When I started sharing insights about the what, why, and how of using experience maps to make sense of cross-channel journeys a year and a half ago, I was completely (and pleasantly) surprised by the positive response. Since then, we've worked on many projects that made use of experience maps, I've talked about them at conferences, and my colleague Patrick Quattlebaum and I have taught hundreds of people around the world about the value and process of experience mapping (including last year at UX Week). All of this has helped further evolve what we know and share about using experience maps effectively in organizations. Sharing the process and methodology at conferences has been a great source for hearing about how people are using them for their own needs—and pushing their use in ways I hadn't even imagined.
We've been asked a lot of late “where are you teaching it next?”
Well, how about in Austin and San Francisco next month? I'll be leading our workshop on Experience Mapping in our Austin studio on Thursday, June 6th, and Patrick will lead it in our San Francisco studio on Saturday, June 15th. We're keeping the groups small (under 30) and packing a lot of value into eight hours of instruction and exercises.
I’m on my way back to San Francisco from Savannah, Georgia where I was facilitating a workshop at EPIC 2012. I can’t help but still feel the excitement from this past weekend. The attendees brought diverse expertise, were continually engaged, and left me with new perspective.
EPIC Conference continues to promote ethnography and the study of human behavior applied to the business context. However, after almost a decade, the program has started to focus more in depth on the value of design research (shown by Savannah College of Art and Design hosting the conference this year). While integrating concepts of design research into a research conference makes sense, there were two major questions I wanted to explore with this audience: 1) how to translate research findings into actionable design and 2) how to introduce co-research to facilitate better co-creation. While these seem like mutually independent topics, both involve understanding the most effective tools and activities for a specific audience in order to capture, translate, and act upon findings.
Last week at UX Week 2012, Chris Risdon and I had a blast teaching a workshop not once, but twice on the art and science of experience mapping. The practice of experience mapping is not new, but there has been a bit of a buzz in the community of late on how to create and use them (thanks in part to Chris' excellent blog post of the topic and his subsequent one-manroad show).
At Adaptive Path, we have been mapping experiences and customer journeys for some time, so a workshop on the topic was well overdue. Participants learned the basics of mapping by working in teams to create and refine experience maps of hotel guests. Key concepts that participants walked away from the session with included:
Experience maps visualize the intangible stories of the experience customers have with a product or service. When done well, they communicate what is really happening outside of the walls of an organization and incite action by the stakeholders who have the responsibility to exceed the expectations of their customers.
Rigor must be applied when gathering inputs to ensure your experience map will be based on truth. This means qualitative research backed with quantitative research.
The core building blocks of an experience map are what the customer is thinking, feeling, and doing as she interacts with touchpoints across time and place. Again, qualitative research is needed to uncover this kind of data.
Experience maps can take on many different forms to express the customer’s journey and communicate key opportunities to better meet her needs. Our advice: choose one building block, such as feeling or doing, to drive the narrative and tell an impactful story.
As an outside-in view of the customer’s experience, experience maps challenge the traditional approach to delivering products and services via siloed functions. When possible, involve stakeholders from different functions to gather inputs and map collaboratively.
Once completed and socialized, experience maps can help an organization strategically plan to improve, replace, or create new touchpoints that, one at a time or all together, better meet the needs of customers.
In other words, we stuffed a ton of content and exercises into just a half-day workshop. Yet, participants in both sessions did a great job of going from research to sticky notes to illustrated maps in just under four hours. Each team was challenged to incorporate storytelling and narrative into their maps, and the variety of approaches taken certainly illustrates the elasticity of method.
UX Intensive, our popular, globe-trotting, four-day workshop series is all new this year! Designed as a skills builder for practitioners, UX Intensive delivers the best tools and learnings from our practice in a workshop setting. It's taught by senior Adaptive Path staff and offers the opportunity to learn new techniques, meet other practitioners and have a little fun in the evenings. The workshop is now in its fifth successful year and it's still going strong, with attendees coming from leading companies all over the world.
We have been working on a completely revamped UX Intensive course over the last few months. We've gone over the material with a fine tooth-comb, listened to attendee feedback and have developed a course focused on where the practice of user experience is headed. Each day's content has been completely overhauled, and we're particularly excited about the addition of a day on service design. We've been moving in that direction for a while now, with Jamin heavily involved in the Service Design Network and Brandon exploring what he calls the Service Anticipation Gap in a series of blog posts. We're super excited to bring you what we're doing and learning in this area, as well as the latest in strategy, research and interaction design.
We’re sticking to the four-day format, each day building on the next. Here’s how the days break down…
In two weeks, ten of the most fun, charismatic, world-changing entrepreneurs from Japan are coming to San Francisco for a week of design thinking, experiential learning, and deep dive brainstorming on topics intersecting innovation, creativity, and Japanese culture. This is The Tofu Project.
We're super excited to host this group. In fact, one of these visiting entrepreneurs, Japanese inventor and performance artist Novmichi Tosa, will do a workshop—the first-ever Nonsense Toy Workshop and you're invited. Well, 40 of you are. Space is limited!
You're about halfway through your project. You've done everything right. The project plan is going swimmingly and you've entered the design phase. Fast forward a few weeks later and you are slowly losing interest. Creativity is ebbing. Your attention span starts to wane. The wind has left your sails—you've hit the project doldrums.
I've worked on some looooong projects, some with one- or two-year long cycles. Anyone who's worked on an operating system would probably put the smackdown on my definition of long, but you can hit the wall on any project, no matter how much time it spans. For me, there is always one surefire method for breaking through—Do more work. Yes, more. Just not on this project. Take on something totally new and unrelated.
How better to learn about design than by chucking a raw egg over a balcony? Besides being a highly exhilarating release (Weeeee! SPLAT!), it also turns out to be a great hands-on way to teach basic design principles to kids. My Adaptive Path mate Ljuba Miljkovic and I just tried it out with two fantastic 12 year-olds (Thanks, ladies!), and it went something like this…
As a User Experience practitioner, you learn about UX in school (even if it wasn't called UX), you improve your skills in practice by being part of project teams, and you update your knowledge at a UX conference or training. But what about the people around you? Where do Project Managers, Product Managers, Developers, Sales, QA, Strategists, and Managers learn about User Experience?
In the past six months, I've been leading design teams of twenty, sometimes thirty people. Some of these people are designers, but the majority are managers, business strategists, front-line workers, and P&L owners. Most of my team members come from my client's organization. Together we have been solving big wonky strategy and design problems that matter deeply to how our client will continue to support and grow relationships with their customers in the future.
Did you hear the good news? Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), composer, multimedia artist and writer, is our keynote speaker at this year's UX Week, August 23-26th (our conference for user experience folk, for those of you not in the know). This is a big deal, people. He's an interesting guy, who will twist your brain in all kinds of intellectual/creative ways you didn't know your brain could bend. Like brain yoga. He'll be talking about his book, Sound Unbound, a collection of thirty-six essays from musicians, writers and artists like Brian Eno, Moby, Chuck D, and Bruce Sterling. These are reports from the front lines on the role of sound and digital media in an information-based society.
If that's not enough to get your brain bending, I have more: Paul describes music as a social network that is “not about individual creativity but a collective process.” We're also big proponents of collaboration at Adaptive Path, so when the opportunity to interview him came across my path, I decided to open up the interview process to our broader community. I put a call out on our blog for questions and sent a handful of them Paul's way. This is where we landed:
