Complex user journey mapping with Netflix

Mapping user journeys can be a time consuming, exactingly detailed process. For Emily Loper, a growth product designer working across platforms at Netflix, the process for a recent project took months. Emily needed to painstakingly map out how the project would impact both Netflix members and internal Netflix teams, creating a web of interdependencies and connections that can quickly become chaotic. FigJam was a place to work through those early, often messy stages of organizing requirements for a new, complicated project.

1. Work efficiently

Emily is no stranger to building out intricate user flows and she’s experimented with almost every tool out there. And because of how complex those diagrams can be, she prefers to keep the design process all within the same environment. Diagraming in Figma felt too cumbersome to move at the pace she needed—but when she moved one of her projects to FigJam, things started to click. FigJam’s built-in shapes and connectors easily snapped together in Emily’s design grid and made it easy to work through the little details of moving boxes around the canvas without losing track of dependencies.

2. Communicate the process

The user flows that Emily diagramed for this project had implications across the entire Netflix organization. Articulating the process to stakeholders from engineering to legal to data science can be a challenge, so at the top of her FigJam file, Emily builds a schematic of the design process. The intuitive diagram clearly notes how far along the project is and what team’s input is needed at that point. The progress report gives stakeholders a high-level look at how the project is advancing, and keeps interdependencies organized and communications streamlined during a complicated, months-long process.

3. Follow the key

The user journey map explored more than 20+ user flows, all within one FigJam file. With so much complexity and so many stakeholders involved in a single project, clearly communicating all the points in the user journey was critical. In order to keep everything organized, Emily created an easy-to-understand key for her flow diagrams. The key helped cross-functional teams decipher the intricate cartography of user journey maps, using colors and shapes to help different teams clearly understand what they were looking at.