Asset Mapping for Experience Consistency - NN/G

Introducing NN/G Membership | Access all self-paced courses for $249 per year | Join by Jan. 26, 2027 |
Find the training option that fits your learning style.
March 14, 2021 2021-03-14
Consistency is essential for a great omnichannel user experience. When interactions look, feel, and function similarly across channels, not only is user effort reduced, but users’ trust and confidence are bolstered.
To make an experience consistent, teams first need to catalog the interactions and assets that users engage with along their workflows and journeys. An effective tool for analyzing consistency across channels is an asset map.
Definition: An asset map provides 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. Full or partial-page screenshots, social media posts, videos, emails, text messages, push notifications, copy, and photographs can be included in the map.
Prioritize including assets from the channels people use frequently to complete key workflows and journeys. These are typically channels such as the desktop website(s), mobile web, and mobile apps. It’s also acceptable to include subchannels of these main channels — such as chatbot messages on desktop web, customer-support messages communicated over the phone, or photos of a physical location, provided that these are part of the journey.
Asset maps and customer-journey maps share commonalities and should be thought of as complimentary UX mapping methods. They’re both chronological representations of the user’s experience with a company and serve as foundational tools for determining where pain points exist.
Typically, customer-journey maps do not include the actual screens and elements users interact with. However, it’s perfectly acceptable to supplement actions in the customer-journey map with graphics or storyboards. If the journey map includes actual screenshots from the journey, it becomes an asset map. This way of creating an asset map lends credibility to the process, as it’s rooted in data from exploratory research such as field studies and diary studies that inform customer-journey maps.
Asset maps work best for smaller tasks and workflows such as buying a new TV, checking into a flight and retrieving a mobile boarding pass, or signing up for a new mobile phone carrier, that teams can change to improve the consistency across channels. Bigger journeys like planning a vacation or looking for a new mobile-phone carrier can include many different information sources, channels, and assets that may be outside of the team or organization’s control, so for those an asset map will be less useful. It’s best to focus on change that can actually happen.
Though a suboptimal approach, an asset map can also be created in the absence of a customer-journey map, if the team wants to do a baseline assessment of consistency or to fix any inconsistencies before doing user research. The asset map serves to ensure that the current state of the experience is as consistent as possible across all (or most) channels, before reaching users. The sooner the team detects inconsistencies, the faster it can identify the internal reasons behind them. Then, it can use user research to assign severity levels to these inconsistencies and prioritize fixing them.
Sometimes, including the asset map alongside the customer-journey map moves focus from understanding the user journey to detecting inconsistencies. If this is a challenge for your team, it might be best to keep customer-journey maps and asset maps as separate tools with different purposes: the journey map for understanding the user and the asset map for ideating solutions. (You can still use the journey map to create the asset map, though.)
A consolidated view of anything users see and interact with in a journey or workflow — a collection of screenshots, emails, text messages, and so on
A visualization of a typical experience a person has with a company over time and across channels and that is informed by user research
Smaller workflows across an organization’s owned channels
Can cover journeys large or small across many different information sources and channels with varying ownership
Provide an understanding and context for the typical user’s experience.
Researcher-collected or user-provided screenshots, ideally paired with user data
User data from exploratory research such as diary studies and field studies
Low (Once the journey-level research and customer-journey map are complete, adding and organizing assets takes minimal time and effort.)
High (Journey maps require effort because they are grounded in user research.)
Does not include user-centered context such as thoughts, feelings, and motivations, unless combined with customer-journey map
Does not include tangible artifacts to reflect what users may see along the way, unless combined with asset map
The distinction between asset maps and journey maps is similar to that between UI and UX: the asset map focuses on the user interface (UI) and the journey map focuses on the broader picture of the user experience. Understanding both is important; even if the interface and elements supporting a workflow or journey are perfectly consistent, if the journey misses the mark on what the user wants and needs in the first place, the total user experience will still be lousy. And vice versa, even if the big picture is right, when there are lots of problems at the basic interface level, the resulting experience will be affected.
Map creation can be done in person, using a large whiteboard or wall space and printed assets, or remotely, through digital collaboration tools such as Miro, Mural, and Google Sheets, which scale to accommodate many assets of varying sizes.
Follow these five steps to create and use an asset map:
At this stage, involve crossfunctional partners or other channel-dedicated teams. Share the map, discuss the in