Reﬂection – Visualization

Selection

The best tool I have found for getting to shared vision and agreement on the problem space and  scope is Visualization. This has helped me with diverse groups with different backgrounds and  experience to better understand the problems and challenges before trying to deﬁne a solution. I  work for a large software and hardware company in identifying technology innovations for  customers and employees interacting for sales and customer service experiences. I have used  the technique of starting with a general description and then working with the group to further  reﬁne the existing journey.

Challenge

In the particular example I will describe below we were creating a virtual experience for  something that we currently delivered within our retail store. This experience was for helping  customers set up and get familiar with their new hardware purchase. The experience we were  trying to create was to take the same great experience that customers loved within our store but  allow them to have the experience in the comfort of their home or ofﬁce.

Application

I started the process by creating a quick journey map of the the high-level current store  experience to ground the group of the start and end of the experience we are addressing. I drew  a simple journey map on the board with points of each step in the journey. I was very careful to  keep it generic and not imply anything about customer feelings or opinions about the current  experience. I added pictures from our retail stores of customer going through the experience.  This brought the experience to life for the group. This is similar to what “The Good Kitchen”  used to help them understand what the employees and elderly were going through not just from  a functional perspective but also an emotional perspective.

At my company, creating an emotional experience is critical to the overall customer experience  and journey mapping helps with that process. It allows for us to take the base high-level  experience and continue to drill down with details so that everyone can share their perspective.

We took the initial journey map and I asked questions about each step to further reﬁne exactly  what both the customers and employees were doing at each step and what emotions they were  experiencing as they went through the journey. This was helpful to allow everyone to participate  and have their feedback heard. I use sticky notes for this purpose so that we could later  categorize them into logical groups as described by Angela Meyer in the course video.

Insights & Approach

One difference from “The Good Kitchen” example is that we do not normally conduct customer  focus groups or talk to customers. We depend on our vision of the experience and creating what  we want the experience to be and then sharing that with the world. It has proven to be a  successful approach. I have used ethnographic research at two previous companies and found  that to be useful when applied to better understand the problem. At a previous software  company we called them “follow-me home” experiences which allowed us to see the customer

use our products in their home or ofﬁce and see ﬁrst hand the challenges they had in using the  products and have a dialogue about them.

That was one of the insights from this approach was that while we could use the gathered  customer feedback and our opinions about the experience, we really only had a partial picture  as we did not talk to customers. The other insight was about gathering input from a diverse  group of employees. We were all to have many different internal perspectives on the journey  which helped us form a fuller picture of the current experience to use as a baseline as we  moved through the design thinking process. I found this to be a successful approach and  everyone walked away from that session with a very good understanding of the current  experiences from several perspectives not just functional but emotional as well. I have used this  approach for several other projects and found it to be a great tool for getting people on the same  page.

