DCHS Insights CX Human-Centered Design @ DCHS PROTOTYPE no real data Customer journey mapping
What it is
A visualization of the end-to-end process a client goes through to accomplish one goal — built with frontline staff and clients with recent experience of one specific program, grounded in real research. The April 2025 maps were made by leadership for a general journey; the power of the method comes from doing it narrow and evidenced.
"Where, step by step, does the experience break down — and how does it feel?"
What it tells you and what it cannot
| Tells you | Cannot tell you |
|---|---|
| Where the pain points and emotional lows sit, in sequence | How frequent each pain point is — that needs a quantitative pairing |
| A shared cross-role picture executives read in seconds (the emotion curve) | The backstage causes — that is a service blueprint |
| Which fixes matter most, tied to owners | Anything reliable, if built from assumptions instead of research |
How it runs
| Who does the work | Participants | Elapsed time | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| A facilitator/designer + a cross-functional group | 5–15 in the room; synthesizes 5–15 client interviews | 1–2 days with research in hand; 2–6 weeks full cycle | $$ — staff and client time, plus research and facilitation |
Strengths, watch-outs and quality signals
aligns the organization around the client's lived reality; makes problems legible instantly; converts pain points into owned, prioritized opportunities.
"fantasy maps" built from assumptions; over-generalizing one persona's journey; a poster nobody acts on — the opportunities-and-owners layer is the part most often skipped and the part that matters.
grounded in real research with verbatim quotes; a genuine numeric emotion curve; every top pain point mapped to a fix with an owner and a metric.
Equity & consent
Whose journey gets mapped is the equity decision: map the hardest journeys (limited English proficiency, disability, first-time applicants), not the average. Mixing clients, frontline staff, and supervisors in one room can silence the clients — consider separate sessions and consent for quotes and photos.
When to choose it
to synthesize and communicate — it is the table the other methods' evidence lands on.
Nielsen Norman Group's journey-mapping structure (lens → experience → insights); Civilla's Project Re:Form, which used hundreds of hours of fieldwork to cut Michigan's 42-page benefits application to 18 pages.
Customer journey map — Janice Brown, crisis entry to stability
Scope & method
One persona, one journey, one goal.
Persona tile for Janice Brown, a composite client who entered through the DV hotline and touches seven programs.
Janice Brown
Left in crisis. Asked to retell the same story until the system could see the whole picture.
Goal: Stability that unblocks reunification
Scenario. Janice left a violent home and is stabilizing several needs at once: immediate safety, housing, food and benefits, behavioral health support, and a CPS matter that cannot move toward reunification without stability. Goal: a stable footing that unblocks reunification. She is a protective parent who acted under pressure, keeps showing up through exhausting contacts, and is clear about what she can realistically manage — the map treats those strengths as data, not as garnish.
Evidence base (as-if). This mock is written as the output of a half-day mapping workshop with 6 frontline staff from the programs on her path plus synthesis of 9 client interviews with recent crisis-entry experience. A journey map without underlying research produces fiction; a real version of this artifact must be grounded in real interviews and field evidence before it is used to prioritize anything.
The journey at a glance
The map below is the workshop's central artifact: six stages, standardized department-wide, with what happens, where it happens, how it feels, what grinds, and which indignities attach at each stage — and the emotion curve running underneath on the same columns. Timeframes are relative to the night she left.
Six-stage customer journey map from crisis entry to an unresolved stability loop, with indignity tags on every stage and an emotion curve beneath that starts at -3, never rises above -2, and dips back to -3 at the retelling stage and the housing loop.
Night 0 — the night she left
Days 1-3 — safety first
Weeks 1-2 — the story again
Weeks 2-5 — separate clocks
Weeks 4-6 — one miss echoes
Day 47 and counting — the loop
Arrives via the DV hotline into a safe house. First contact is the crisis, not the plan.
Safety, a bed, food. Told about resources, handed numbers.
Separate approaches for housing, benefits, behavioral health, and the CPS matter. Each requires the story again.
Services start on separate clocks. Nobody holds the whole picture; appointments collide.
Progress in one area; a missed appointment elsewhere sets it back. No coordinated view.
Housing still unresolved. Reunification depends on housing. Loop.
DV hotline / safe house
Safe house and phone calls
Multiple programs
Program offices
Calls and offices
Housing queue / CPS
A night of disclosure and no whole-system plan
Multiple numbers to call while in crisis
9 retellings across 7 doors
Conflicting appointments and forms
A missed appointment becomes a closure risk
47 days to first stable service
3. Service Connection 9 retellings across 7 doors — this dip is administrative, not clinical
6. Stability & Transition The curve ends where it began: housing loops back to reunification
The curve never crosses −2, and the workshop's reading of it is the report's headline: the deepest lows after the entry night are system-made — the retelling stage and the unresolved housing loop — not features of the underlying crisis.
