Methods and Best Practices for User Journey Mapping within Distributed Services

Customer journey maps are useful tools for discovering user behavior and deviations from a preplanned plan. Such maps are typically drawn out by humans and, most of the time, do not reflect the actual journey, as it was experienced by a customer.
As such, they help stakeholders to optimize the experience of their customers, identify bottlenecks and open up room for general optimization. Such bottlenecks could be waiting times at a medical hospital or overloaded systems in a business environment. This becomes even more complex when applied to a distributed system, where a user can change the used system on a whim. Often
multiple different and small services, work in conjunction to create a general platform for users to work with. An easy example would be the combination of a user authentication service combined with a file upload service. Both services can be interacted with separately, but a user needs to authenticate before uploading a file. None of the services know each other, and the information, of how the user proceeded through the systems, is lost. This systematic literature review aims at finding current methods of customer journey mapping techniques in distributed services. With these techniques, it will become possible to discover the customer journey
of a user across a distributed system.