<aside> ⭐ A UX roadmap is a high-level, living artifact that prioritizes and communicates a UX team’s future work and problems to solve.
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Traditional roadmaps originated in the early 1900s as motorist aids. The first roadmaps listed instructions: how to get from one town to another, where to find gasoline, and where to find a repair shop. Today, many of us use roadmaps routinely, even though nowadays they’ve become digital.
In 1987, Motorola introduced the term “technology-roadmap process” — a process to produce and document product strategies that met market needs. In the early 1990s, road mapping grew in popularity among hardware and software companies as a way to plan and communicate upcoming work. Since, roadmaps have fallen in and out of popularity. Regardless, the same need has persisted — a way to align, prioritize, and communicate product strategy and future work, to both team members and stakeholders.
If you are taking your company’s feature wishlist and applying it to a specific timeline in a tidy Excel spreadsheet, you’re doing it wrong. A UX roadmap is not a release plan, it is a strategic document. It should act as a single source of truth amongst designers, researchers, developers, and stakeholders to define, organize, prioritize, and then communicate future work towards your UX team’s vision.
An example of a UX Roadmap that outlines future UX work for the customer portal (the logged-in experience) on nngroup.com
Roadmaps can take several tangible forms: organized lists, spreadsheets, slide decks, high-fidelity visualizations, sticky-note walls, or even a mix of media.
Thus, not all roadmaps look alike. However, regardless of visual appearance, all UX roadmaps generally share the same fundamental structure — they are organized by context (scope and time) and theme. Think of this structure as the scaffolding for your roadmap: