I have a hard time believing that Customer Journey Mapping started only in 1999.

This is because I am reminded of the fact that the mother of Service Design (Lynn Shohacks) created the Service Blueprint, which seems to be an update of the customer journey, back in 1984. But hey, I didn’t find any source that dates customer journey before 1999, so for now I’ll go with what my fellow contributors on Wikipedia say.

According to them, “The customer journey map for service design was first introduced through the Acela high-speed rail project of IDEO (1999). It has subsequently become one of the most widely used tools for service design and have been utilized as a tool for visualizing intangible services.”.

Let’s hope that in a future update of this booklet, I find an earlier and more accurate date for the creation of the first customer journey map.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.