Video: Human-Centered Design & Customer Experience Innovation

Posted on May 24, 2013 by John Kembel

We’ve wanted to record and share a video of our intros to CX Design and Journey Mapping for quite a while, but until now have been unsuccessful for various technical reasons. But, thanks to a professional media crew at a recent conference, we have something to share.

The background:

Our friends across the street — the Sterling-Rice Group, a wonderful strategy & innovation firm — run an annual conference on innovation here in Boulder, aptly named the Bolder Innovation Executive Forum.

This year, they asked if I could speak at their event and talk about human-centered design and customer experience innovation — an honor given the invitation-only crowd of business and academic leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents. The event was just a few weeks ago, and I had the intimidating task of opening the conference.

I used the opportunity to speak about how human-centered design can unlock innovation within and across our organizations in everything we do, and touched on what I believe are the implications for innovation leadership in today’s business climate.

You’ll notice that the talk is built around a crash course in design thinking and another crash course in CX Journey Mapping, and it weaves in two of my favorite stories from the d.school. And since these are close cousins to the very same crash courses we offer in our CX Design workshops, I wanted to share the video here.

You’ll find the two crash courses at the following video locations:

05:20 – 17:20 :: Intro to Human-Centered Design (design thinking style)
18:05 – 38:45 :: Intro to CX Journey Mapping

So grab some popcorn and have a look. I hope you find the video useful and can leverage it in multiple ways: e.g., spin up before one of our workshops, get a refresher after, introduce your teams to the material, or prepare to facilitate your own session.

Many thanks to the SRG media & productions teams for capturing, editing, and posting this, so we could share it with you!

Tabletop CX Journey Mapping Supplies List

Posted on April 22, 2013 by John Kembel

As promised, here’s the list of supplies we use for mapping with our CX Journey Mapping Tabletop format.

You’ll notice these are nearly identical to the original supplies list for our larger 4′x8′ mapping format, but smaller in scale. Our goal, as usual, is that we want the supplies to be easily sourced in an office environment — either online, or by raiding your company’s office supply closet.

Tabletop CX Journey Mapping Supplies List

Tabletop mapping template — I’ve shared our Tabletop format in previous posts, and you can download and print two versions: our pre-mixed learning scenario or a blank template
Small 2” sticky notes (technically these are 1 7/8”) — we’re currently fishing from two different brands/packs to source the complete set of colors we like to use: Post-it Cube, Ultra Colors, and OfficeMax notecube
Precision sharpies – these ultra fine-point sharpies are fine enough to write on the smaller sticky notes, but still bold enough to be legible in a collaborative setting
RYG stickers – 1/4″ round stickers work perfectly for the small sticky notes. We like Avery’s Removable Color Coding Labels, or Office Depot’s version
Paperclip and colored string — as with our larger boards, this provides a simple “line-of-focus” (as we affectionately to call it) and helps teams mark a moment that matters to work with; and we’re fans of a brightly colored twisted mason line

I should note, we also downsize the CX Design worksheets as well. Printing both the CX Strategy Design Canvas and Experience Design Worksheet on standard 8.5×11” paper (rather than 11×17”) works perfectly for the smaller scale supplies.

Whether you’re learning on our pre-mixed mapping scenario or using the blank template on your own work, the same Tabletop supplies work.

Example CX Strategy Design Canvas

Posted on April 8, 2013 by John Kembel

In a recent comment, Jennie asked if we could share an example CX Strategy Design Canvas filled out. Great question. I figured sharing an example is worth a full post.

Indeed, we do take pictures of filled out canvases after most of our CX Journey Mapping workshops. So I figured I’d share a real example of a CX Strategy Design Canvas that a team filled out, when working on our pre-mixed journey mapping scenario.

The first thing you’ll note is that our CX Strategy Design Canvas is designed to enable teams to pull specific sticky notes directly from their journey maps. This works great when teams are learning and speeds up team decisioning and filling out the worksheet. When working on your own maps, we suggest transcribing the elements so that your journey maps stay in tact as living artifacts usable across your full CX design process.

