Map the Whole Line

Practice · How I map a service

Map thewhole line

Three ways of looking at a service, run in sequence. Each is ordinary on its own. Together they find the gaps no single method shows: the stage nobody has stood in, the user nobody recruited, the claim resting on the wrong evidence.

Read this first

Fictional examples. Real patterns.

Every example on this page is from a made-up internal data service at a made-up utility. The client work behind the patterns stays with the client.

The claim

A method is only worth naming for what it reliably surfaces. This page names the method, then the pattern it keeps finding.

The spine

Three stages · each feeds the next

1Journey

Method

End-to-end journey mapping

The full line, offline and online, from before first contact to after the outcome lands. Drawn at the level of the user's eye, not the org chart: what they see, do, wait for and work around. The message to a mate. The spreadsheet on the side. The meeting where the answer is actually used.

Built from sessions, not assumptions. Every stage carries who told us and how strongly.

Unevidenced stages are drawn hollow. Never filled in to look finished.

What it surfaces

The empty stage

Draw the whole line and some stages have nobody standing in them. They are usually the stages the service most needs to win, because the people who struggled there never became users you could recruit.

Fictional example

Stage 0, "doesn't know the service exists", and stage 12, "gets the output back to the person who decides", had no participant evidence at all. Fourteen stages drawn; the two that mattered most were hollow.

2Ecology

Method

Persona ecology analysis

Not a gallery of personas. The set of roles around a service and how they relate: who asks, who produces, who approves, who sits outside the wall, who receives the result. Mapped as a system, so a missing role shows as a hole in the picture rather than a card that never got made.

Every role carries an evidence grade. Strong, partial, or gap.

Strawmen are labelled strawmen. A small card gets screenshotted and travels without its footnote, so the caveat lives on the card.

What it surfaces

Insider overfit

When participants are recruited from existing customers, the ecology quietly collapses to insiders. Design then follows the evidence: one ask at a time, fitted to the people who already found the service, not the many who haven't.

Fictional example

An analyst persona was well evidenced as an existing customer. The same person as a newcomer, unaware the service existed, appeared nowhere. Two relationships with the same service; only one had ever been studied.

3Persona

Method

Personas placed on the journey

A persona earns its keep beside a journey, rarely on its own. Put the card next to the line and ask at every stage: who is standing here, and what did they actually tell us? The card carries the person. The journey carries the evidence. The grades travel with both.

Two card sizes. A detailed evidence profile for the argument, a scannable companion for the wall.

The small card always points to the big one. So the distilled version can't quietly become the only thing anyone reads.

What it surfaces

The proposition gap

A service can be evidenced on the stages where people use it and sold on the stages where people find it. Personas on the line make that mismatch visible, because the same person is strong on one half and silent on the other.

Fictional example

The pitch was discovery. The evidence was usage. Nobody had ever been asked, in a session, how they found the last thing they used.

The journey shows where

Which stages the evidence is thin on, and which are hollow.

The ecology shows who

Which roles are missing, and why recruitment never reached them.

The persona makes it land

A stakeholder will argue with a chart. They will not argue with a person they recognise standing in an empty stage.

The research I run

Purpose × format

Most method lists mix two questions: what the research is for, and how it is run. Kept apart, they make a grid. Filled cells are ones I have run on live services.

Purpose ↓ · Format →
One-to-oneInterviews, contextual inquiry, think-aloud
GroupWorkshops, co-design, playbacks
LongitudinalDiary studies, repeat touchpoints
UnmoderatedSurveys, analytics, remote tests
GenerativeWhat is going on, and for whom
Depth interviews in the place the work happens; site visits with the frontline
Discovery workshops; journey walls built with the people on the journey
Diary study across a working fortnight to catch what interviews miss
Not yet
FormativeIs this shaping up right
Think-aloud on prototypes, from paper to working service
Co-design and critique sessions with the delivery team in the room
Not yet
Remote first-click and comprehension tests between rounds
SummativeDid it work
Task-based sessions against the measures agreed at the start
Playbacks that turn findings into decisions, not decks
Not yet
Service analytics and satisfaction measures read against the journey

A note on words. Formative and summative research are both evaluative; the useful distinction is when you evaluate, not whether. Generative research is the third thing: it comes before there is anything to evaluate.

See it in action

Ashcombe Data Hub — a full demo journey with hollow stages, persona cards and the insider-overfit pattern, in a fictional utility →

New · The evidence page

UR × AI: state of play — sixteen evidence-graded findings on what AI does to research, how to research AI, and what stays human →