Her scoreboard across this journey, from the persona record (illustrative, not measured caseload data): 7 doors · 9 retellings · 6 forms · 47 days to first stable service · needs met 3 of 8.
Pain-point deep-dives
Four pain points carried the workshop's attention. Each traces back to a stage on the map above.
The story restarts at every door — Stage 3, the deepest system-made dip
Phone photo of a blank intake form on a clipboard at a reception counter.
Intake counter, mid-morning: a fresh clipboard with the same demographic page she has completed five times
Between the hotline, the safe house, housing intake, benefits, behavioral health, and the CPS matter, interview participants described giving the same account of the worst night of their lives eight to ten times; the persona record carries 9 retellings across 7 doors. At the third door in nine days, one participant put it in five words: "I already told somebody this."
Taken one at a time, every program's intake is locally reasonable — each needs its own record, its own consent, its own risk assessment. It is the sum that retraumatizes, and the workshop judged that sum the single strongest driver of the curve's second dip. Nobody designed the repetition; that is precisely why no single program can fix it.
Appointments collide — Stage 4
Client quote: I can do the appointments. I cannot do them all at once.
I can do the appointments. I cannot do them all at once.
In the mapped fortnight, three programs independently scheduled required contacts into the same two weekday windows, and two collided outright. No one holds the whole calendar, so compliance with one program manufactures absence from another. The point the workshop kept returning to: she can meet any one program's expectations. It is the set that fails — and the set is ours, not hers.
The dependency nobody can see — Stage 6
Phone photo of a folded letter and notebook on a made bed in a plain room.
A borrowed room at the safe house: a folded program letter on a made bed
Reunification requires stable housing. Housing sits in a queue owned elsewhere. No plan of record links the two. That chain — the most consequential fact in her case — surfaced in the workshop only when the staff lanes were drawn side by side on the wall; until that moment, no one in the room had seen it whole, because it exists in no single program's view. It is a property of the map, which is the strongest argument for making one.
Client quote: If housing is the thing everything depends on, why is it the last thing moving?
If housing is the thing everything depends on, why is it the last thing moving?
A miss reads as refusal — Stage 5
A behavioral-health appointment missed because of a same-morning benefits appointment appears in the record as a no-show, and a second miss would trigger closure review. The schedule shows a collision; the record shows noncompliance. The system's memory of her is less accurate than her calendar — and it is the system's memory that decides whether her case stays open.
Prioritized opportunities
Zone C — every pain point maps to an owned, measurable change. Placement judgments are the workshop's.
Severity-by-effort matrix: making the housing-CPS dependency explicit and collision-aware miss codes are quick wins; the traveling intake and shared calendar view are major projects.
S = Severity / impact (1 low - 5 high) · E = Effort to fix (1 low - 5 high)
Findings table linking the four pain points to owned recommendations with metrics.
| Finding | Recommendation | Owner | Evidence · metric |
|---|---|---|---|
| The story restarts at every door (9 retellings, 7 doors) | Pilot one consented intake narrative that travels across programs | Intake redesign workgroup | Journey strip stage 3; workshop interview synthesis Retellings per new multi-program case |
| Appointments collide across programs | Stand up a cross-program appointment view and sequence new contacts against it | Program supervisors, jointly | Stage 4; two collisions in the mapped fortnight Collisions per client per month |
| Housing-reunification dependency is invisible | Name the dependency in both the housing and CPS plans and review it jointly | Housing and CPS program leads | Stage 6; surfaced only when staff lanes were drawn together Multi-program cases with documented dependencies |
| Missed appointments read as refusal | Add a collision-aware miss code and require it before any closure step | Records / QA lead | Stage 5; no-show coding precedes closure review Share of misses coded with a documented reason |
Limitations & quality self-check
Limits of this map. One composite persona's journey, reconstructed retrospectively — recency and memory bias apply, and one journey does not generalize to all clients. This mock's evidence base is synthetic by design; a real map must be built from real interviews, field observation, and frontline participation before its priorities are acted on.
Open research questions the map surfaced but cannot answer (deliberately left unresolved):
- "Which retellings are legally required and which are habit"
- "What information can travel with consent today"
- "Which missed appointments could be prevented by sequencing"
Self-check. Emotion curve numeric on the −3..+3 scale: yes. Every pain point mapped to an owned fix with a metric: yes. Quotes verbatim-style and tagged: yes. All fabricated figures marked: yes. Banner present: yes.