What is a journey

Overview

A journey is the primary artifact in TheyDo. It's a visual map of a customer's experience — the steps someone takes to achieve a goal, and what they think, feel, and perceive along the way. Journeys are always shown from the customer's perspective, not as an internal process chart.

A journey can represent a full end-to-end lifecycle like "onboarding to renewal" or zoom into a specific moment like "the support handover experience".

How a journey is structured

Every journey in TheyDo is built from three core elements:

Phases are the major stages of the experience — for example, Awareness, Consideration, and Onboarding. They group related steps together and give the journey its high-level shape.

Steps are the individual touchpoints within each phase. Each step represents a specific moment in the customer experience, like "submits a form" or "receives confirmation email."

Lanes run horizontally across all steps and hold the content attached to each touchpoint. Each lane represents a different type of information — for example, what the customer is thinking, what they're feeling, or which building blocks are linked at that step.

Lanes in TheyDo

There are three types of lanes you can add to a journey:

Building block lanes link your research and strategy directly to journey steps:

  • Insights — add customer insights through the journey
  • Opportunities — capture areas for improvement
  • Solutions — track who's working on what
  • Metrics — track data for your KPIs
  • Nested journeys — connect related journeys within another journey
  • Step links — connect steps from any journey

Summary lanes give you a high-level overview across steps:

  • Bar chart — shows a summary of a building block per step

Basic lanes add context and supporting content to each step:

  • Text — a simple text lane for notes or descriptions
  • Images — add images to a step
  • GIF — add GIFs to a step
  • Comments — tag other creators or stakeholders within the journey
  • Links — add links to a journey step
  • Channels — show which channels are used at that step
  • Tags — add a tag to journey steps

Linking building blocks to a journey

Building blocks like insights, opportunities, solutions, metrics, and personas can be linked directly to steps in a journey. This is how evidence and strategy connect to the actual customer experience — rather than living in isolation, each building block is anchored to the specific moment it relates to.

Building blocks are covered in more detail in the Key Concepts section.

Where you work with journeys

You'll interact with journeys across four surfaces in TheyDo:

  • Journey library — the workspace-wide repository for browsing, filtering, and organizing all journeys
  • Journey detail — the full-page canvas where you build and edit a journey map
  • Journey observatory — a graph view for exploring how journeys relate to each other across the workspace
  • Favorites — personal shortcuts to the journeys and views you return to most

Journey library

The journey library is where you discover and manage journeys at the workspace level. From here you can:

  • Browse all journeys with metadata like owner, status, type, and tags
  • Search and filter by persona, owner, group, type, or status
  • Sort and paginate across large repositories
  • Run bulk actions like updating metadata or deleting multiple journeys
  • Export your journey list to CSV
  • Switch between saved views to see scoped subsets of journeys

The category sidebar on the left lets you filter by Status, Type, or Group in one click — useful for quickly narrowing down a large list.