, behaviors, emotions, touchpoints and other relevant layers throughout each phase. Visualize them to create a shared understanding and alignment. Build the map collaboratively with the team members who will operate on it, and use subsequent interviews or research efforts as an opportunity to test validity. Provoke new options for design by building a "future state" journey map and identifying the key gaps between now and a more preferable future.