Abstract
Although user journey mapping is widely employed to analyze and diagnose user experiences, it offers limited support for design exploration and refining product and service concepts. Recent advances in generative AI have created new opportunities to reconceive the journey map as a tool for creative design inquiry. This study first identifies the limitations of existing tools and then conducts a formative investigation to clarify the requirements for a new approach. We developed Journey Creator, a design tool that visualizes touchpoint-level interactions and multi-user journeys, provides multimodal data representations, and supports a stepwise process for expanding ideas. Evaluation results show that the system helps designers understand and articulate user journeys structurally, enables detailed examination of user experiences, and effectively stimulates imagination and idea generation. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of Journey Creator as an AI-empowered design tool and by outlining the potential for designer-AI collaboration in future design practice.
Keywords
User Journey Map; AI-empowered Design Tool; Design Exploration; Experience Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1000
Citation
Lee, J.,and Nam, T.(2025) Journey Creator: An AI-Empowered Journey Mapping Tool for Experience Design Exploration, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1000
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 4 - Human-Centered AI
Journey Creator: An AI-Empowered Journey Mapping Tool for Experience Design Exploration
Although user journey mapping is widely employed to analyze and diagnose user experiences, it offers limited support for design exploration and refining product and service concepts. Recent advances in generative AI have created new opportunities to reconceive the journey map as a tool for creative design inquiry. This study first identifies the limitations of existing tools and then conducts a formative investigation to clarify the requirements for a new approach. We developed Journey Creator, a design tool that visualizes touchpoint-level interactions and multi-user journeys, provides multimodal data representations, and supports a stepwise process for expanding ideas. Evaluation results show that the system helps designers understand and articulate user journeys structurally, enables detailed examination of user experiences, and effectively stimulates imagination and idea generation. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of Journey Creator as an AI-empowered design tool and by outlining the potential for designer-AI collaboration in future design practice.