Milestones (activities)

Most of my user experience maps depict possible paths the user might take to fulfill the opportunity. Milestones of my maps group all events which lead to a common goal. They are more than just simple aggregators. Every achievement the user has on the road to reach the opportunity is a milestone. 

Some authors tried to coin the term activities, but I prefer to call them milestones. Most of the time, the card used to represent them is the same width as the common user story card, for the simple fact that few people carry around oversized sticky notes for this purpose. Events in a milestone usually share the thought processes of the user. For example, checkout is an obvious milestone for a webshop. When they reach this milestone, the user's mindset changes, and they will start to react to triggers differently. 

Milestones are usually named after the common goal the events share. Our webshop's user story map could start with the planning milestone, but there is nothing to develop there at the moment. It's certainly part of the whole experience, but unlike most other milestones, planning happens outside of the webshop. It contains things such as searching something in Google, finding an item sold in our shop on Facebook, or reading an article about our site (obviously, we wish to get into mainstream media). It's mainly a thought process when you plan to buy something, and ideally (for our site) this could conclude in reaching our site.

Instead, we will start with the research milestone. This milestone contains the events happening when the user reaches our site, but they don't immediately start exploring what's available. Instead, they would want to make sure that it's safe to buy from here, understand what grocery surplus is, and might have other questions related to the site or buying here. Those can lead to many different user stories. One user story in this milestone could be I want to live-chat with someone to get answers to my questions.