Ecosystem Mapping (Experience Mapping) 🌐 Prompts

SUMMARY

Purpose: Ecosystem Mapping (also known as Experience Mapping) visualises the full scope of interactions, systems, and stakeholders that shape a user's journey with your product or service. It aligns internal teams around a shared understanding of complex UX environments.

Design Thinking Phase: Empathise

Time: 45–60 min session + 1–2 hours analysis

Difficulty: ⭐⭐

When to use:When onboarding stakeholders to a service-focused productAt the start of discovery for cross-platform experiencesTo identify gaps, overlaps or misaligned touchpoints in a user's journey

What it is

An Ecosystem Map is a collaborative tool that visualises the relationships between users, systems, channels, and external actors that influence the overall experience. Unlike a journey map that follows a linear sequence, this method captures everything happening around the journey, offering a holistic view of the context in which your product operates.

📺 Video by NNgroup. Embedded for educational reference.

Why it matters

For product teams working across multiple touchpoints — apps, services, physical environments — it’s easy to miss dependencies or stakeholder friction when each team is focused on their own lane. Ecosystem Mapping bridges these silos, revealing interconnections that shape the user experience at scale. It ensures design decisions factor in organisational realities and user expectations that extend beyond any single screen or device.

When to use

• Starting a complex redesign involving several internal departments
• Planning features that depend on APIs, third-party services, or customer support
• Auditing the entire experience for consistency and gaps post-MVP launch

Benefits

• Rich Insights: Helps uncover user needs that aren’t visible in metrics.
• Flexibility: Works across various project types and timelines.
• User Empathy: Deepens understanding of behaviours and motivations.

How to use it

1. Define Scope: Decide whether you’re mapping a full customer lifecycle, a feature journey, or a service moment (e.g., onboarding).
2. List Actors: Include users, internal touchpoints (like CS, operations), and external forces (like partners, devices, regulations).
3. Map Relationships: Use nodes and lines to show how information, decisions, or tasks flow between elements.
4. Highlight Friction: Add icons or annotations where gaps, risks, or redundancies exist.
5. Facilitate Discussion: Use it in workshops or strategy reviews to ground conversations in ecosystem reality.

Example Output

A B2B SaaS team created an ecosystem map to understand how a new client management portal would function across departments.

• Actors: End user (account manager), Ops team, CRM vendor, support reps
• Touchpoints: Desktop portal, email alerts, Slack updates, manual CSV uploads
• Insights: Discovered duplicate data entry between CRM and portal; ops team relied on phone confirmations not tracked anywhere
• Impact: Prompted API automation and service design inclusion in roadmap

Common Pitfalls

• Boiling the Ocean: Avoid mapping too broadly. Prioritise a scenario or life-cycle phase.
• Ignoring Internal Actors: Don’t just map users; internal systems and blockers affect experience quality, too.
• Going Static: An ecosystem map should be a working document — it’s not just for slide decks.

10 Design-Ready AI Prompts for Ecosystem Mapping – UX/UI Edition

How These Prompts Work (C.S.I.R. Framework)

Each of the templates below follows the C.S.I.R. method — a proven structure for writing clear, effective prompts that get better results from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or any other LLM.

C.S.I.R. stands for:

• Context: Who you are and the UX situation you're working in
• Specific Info: Key design inputs, tasks, or constraints the AI should consider
• Intent: What you want the AI to help you achieve
• Response Format: The structure or format you want the AI to return (e.g. checklist, table, journey map)

Level up your career with smarter AI prompts.Get templates used by UX leaders — no guesswork, just results.Design faster, research smarter, and ship with confidence.First one’s free. Unlock all 10 by becoming a member.

Prompt Template 1: “Map External Touchpoints Early in UX Discovery”

Map External Touchpoints Early in UX Discovery

Context: You are a UX strategist planning a discovery session for a multi-service platform experience.
Specific Info: The product involves different channels (web, mobile, SMS) and relies on third-party services and at least 3 internal departments.
Intent: Identify and visualise all touchpoints (internal and external) that influence the user experience journey.
Response Format: Return a table listing each touchpoint, the actor responsible, user visibility level (high/low), and risk factor.

If scope is too broad or touchpoints unclear, ask for clarification or duration focus.
Then offer a suggestion for how to prioritise which interactions matter first.