Mapping Behavioural Journeys
If you gate-crashed one of our meetings at Common Thread, you’d find yourself amongst a team eager to play the game: creating clarity from complexity. Cursors race around and a rainbow of virtual post-it notes emerges. Each post-it note is an intellectual breadcrumb—an argument for a tool, discipline, or methodology that can help us tackle the problems we most often get asked to work on. We’re a polite team at Common Thread, but don’t be fooled by Miro’s airy, “uptempo funk” background music. Our sessions can be fierce showdowns amongst our interdisciplinary team, particularly between the two disciplines we are constantly seeking to blend better: behavioural science and HCD.
This year, we’ve been trying to understand why adolescents in Ghana don’t access sexual and reproductive health services, how to help Ukrainian teenagers in Poland navigate an educational system they didn’t choose, and how to make diverse work environments more equitable and psychologically safe. We’re increasingly zeroing in on the systems and structural bottlenecks that influence individual decision-making and behaviour change.
Most of us who work in design are familiar with the power of a journey map: they help us visualise the physical and emotional experience of getting from point A to point B. At each step, they plot the barriers that may impact an individuals’ willingness to complete a desired behaviour, whether that be enrolling into the 10th grade in Poland or speaking up to your friend and colleague about that sexist joke they made at this morning’s meeting.

An example of a journey map template we created for immunisation. It is a tool designed to analyse the journey of caretakers who need to vaccinate their kids.
While a journey map provides insight into the more tangible barriers of going about a task, a behavioural map focuses on the psychological barriers and biases, bringing in scientific principles that can help us understand the invisible as well as visible pain points. We can layer in multiple models that help us unpack the systems and structures that influence a behaviour at each stage.
How might we combine the strengths of these two powerful tools?
Here’s where we’ve recently landed.
First, we map out the physical and psychological steps towards a desired behaviour.

We then use a COM-B structure to code research insights on to each stage of the journey.

The COM-B model is a useful tool for understanding the factors that influence behaviour. Capability refers to physical, psychological, and social ability to perform a behaviour. Opportunity refers to the presence of enabling factors, such as time, resources, and support. And motivation refers to the person’s intention to perform the behaviour.

We identify enablers and barriers on the journey and colour code them – the colours correspond to the structure of COM-B model: capability, opportunity or motivation.
This results in a heat map that highlights where barriers and opportunities lie in concentration, allowing us to see forces that may be stronger than the ones people might tell us about directly.

This visualisation prompts a clear and strategic path to meaningful interventions. It tells us when interventions will have the most impact, and offers a blueprint for evidence-based precision about the types of interventions that could have impact at each moment. For challenges where psychological influencers like social norms, equity, inclusion and historical events take centre stage, this methodology feels integral to getting to the root of the problem.

This way of visualising the pain and possibility within a user’s journey was inspired by a number of tools and resources, in particular, Allison White and Habit Weekly’s elegant Behavior Map PRO tool, Marc Stickdorn’s continued evolution and investment in journey mapping tools at smaply, and Robert Meza’s thinking around combining COM-B with journey maps and combining SEM with COM-B—which we’ve also used to complement this process to show us at which level an intervention will have the most impact (individual, social or system) — more on this coming soon!
You can access the map here. While it is still a work in progress, early feedback from users have noted how rigorous and promising it is.
But what do you think? How might we improve it? What would you like to see in our next version? Let us know on LinkedIn or Twitter.