REFLECTION – JOURNEY MAPPING AND VISUALIZATION

Challenge & Selection

Being in the technical aspect of a product development, the stakeholder management is always a  typical challenge .With changing requirements and defining possible solutions to the user centric  issues, the tool I used for better ideation were Visualization and Journey Mapping. I used customer  journey map approach with the company’s 1000 developers for rolling out a new product which  caters their need of reduced development and deployment cycle. I distributed the developers in sets  and various mapping session were setup to rally around the customer journey map for better  ideation and prototyping. Visualization approach was taken for a better analysis of current situation  and a perfect statistical analysis of future product.

Application

Innovation works best when it does not require customers to change their behaviours in significant  ways. Journey mapping takes us on an empathic journey through our customer’s current experience.  I start the process by the customer journey approach for better understanding of the end user  current experience.

I will take a group of 1000 developers categorised in set of 5 according to their job profiles and  spend some time understanding their experiences till date. I will conduct few pilot interviews and  mapping sessions walking systematically through the user’s journey to be sure that we are  accurately capturing the steps and getting the kind of data we need. Next, we’ll create a proto- persona of the developers which are our primary users. For this activity, I will invite at least 5 key  members from each set for the proto-persona. This will enable the team to visualize the user’s facts,  behaviours, problems and goals of our representative user. We’ll begin by conducting pilot  interviews and mapping sessions with questions like 1)what are the issues they have 2) what change  do they wish 3) how committed they are 4)what they will do to change the experiences etc.

Next I will map the journey of each persona. Taken together, these maps should reveal a set of  shared low points. These are the “pain points” that represent the most valuable innovation  opportunities for that customer type and will be our starting point as we move forward .Post this  we’ll have our interviewers summarize what they learned during each interview on a single  template. Then we’ll rip a sheet of flip chart down the middle and write the name of each interview  across the top. As a team, we’ll summarize the key notions as bullets on the flip chart. We’ll array all  of these on a wall, lined up next to each other so that we can begin to look for themes of our new  product. We will take these themes and will try to identify the number of dimensions that I believe  to be useful in understanding the differences in the data we have gathered.

Visualization, often coined as statistical tool will be used throughout the journey mapping life cycle  to reduce the possibility of unmatched mental models and visualize the ideas. I’ll keep it simple  using colour in a meaningful way, clip arts, white board designs and power point presentations.  During the pilot interviews we would have given the customers a better visual approach of our  hypothesis to their current problems. At the end of the mapping journey, we’ll visualize a user- centric approach having business needs incorporated as well.

Insights & Approaches

What I got clued up from conducting this exercise with the groups is that the ethnographic approach  of tracing the customer’s experiences with special attention to their emotional highs and lows and  the meaning that these experiences hold can significantly reduce the low points. Conducting pilot  interviews in an environment that the customers are comfortable rather than handing them with  surveys offer a systematic way to uncover those hidden needs which causes changing requirements.  Customer mapping accompanied with visualization practice gives a unified strong step towards a less  errand product.

The reason for mapping customers’ experiences is captured in Harvard marketing professor  Theodore Levitt’s famous observation, “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a  quarter-inch hole! It’s not about the product we sell; it’s about the value that we create in customers’  lives”.   In the product and technology community that I am a part of, I discovered the power of Journey  Mapping and Visualization combo. Going forward, my journey towards a great product will always  start with Journey Mapping accompanied by Visualization -“mother of all design tools”.

