Journey Map Sprint: Inclusive Design

Journey Map Sprint: Mapping the Whole Journey for Inclusive Design

This Miro board is a ready-to-use group activity for teaching journey mapping through an inclusive design lens. It gives each team a structured space to map one person’s experience from start to finish, including the barriers that appear away from the screen. It was built for DMS 104, Journey mapping for inclusive design, but it works for any course or workshop that introduces service design, UX, accessibility, or student support.

What the board does

Each team works from a short situation card describing a real kind of student experience. The four cards cover:

• A first-year student, first in their family to attend college, who doesn’t know what an “advising hold” means.

• A student whose first language isn’t English, using a translation tool on every page and trying to book help before a deadline.

• A student using a screen reader and keyboard only, trying to book an appointment online.

• A commuter student with ten minutes, a slow connection, and an older phone.

Teams read their card aloud and agree on the person’s goal in one sentence. Then they map the journey across five stages: Find, Decide, Do, Confirm, and Follow up.

How the map is organized

The map is a grid with one column for each stage. The rows follow a color-coded system that matches the sticky notes teams use:

• Emotion line: one point per stage, plotted from high to low, so the group can see where the experience dips.

• Actions (yellow): what the person does at each stage.

• Thoughts and feelings (blue): what they wonder, worry about, or feel.

• Barriers (pink): what blocks or slows them. Teams must add at least one barrier that can happen off the screen, such as an unreadable email or an office with no accessible entrance.

Teams fill the Actions row first, then add thoughts and feelings, then draw the emotion line, then add barriers. Working in that order keeps the map grounded in what the person actually does before the group moves on to interpretation.

Built so everyone participates

A shared board can easily turn into one student typing while everyone else watches. This board has a section that addresses this directly. Five short steps guide the team:

1. Think alone first. Before anyone types, each person writes two actions or worries on paper during two quiet minutes, then shares.

2. Say it, then type it. The person with the laptop types what others say aloud, not only their own ideas.

3. Go around the group. At every stage, each person adds one thought or feeling. Nobody skips and nobody adds twice in a row.

4. Swap roles halfway. After the Do stage, the team passes the laptop and rotates the roles of sticky note writer, emotion line drawer, barrier checker, and presenter.

5. Everyone shares. Each person picks the one barrier that matters most, and the presenter reports the group’s picks and who chose what.

What’s included

Each group board contains three sections:

• The activity: the four numbered instructions, the four roles, and a sticky color legend.

• Everyone takes part: the five participation steps above.

• The group map: the situation card, a goal box, and the blank grid, ready for stickies.

The grid cells are deliberately empty. Nothing is pre-filled, so teams create all of the content themselves. A separate filled-in example (a student getting from a dorm to a class across campus) can serve as a model to show before the activity starts.

How to use it

Give each group its own board link so that one laptop per team is open to Miro. Start with a short warm-up, such as mapping a literal journey like walking across campus, and use the example to show how barriers and stages connect. Then let teams run the activity, with the presenter from each team sharing the group’s map and chosen barriers at the end.

A note on the situation cards

The cards are starting points for empathy, not stand-ins for real people. Encourage students to describe what the situation might involve rather than assume how any individual would think or feel, and to look for barriers in the design of services, spaces, and communication.

Who it’s for

Instructors, workshop facilitators, and student support or accessibility teams who want a simple, structured way to help groups see a service through someone else’s eyes. It is best suited to classes of mixed size, where small teams of three to five can share one board each.