In UX, a map is a visual representation of an experience, process, or system that helps teams build a shared understanding.

UX practitioners create maps throughout a project to synthesize research, align stakeholders, uncover gaps in a service, and plan future work. Because many maps look alike, and some go by several names, it's easy to confuse them or to use the same term to mean different things.

Use this glossary as a reference to tell these maps apart and choose the one that fits your goal. For other UX artifacts, such as personas and wireframes, see our UX Deliverables Glossary.

Jump to a definition in the table or review the complete glossary.

Affinity Diagram

Field Roadmap

Relationship Map

Treemap

Asset map

Heatmap

Scenario Map

User Flow

Chronological Map

Interactive UX Map

Service Blueprint

User-Story Map

Cognitive Map

Journey Map

Site Map

UX Roadmap

Concept Map

Landscape Map

Skill Map

Wireflow

Ecosystem Map

Mind Map

Specialty Roadmap

 

Empathy Map

Process Map

Stakeholder Map

 

Experience Map

Product Roadmap

Storyboard

 

Affinity Diagram (Affinity Map)

The clustering of information, often using sticky notes, into relational groups based on similarities or themes.

Illustration of an affinity diagram: sticky notes sorted into four labeled groups.

Asset Map

A high-level, chronological method of displaying and organizing all the screens and elements users encounter across channels when completing a workflow or journey, to assess its consistency.

Illustration of an asset map: columns of labeled stages, each with sticky notes and small screenshots of existing content.

Chronological Map

Visualization of the users’ experience over time. There are 3 types of chronological maps: experience map, service blueprint, and user-journey map.

Cognitive Map

A visual representation of a person’s (or a group’s) mental model for a process or concept. Cognitive mapping is free-form and can include numerous visualization methods, including bulleted lists, flowcharts, concept maps, mind maps, or affinity diagrams.

Concept Map

A graph in which nodes represent concepts and labeled, directed edges illustrate relationships between them.

Illustration of a concept map: a top concept box linked by labeled lines to rows of related concept boxes.

Ecosystem Map

A visual representation of the people, organizations, products, and services that a user may interact with during a particular experience.

Illustration of an ecosystem map: a person icon at the center of concentric rings, surrounded by circles for related people, organizations, and products.

Empathy Map

A collaborative visualization used to articulate what is known about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to create a shared understanding of user needs and aid in decision making.

Illustration of an empathy map: a square split into four colored quadrants labeled Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels.

Experience Map

A visualization of an entire end-to-end experience that a “generic” person goes through to accomplish a goal. This experience does not involve a specific business or product. An experience map is used for understanding a general human behavior (as opposed to a customer-journey map, which is more specific and focused on a specific business).

Illustration of an experience map: phase columns with rows of detail and a curved line tracking emotion across the phases.

Field Roadmap

An expansion of the themes that a UX team owns on the product roadmap. It represents all future problems to be solved by UX (for example, related to design, research, or content) but does not include problems outside of UX (for example, in marketing, development, and support).

Heatmap

Heatmaps are quantitative visualizations that aggregate the number and duration of eye fixations on a stimulus (UI).

Illustration of a heatmap: a web page layout overlaid with red, yellow, and green patches, red marking the areas with most attention.

Interactive UX Map

A high-fidelity map that utilizes UI-design software to add interactive elements like revealing user-research data alongside specific findings or showing specific elements.

Journey Map (User-Journey Map or Customer-Journey Map)

A visualization of the process that a person goes through to accomplish a goal.

Illustration of a journey map: phases across the top, rows of actions and thoughts below, and a line showing emotions rising and falling.

Landscape Map

Arranging groups of similar content (usually written on sticky notes) into a preassigned structure (such as a customer-journey map) to understand relationships and patterns across items, groups, and time.

Illustration of a landscape map: sticky notes grouped into labeled rows and columns.

Mind Map

A tree that represents a central topic and its subtopics.

Illustration of a mind map: a central topic circle with branches radiating out to related idea bubbles.

Process Map

A visual representation of a zoomed-in view on a specific user or business process, used to understand how a given process works. Possible formats of process map include flowcharts, operational-sequence diagrams, or HTA diagrams.

Illustration of a process map: a flowchart with a start oval, a diamond decision point, and boxes joined by arrows.

Product Roadmap

A strategic document that represents all future problems that need to be solved, whether related to UX, marketing, content, design, research, development, support, or operations.

Relationship Map

A diagram of an organization's essential teams, people, and resources. The diagram is used to describe relevant resources under the control of these individuals, how they might help each other, and the manager of that person or team.

Illustration of a relationship map: colored boxes for teams, each holding people icons, connected by lines in a hierarchy.

Scenario Map

An ideation tool used in brainstorming workshops that helps UX teams visualize how persona segments might approach an activity using a product or service. It is meant to facilitate ideation for design solutions.

Illustration of a scenario map: a header naming an actor, motivation, and intention above columns of steps, each with sticky notes.

Service Blueprint

A diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Illustration of a service blueprint: horizontal lanes labeled Evidence, Customer, Front-stage, Back-stage, and Support processes, with boxes in each lane.

Site Map

A visual representation of the organization of your site’s content.

Illustration of a site map: a homepage box at the top branching to three section boxes, each with a column of page boxes.

Skill Map

A collaborative activity used to visualize strengths and weaknesses of UX professionals and UX teams in order to take inventory of the existing team’s composition.

Illustration of a skill map: a six-axis radar chart with overlapping colored shapes showing skill levels.

Specialty Roadmap

A subset of field roadmaps that focus only on problems within one UX area (for example, in user research).

Stakeholder Map

A visualization of a project’s stakeholders that assesses each one’s power over, interest in, and attitude toward the project, to help decide how to manage each stakeholder. A common format is the power–interest matrix (also called Mendelow’s Matrix).

Illustration of a stakeholder map: a two-by-two grid of power versus interest, with quadrants for keep satisfied, manage closely, monitor, and keep informed.

Storyboard

An artifact that communicates a story through images displayed in a sequence of panels that chronologically maps the story’s main events.

Illustration of a storyboard: a row of comic-style panels with simple sketches and short captions showing a sequence of events.

Treemap

Treemaps are visualizations for hierarchical data. They are made of a series of nested rectangles of sizes proportional to the corresponding data value. A large rectangle represents a branch of a data tree, and it is subdivided into smaller rectangles that represent the size of each node within that branch.

Illustration of a treemap: nested purple rectangles sized by value, with one large block on the left and smaller blocks subdividing the right.

User Flow

The typical or ideal set of steps needed to accomplish a common task performed with a product. User flows can be represented with artifacts such as wireflows, flow charts, or task diagrams. 

Illustration of a user flow: screen boxes and a diamond decision point joined by arrows from a starting screen to an end screen.

User-Story Map (Story Map)

A lean-UX map method used by Agile teams to visualize the interactions that the team expects users to go through to complete their goals in a digital product.

Illustration of a user-story map: rows labeled Activities, Steps, and Details, with release lines separating stacks of story cards below.

UX Roadmap (Roadmap)

A strategic, living artifact that aligns, prioritizes, and communicates a UX team’s future work and problems to solve.

Illustration of a UX roadmap: columns for time horizons, each holding stacked initiative cards.

Wireflow

A design-specification format that combines wireframe-style page-layout designs with a simplified flowchart-like way of representing interactions.

Illustration of a wireflow: several phone-screen wireframes joined by arrows showing how a user moves between screens.