Smaply

Avantages

Simple to learn and use - very intuitive
Extensive journey mapping coverage
Collaboration

Inconvénients

No persona templates so a lot of repetitive data entry required
Collaboration can lock you out of models. Multiple parties cannot collaborate simultaneously
Pricing is on the steep side

Avantages

Ease of setting up your own custom swimlanes

Inconvénients

Sharing - a few more options would be great

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Smaply

Avantages

Ability to build both Customer Journey Maps, Personas as well as Stakeholder Maps. The latter part gives a super useful high level picture of the relationship between parties.

Inconvénients

The UI is super old looking and not that inspiring. Personas are a bit cumbersome to use and CJM tool is completely in the woods. We rejected the tool due to the complexity of the CJM tool.

Avantages

Very solid user-experience structure.
Quite a bug free app.

Inconvénients

UX: quite old fashioned, not so easy to interact with, it should be updated.
Integrations: that should be improved, videos, prototypes, live data from analytics should all be rendered in the preview mode. Richer icons and image libraries.
No data structure: the data user generates and input into the lanes should be reusable; they should be some sort of entries from a db (ie. Airtable) in order to let user structure more flexible outputs (ie. markdown); putting together a db data structure and the user journey/service blueprint views would let Smaply be quite the definitive tool.
Add "User flow" (with branches) as a new way to design a more mobile app/website/digital application user experiences.

Avantages

The standardized way of working. The guided approach to doing things.

Inconvénients

Lack of tablet functionality but must of the work is desktop based anyway

Avantages

Smaply is a simple online service that's focused on CJM development with support for Personas, Stakeholders and Stakeholders Maps. It is easy to add data to the map, manage it and export to huge pdf documents that can be either printed or manipulated further with different software.

Inconvénients

It takes some time to upload graphics for Persona or CJM either from your computer or awaliable Smaply's collections.

Avantages

I love the ability to export various creations such as Journey Maps, Stakeholder Maps, and Personas to a pdf or ppt.

Inconvénients

I think the journey map portion is still a little too hard to read. I use this tool for sales presentations and not to actually create a service design model so maybe dumb it down a little and offer more "pre-canned" maps to make it easier.

Avantages

Great product, easy way to display multiple journeys and channels at the same time. You can see a lot of data at once.

Inconvénients

I wish it allowed for more creativity and flexibility. Feel it is ridged and if you can’t do it within the structure they present it is hard to do.

Avantages

User level: Turns scrappy workshop outputs into attractive maps which are suitable for readers outside the "bubble" of the team – for example senior management, or research respondents.
Strategy level: the nestable levels of mapping make Smaply suitable for the strategic use of maps as a management tool, coordinating the activities of multiple teams across multiple projects which impact experiences (Journey Map Ops).

Inconvénients

I wasn't fond of the pricing plans. The new version looks better.

Avantages

One of the best tools to visualize and digitize customer journey map, it's easy to build and share with team and stakeholders. For remote teams, it is super useful to collaborate​ and share insights from the research. It is also easy to build persona and mapping stakeholders which are​ super important to gain empathy. I also like the export feature if you don't want to invite everyone to collaborate​ or need it for offline viewing and print.

Inconvénients

Nothing so far​ works well as expected.

Avantages

The ease of use and the templates to start building CJM

Inconvénients

The lack of templates when exporting to ppt.

Alternatives envisagées 

Avantages

It's great for creating journey maps, it has very useful templates and you can edit and cutomize you own projects. I like the storyboard features where yo can import images within the journey map. When exported, journey maps, are visually attractive and esaily understood.

Inconvénients

I believe there are tiny details that can be improved. in some fields you are requiered to: clic, edit, and then type, i think it would be faster if you just clic and edit right away.

Avantages

Great customer experience with amazing UI and great journey mappings with the solutions to create different personas. vizualising and mapping of the customer behaviour

Inconvénients

The Dashboard is very much cluttered and too messy and also there is no mobile app support and no desktop app support.

Avantages

The software is really use to use with a lot of features

Inconvénients

There is no rewind button. If you delete something it's gone

Avantages

Very easy to visually show the customer journey, combining the processes with emotions at various points in time. Also, the fact that many different personas can be incorporated in the same view is very useful for comparisons.

Inconvénients

Sometimes, at least in my case, the customer journey consists of many steps thus creating a very long map. Visually in smaply this means to keep scrolling towards the right hand side and when this is printed in a pdf it is a very difficult map to understand (and fit in an A4 page). Maybe the option to be able to break down the map would help?

Avantages

I found this as one of it's kind in this domain. The way the software mapped the entire journey of a day was quite interesting to see. As a customer can visualize their entire day and then work upon it, depending upon the time they were feeling low or depressed.

Inconvénients

Persona templates are not that great, orientation customization can be improved upon, No real time plugins are there to support user mapping as there are in various applications.

Avantages

The promise of an overall view of user-centred Design stages ist wonderful. The link between personas and stakeholder-maps is useful and I think a few iterations down it could be a really powerful tool.

Inconvénients

A big minus is the UX/UI. You basically took all the life out of the methods you tried to ease. In our test, it was not possible to engage students with the platform, because the UI seems more like filling out grey and lonely forms. The design is very narrow and not at all playful, generous and inspiring. You should be aware of this and take care of it, because all the methods you promote are more storytelling than burocracy.

Avantages

Smaply is very easy to use and the company has good customer service. Whenever I had questions they were answered quickly and friendly. Also the cost is pretty low.

Inconvénients

I missed some options for customizing the journey maps and the look and feel of the maps could be better, they are not very well suited for sharing and presentations.

Avantages

The software was easy to use and understand

Inconvénients

The user interface was rather clunky and dated

Avantages

The concept is great and the support documentation is useful

Inconvénients

The limited flexibility with features makes it difficult to use for multiple purposes