UXPressia year in review: 2021 ✨

Another year is almost over. Did it fly like a comet and burn in the atmosphere, or was it rich like Christmas cocoa that you will happily drink to the bottom? 

Our year has been intense, eventful (literally), with its own happy and bittersweet moments, but overall memorable and hopeful.

Let's look back together and celebrate the best that we will definitely take with us in 2022.

💜 The platform

While you’ve been improving the experience of your clientele and employees, we’ve been improving the platform to make it easier and enjoyable for you to achieve your mapping goals. 

If you have missed our product releases, here is a snapshot of the key functionality we brought to you in 2021: 

• Team Library — a shared repository of reusable components and files. It’s the shiniest constellation in the UXPressia skies of 2021 with the three stars (Stages, Touchpoints, and Images) appearing and one more (Documents) to light up very soon.
• The Version History that logs every action you and your teammates take in a map or persona. You can copy and save the important ones or just travel back in time along the waves of mapping.
• The Description section in customer journey maps, personas, and impact maps to store important information about your map or persona.
• The ability to add more fields in the demographics section in the Personas Tool.
• In the CJM tool, you can now set emoticon colors individually and add some emotion-related notes in the experience graph section.
• Seeing online collaborators inside your map or persona. Even the anonymous ones.
• Cell locking. Whenever someone edits a cell, now it gets locked and other users cannot edit or delete it.
• Extended Storyboard section with black and white images and their color twins to add to your maps and personas.
• More image editing options: from cropping to rotating along with the uploaded image quality improvement and popup windows to preview them.
• The Image section in the Personas tool. Now personas’ profiles are even more illustrative than before.

📚 Whitepapers & reports

And if you are looking for journey mapping insights, check out two insightful whitepapers — Journey mapping in finance and Employee journey mapping — that we published this year. 

Many thanks to the experts and practitioners who shared their experience and opinion with us to help our team produce both of them. 

We also turned the results of long-term research that we started back in 2019 into a report you can download on our blog. 

The report focuses on the kind of maps people build depending on their background, the way they organize mapping initiatives, the impact their background has on maps’ structure and content, and their approach to complementary personas.

🎥 Events

This year, we hosted almost 30 online events, covering different topics, such as New trends and direction in experience mapping with Jim Kalbach, The Future of CX with Mike Wittenstein, and How to Improve Onboarding with Employee Journey Mapping with Paul Lopushinsky. 

And we did several workshops on interviews and journey mapping ideation strategies which were a combination of theory, practice, and fun.

Missed something? Don't worry, we gathered all the recordings on our Youtube channel. 

📰 Ready-to-go templates

This year, we came up with many detailed persona and customer journey map templates. Each is based on the research and experiences of real people and contains ideas for improving customer experience, useful data, and beautiful illustrations. All of them are free and yours to take: 

• SaaS buyer journey;
• Сar sharing customer journey;
• New reality travel journey;
• Telecom customer journey;
• First-time gym visitor journey;
• Remote employee journey;
• Car insurance customer journey;
• The sneakers store visitor journey.

😀 Plans for 2022

We already have many awesomely ambitious plans for 2021. But what's the fun to spoil ‘em all? Well, here's a hint: interesting events, new functionality, insightful content, and fruitful collaborations await you. Follow us not to miss a thing 😉

❄️❄️❄️

Thank you for being with us in 2021. We hope this year was as happy and productive for you as possible, and that 2022 will be even better!

See you in 2022!

Happy Holidays,
UXPressia team