Emergent Experience Mapping Toolkit
Some experiences don’t fit neatly into rows and columns. They unfold across multiple people, organizations, systems, tools, and contexts, with relationships changing along the way.
Emergent Experience Mapping is a journey-centered approach for visualizing these complex experiences over time. Instead of treating the journey as a linear table, EEM follows the person through an evolving network, helping you see both what they experience and the ecosystem shaping that experience.
Use this template to uncover what can be difficult to see when looking at individual journeys or touchpoints in isolation: cross-entity dependencies, handoffs, gaps, duplicated effort, changing relationships, and places where the person is doing the work of coordinating disconnected parts of the experience.
The template is especially useful for UX designers, researchers, service designers, strategists, and cross-functional teams working on experiences that span organizational boundaries, such as healthcare, retirement, financial services, education, or other complex services.
You’ll be guided step by step to frame the experience, map the journey, reveal the ecosystem, connect relationships, add tools and touchpoints, identify friction, and make sense of what emerges. Each step includes an example and prompts to help you build your own map as you go.
The journey reveals the system.
The system explains the experience.
