Originally written in March, 2019. Resurrected from a private archive.
Your customers aren’t on a journey. They’re not having some kind of existential experience by using your application.
Your time building a business that you then sold was potentially a journey, but it was not magical.
The definition you are co-opting is probably the forth:
passage or progress from one stage to another
the journey to success.
To understand why you shouldn’t abuse the word journey, look at the first definition:
a traveling from one place to another, usually taking a rather long time a six-day journey across the desert.
Journeys should be epic. Journeys should be imbued with meaning. Journeys should be a life experience, not a user experience.
The illustrations of workflows your customers execute using your application are not journey maps. A journey map is a thick, rolled, weathered parchment and has a wandering dotted line that terminates with a big fancy X.
I understand that your work is one of the, if not the primary, sources of meaning in your life. I understand that you would like to, therefore, inculcate that work with meaningful words. But avoid this as you would a sneezing stranger on the subway or the allure of social media stardom. No good will come of it.
I know that you want to communicate the gravitas of your research and designs. But they don’t have gravity, they have practicality. They’re not Thor’s hammer, they’re just a regular hammer. You can still build pretty great houses with them. In fact, they’re well suited to the task, despite their lack of ornamentation.