Developing Tools for Customer Experience Mapping

In designing customer experiences, there are a number of methodologies that can be followed.

 

Recently we’ve been working on a lot of customer experience and user experience workshops (yes, they are different). We’ve pulled together the resources and frameworks we use to share with you.

Probably the most common is that great 3M innovation – the post-it note.

 

 

 

Everyone has a photograph of the wall after a good day’s worth of prototyping. The challenge, however, is how to keep the end user’s needs and emotions in mind

The empathy mapping tool from Dave Gray is a particularly useful tool to understand needs and emotional states.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The empathy mapping tool takes a moment in the customer experience. It asks participants in the workshop to look at the world from the user’s point of view.

To actively consider their feelings and actions. To understand how the responses in the customer experience shift their emotional states and help or hinder.

In the process of working through the exercise, teams develop an understanding of the underlying “why” and also identify opportunities to innovate.

But we think something is missing. The more workshops we’ve run, the more we’ve come to realise that there is a natural grammar to the customer experience mapping process.

In every customer experience, there are some well-defined stages that the consumer goes through. The start of the journey, research, achievement, success or failure.

To make this process more efficient, and fun, we’re thinking about creating a toolkit that supports facilitation.

Specially, we’re creating a series of easy to post tokens that help brainstorming in sessions.

Just imagine being able to throw up a magnet on a magnetic wall.

Then grab some white board pens and markup the steps the user is taking through the key moments.

Then it’s a simple matter of using the trusty post-it note to markup opportunities for innovation.

We’re also looking for ways to better understand feelings at each stage in the journey.

Using the emotional pinwheel it is possible to model all the different likely emotions a person may experience through their journey.

Let’s mobilise the pinwheel so when you shake it it gives you an emotion to work with. Let’s really focus on bringing interactivity to these workshops and start putting together solutions which have impact.

 

 

Let us know if you’re interested in using these tools and we’ll go ahead and get them made.

Resources for marketers and practitioners:

• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers (this book lives on the kindle app);
• The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty.