Smaply Reviews

Summary: Overall, I like using Smaply, I think it is a great way to create detailed journey maps. But when it comes to delivering this to client, a more tech friendly, clickable overview would be much better. It is quite hard to read the poster overview, we would be very happy if this can further developed.

Positive: It is very easy to find your way in Smaply. Every button is explained, and you can easily create a journey. It also has a lot of features to support the journey and can be connected with different programs. Useful to compare two different journeys too.

Negative: I find the export options limited. The only way you can see the whole journey is through poster, but it is too big and you can't read without zooming in. Also, you can only design the journey from one person perspective -and this creates a problem. For example, sometimes, we want to show a continuous process where employee starts to do something and HR takes it over from them. But then, the lane of HR becomes empty during employee's actions and this does not look very well in the poster overview. Lastly, two person can't work in the same map at the same time.

Summary: I'm really happy I found Smaply in my research; it happened purely by accident. As a famous painter once said "we don't make mistakes—we have happy accidents"; this was one of those! The happy accident turned out to be a great choice!

Positive: I LOVE the idea that multiple journeys can be linked or seen in one large format. Most of the journeys I've seen in other platforms are 1 (once in a while 2 at the most). They don't tell the full story that Smaply can.

Negative: Limited options for final presentation views are a bit concerning.

Summary: Overall the product is intuitive and simple to use. It really helped my team understand our customer journey from a grand scale. We had a few misunderstandings between the departments - 'what happens when' and once cleared up, the steps were easy to move around and rearrange.

Positive: I like the ease of which I was able to add steps and move certain topics around once the steps have been placed. I think the product is very clean looking once exported.

Negative: Its a little difficult to understand the timeline, not totally clear how long has passed in between steps, adding a "time-lane" doesn't stand out.

Summary: Very useful tool, I'm working with it for many years and will continue using it. Curious about the next version.

Positive: A simple tool that I can use as a hub for my journey maps. I really like that i can visualize multiple personas on one map, or see current-state and future-state journeys on the same map.

Negative: I personally don't like the current interface, however they seem to work on it and I'm curious about the new version that's to come.

Summary: Will use it again! It has enough features to make it powerful but not overwhelming by any means. The non editing sharing feature is awesome too! Totally worth it. :)

Positive: Easy to learn, web-based, simple to navigate, exporting features. The tool is super easy to set up and assign team members.

Negative: No undo (CTRL-Z) no simultaneous collaboration, and sometimes there is a lag for saving changes.

Summary: It's fantastic software -- I can't say enough about how useful, helpful, and exciting this product has been for me.

Positive: The ways I can use Smaply to shape my thinking and creative are just awesome... and so many use cases for this software! For some projects, I use it for messaging to different audiences. I'm also using it to create stories: personas=characters, journey maps=plot.

For a particular project, it's easy and interesting to build multiple personas from available data. Building over-time journeys for them is fairly straightforward too. One very nice feature: Link several journeys together.

Another feature I like is "stages." After I've analyzed the journey maps, I can relocate persona maps to fit under similar stages.

Smaply also has something unique -- and brilliant called stakeholder maps. I plan to build them for each point in personas' journey maps. Essentially, it is a who-to-whom network graph, where you can specify the nature of every link.

Wow!

Negative: - I'd like to be able to add multiple Stages. It would allow multiple ways of looking at processes.
- I can't figure out how to alter the pop-up form for "Steps," and would like to be able to change it.

Summary: This is a tool that does one thing and helps you accomplish your task well.

Good tool to be using for journey mapping even in Microsoft Teams and Zoom kind of collaboration scenario. Though i would prefer some more integration option into the meeting experience.

Positive: Simple and effective tool for creating personas, stakeholder maps and journey maps. Templates for service blueprint and communication journey are the quick start ones I use often. There are others too and you can create a journey map from scratch as well.

The export tool is powerful and the recent change is pricing brings multi format export at a competitive price point. I have often used the option for poster export and ppt. The tool also has options for xls and a4 format export.

Negative: None that I have come across in my workflow. The most I would recommend the developer to do is optimise the experience in Safari for iPadOS. Or maybe think of an app if it makes sense to their business.

A feature comparison with some other platform is not my objective.

Summary: Can't believe I've not used Smaply properly before! This has changed the way I work, my ability to articulate my work and how we engage colleagues in service design and customer journey mapping - superb product.

Positive: Intuitive to use - I felt like I was very comfortable with the product very quickly. It makes service blueprinting and journey mapping incredibly easy - the drag and drop functionality helps you to create first and administer later if you're in a rush; any product that lets you work in draft and with perfection gets my vote.

Negative: Can be temperamental in chrome when clicking on elements within fields, such as colour or font size. Sometimes I have to move my cursor around a little and click a few times to land the right spot. There is no undo function - you really have to beware if deleting anything, on purpose or accidentally.