Scalable Journey Map Framework

Project Overview

As Northwell Health moved through a major digital transformation, adopting Epic as its core EMR while still relying on many legacy applications, leadership needed a simple way to see how patients were moving through such a complex environment. Our UX strategy team was mapping more than 90 individual journeys across the organization, and our goal was to create a flexible system to present that work in a way that was clear, scalable, and useful for different audiences.

Client

Northwell Health

Role

Lead UX Designer

Deliverables

•UX Strategy
•Service Design
•Interaction Design
•Systems Thinking
•Cross-functional Facilitation
•Stakeholder Alignment
•Design Leadership & Mentorship
•High-Fidelity Prototyping
•Executive Presentation
•Figma

The Challenge

Most teams were working from fragmented, inconsistent views of the user experience. With over 90 different journeys across Epic and other tools, there was no shared framework for understanding how patients interacted with the system.

Leadership needed quick clarity. Product teams needed deep, actionable insight. We needed to support both without building a new platform from scratch.

Design Approach

We built a two-tiered journey system. The top layer offers a linear, zoomed-out view of the full experience—phases, UI screens, and collapsible swimlanes.

Each swimlane represents a specific lens on the experience:

Backend systems
Flow interruptions
Support needs
Analytics events
User feedback
Pain points
Opportunity areas

These swimlanes can be collapsed into a simple dot-matrix view for quick scanning or expanded to reveal detailed notes and annotations. This flexibility allows different teams to move between macro and micro views depending on their role and needs.

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Toggleable rows display pain points, support needs, data capture moments, and user feedback—all aligned step-by-step with the interface.

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Interactive Close-Ups

Clicking on any UI screen in the journey map opens a close-up modal containing detailed annotations. Each modal displays backend logic, support scenarios, analytics tracking, user feedback, and pain points related to that step in the journey.

Users can step forward and back through these screens while staying in context—no need to jump between documents or lose track of their place. Nothing is hidden unless the viewer wants it to be.

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Outcomes

This journey mapping system now supports multiple teams across Northwell Health:

Executives use the overview for strategic planning and presentations
Product managers and UX designers access the detailed views to identify pain points and align on improvements
Developers use it to understand backend dependencies and flow interruptions

The framework is scalable, standardized, and now used to manage and understand over 90 user journeys across the organization. It continues to serve as a central reference for roadmap planning, service design, and experience audits.