Purpose
Produce a stage-by-stage map of a consumer app's core journey — capturing what the user does, thinks, and feels at each touchpoint, where friction lives, and which moments make or break retention — so product and UX teams can see the whole experience at once and act on the highest-leverage fixes.
When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Map a user journey or experience flow for a consumer app
- Understand where users drop off or get stuck across a multi-step flow
- Document touchpoints from first action through completion (e.g., home → request → fulfillment → payment)
- Align a product team on the full end-to-end experience for a release or quarter
- Identify the highest-impact friction points to fix before a launch or redesign
- Build an emotional curve or moment-of-truth analysis for a key flow
Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- App type and category: What the app does and its market (e.g., ride-hailing, food delivery, fintech, fitness)
- Core journey to map: The specific flow, ideally as a rough touchpoint sequence (e.g., home screen → request → matching → pickup → in-ride → payment → rating)
- Primary persona: Who is taking this journey — goals, context, tech comfort
- User goal: What the user is trying to accomplish end to end
- Known pain points: Any drop-off data, complaints, or support tickets already observed
- Business objective: What the team wants to improve (conversion, retention, NPS, completion rate)
- Platform context: iOS / Android / web / cross-platform, and whether the journey spans device or offline moments
If persona or known pain points are missing, infer a reasonable primary persona from the app type and note the assumption, then flag friction hypotheses rather than confirmed data.
Instructions
Step 1: Define the Journey Scope and Stages
Break the core journey into 5–8 discrete stages, each anchored to a touchpoint or shift in user intent.
- Name each stage as a verb-led user phase, not a screen name (e.g., "Requesting a ride," not "Request screen")
- Define a clear start trigger (what brings the user into the journey) and end state (what success looks like)
- Mark stage boundaries where the user's goal, context, or channel changes
- If the input sequence is provided, use it as the stage skeleton and refine for missing transitions (e.g., wait/matching states, error recovery)
Step 2: Populate Each Stage Across Five Lanes
For every stage, document these five lanes:
- Actions: What the user concretely does (taps, inputs, waits, decisions)
- Touchpoints: Where it happens — specific screens, notifications, emails, support, offline moments
- Thoughts: What the user is asking themselves ("Is this the right price?" "How long will this take?")
- Emotions: A single dominant emotion per stage, with intensity (e.g., "Anxious — 6/10"); use a consistent scale of 1–10
- Friction points: Specific obstacles, confusion, delays, or trust gaps — labeled by type (Cognitive load / Effort / Trust / Wait time / Error / Mismatch)
Tie friction to the lane it disrupts. Vague friction ("it's confusing") is not acceptable — name the screen element or decision causing it.
Step 3: Plot the Emotional Curve
Translate the per-stage emotion scores into a described curve from start to finish.
- Identify the high point (peak delight) and the low point (peak frustration)
- Note where the curve dips below neutral — these are abandonment risk zones
- Apply the peak-end rule: call out whether the most intense moment and the final moment are positive, since these disproportionately shape memory and retention
Step 4: Identify Moments of Truth
Surface the 3–5 moments that most determine whether the user continues, converts, or returns.
- First Moment of Truth: The first time the user judges whether the app delivers (often first request or first result)
- Make-or-break moments: Stages where friction directly causes drop-off
- Trust moments: Where the user decides whether to share data, pay, or rely on the product For each, state why it matters and the consequence of getting it wrong.
Step 5: Map Opportunities Per Stage
For each stage, list 1–3 concrete opportunities to reduce friction or amplify a positive moment.
- Frame each as an action ("Show estimated wait time during matching to reduce abandonment anxiety")
- Tie each opportunity to the friction or emotion it addresses
- Distinguish quick wins (copy, defaults, ordering) from structural changes (new flow, integration)
Step 6: Prioritize Fixes
Rank the top 8–10 opportunities across all stages by expected impact on the stated business objective.
- Score each on Impact (High/Med/Low) and Effort (High/Med/Low)
- Lead with high-impact / low-effort items
- For each, name the stage it affects and the metric it should move
Output Format
- Structure: Journey overview → per-stage table (5 lanes) → emotional curve description → moments of truth → opportunities per stage → prioritized fix list
- Length: 1,000–1,400 words
- Format: Structured document with a per-stage table (Stage | Actions | Touchpoints | Thoughts | Emotion+Score | Friction); prioritized fixes as a ranked list with Impact/Effort labels
- Sections: Journey scope & persona → Stage-by-stage map (table) → Emotional curve → Moments of truth → Opportunities by stage → Prioritized fix list (top 8–10)
- Tone: Product strategist — observational, user-grounded, specific; no jargon padding, no generic UX platitudes
Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] The journey is broken into 5–8 stages, each verb-led and tied to a real touchpoint
- [ ] Every stage has all five lanes filled (Actions, Touchpoints, Thoughts, Emotion+score, Friction)
- [ ] Each emotion uses the consistent 1–10 scale, and the curve names a clear high and low point
- [ ] 3–5 moments of truth are identified, each with a stated consequence of failure
- [ ] The prioritized fix list has 8–10 items, each with Impact/Effort labels and an affected stage
- [ ] Friction points name specific elements or decisions — none are vague ("confusing," "clunky")
Notes
- The abandonment risk zones are almost always wait states and trust/payment moments — give those stages extra scrutiny even if no pain data exists for them
- When drop-off data is provided, anchor friction to where the numbers fall rather than guessing across the whole flow
- A journey map is only useful if it drives action — the prioritized fix list is the deliverable's real payload; the stages are context for it
- For two-sided marketplaces (rider/driver, buyer/seller), confirm which side's journey is being mapped before starting, or map the primary side and flag the dependency on the other
How to use this skill
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Installing in Claude Code:
~/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md— auto-loads in every session anywhere on your machine (recommended for skills you'll use across multiple projects)<your-project>/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md— auto-loads only when working in that project (recommended for project-specific skills)
Restart Claude Code or open a new session to register.
Using in Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools:
- Drag this file into a new chat, or copy and paste its contents
- Send your task or request as your next message — the AI will apply the skill where it fits
For Claude Code skill details: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills