Canoe's User Journey Canvas Template

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Why?

The User Journey canvas is designed to help product teams, designers, and strategists visualise the full customer lifecycle across a SaaS experience, from initial discovery to renewal. This structured canvas helps identify user actions, needs, emotions, pain points, and opportunities at each stage of the journey. By aligning internal perspectives with actual user behaviour and systems, it ensures that product strategy, design, and development efforts stay human-centred, insight-driven, and purposefully prioritised.

Built specifically for SaaS applications, the canvas features clearly defined swimlanes that span from pre-purchase research to long-term renewal. Each lane can be tailored to suit specific personas, phases, or product contexts, making the tool flexible for different teams and journeys.

Ultimately, this tool fosters shared understanding, uncovers friction and opportunity areas, and supports strategic alignment between user needs and business goals.

How?

Map the Phases – Identify the key moments of your SaaS lifecycle, from discovery through onboarding, usage, and renewal.

Describe the Journey – For each phase, capture:

Goals/Needs – What is the user trying to achieve?
Actions – What are they doing?
Emotions – How do they feel?
Touchpoints – What tools, systems, or channels are involved?
Data/Insights – What data is used, created, or needed?
Known Challenges – What friction or blockers exist?
Opportunities – What innovations, AI solutions, or new workflows might help?

Define the Problem Statement – Post-mapping, articulate the overarching problem(s) based on insights collected across phases.

Prioritise Initiatives – Use the built-in “Now, Next, Later” framework to convert ideas into action. This ensures a balanced roadmap based on feasibility, impact, and urgency.

This canvas encourages holistic thinking, supports empathy-driven design, and builds a strong foundation for roadmap planning, product strategy, and cross-team alignment.

Credits

This template draws on established service design and product discovery methods, tailored through years of hands-on experience in SaaS innovation and customer journey mapping.

About Canoe

Canoe is a design and innovation studio based in Norway, helping organisations globally to navigate complexity and create meaningful change. We blend strategy, design, and technology to craft solutions that drive impact for teams large and small. Whether you need facilitation, service design, or innovation strategy, we’re here to help.

Visit www.canoe.no to learn more.

Canoe

Design and Innovation Studio@Canoe

Canoe is a design and innovation studio. Founded to change the world around us, propelled by a passion to create and empowered by insight. We create work that enriches lives and pushes towards a more meaningful and responsible world. Our partnership is based on trust and an ambition to build an agency of inspired minds and diverse creative thinkers. Canoe believes that design has the power to navigate and transform the future. We create valuable solutions, with an approach grounded in insight.