Here are a few notes about filling the canvas out (numbered inline with the annotations on the example):

The prerequisite getting started is to describe your customer persona and your company’s brand attributes (left column). This ensures that your team has clarity on whose journey you’re mapping, what part of your business/brand are they engaging in that journey, and what your brand stands for (brand promise/expectations). Detail here is important as this allows you to get beyond simply fixing problems and instead design experiences that 1) are valuable and meaningful to specific customers; and 2) express your brand promises.

The second column enables you to focus on and frame the specific problem/opportunity that you’re designing for — from both customer (needs) and business (issues) perspectives. I like to start at the top here with customer needs (goal needs & emotional needs), then identify the primary business issue that’s in the way of the business meeting those needs. This will then enable you to easily identify the key macro trends at play — creating challenges for the business as well as revealing possible approaches to leverage (like new social, mobile, and local technologies).

In the third column, be clear about what value you would expect to deliver (again to customer and business alike) if you address the identified problem/opportunity. Think of this as a precursor to a business proposal for your newly forming CX initiative. But, this goes beyond just the business case (strategic objectives + KPIs), and also includes value from the customer’s perspective (new behaviors/actions & new attitudes expected).

Once you have all this filled out, you’re ready to brainstorm how you might solve your experience specific design challenge.

If you want to innovate in customer experience (or in any field for that matter), it’s critical that you’re working on a problem worth solving. As is often said in the design field, most companies are good at solving problems, but they’re not so good at solving the right problems.” The CX Design Canvas gives you confidence that you’re working on a well-framed customer experience problem with clear line of sight to value if it’s solved.

Blank Tabletop Template for CX Journey Mapping

Posted on March 12, 2013 by John Kembel

When we refined and produced our mid-sized journey mapping “Tabletop” format with our premixed mapping scenario we also took the opportunity to create a blank journey mapping template of the same size.

Here’s what the Blank CX Journey Mapping Tabletop Template looks like:

Our goal: provide an easy-to-carry journey kit mapping for folks who, after our workshops, want to try mapping on their own businesses.

The first time we gave these blanks away was to the entrepreneurs on the unreasonable@sea voyage after our workshop with them in Singapore. Since, we’ve provided copies of these to many other folks and have started to use them ourselves on our own work. We’re finding that the blank templates are wonderfully versatile and speed up the mapping (setup) process immensely, so we wanted to share them.

The blank template is designed and sized to work with small sticky notes, but also can be filled out directly with sharpie.

Additional template design details include:

a dedicated place for persona details
an action line blocked out for 15 steps (sized to accommodate small sticky notes)
a key to mark the key journey mapping areas that we like to use — specifically denoting where onstage and backstage elements go, and where to place attitudes, needs, emotions, and KPIs

You can download pdf of the Blank CX Journey Mapping Template here.

As I mentioned when introducing our tabletop format, we work with a local architectural blueprint facility as they specialize in the 24”x36” format (rapid turnaround, reasonably priced). Find the equivalent printer in your area or give Kinko’s a try.

Please let us know how this template works for you and if you have any feedback or ideas for modifications.

Unreasonable Journey Mapping in Singapore

Posted on March 1, 2013 by John Kembel

The first time we ran and tested our new Tabletop CX Journey Mapping format was last week, at a workshop in Singapore. The event went very well and we learned a lot with the test, so I wanted to share the details.

First, a little background:

We’re in the process of rolling out our CX Design Workshop Program globally, with recent emphasis in Asia-Pacific (Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney specifically). As part of this effort, we work with local teams and run in-region “Boot Camps” — which is our term for workshops that are designed for internal team training and enablement (vs. market-facing and client-specific events).

While in Singapore, we also had the opportunity to connect with the Unreasonable@Sea folks while they were in port, as part of our ongoing collaboration with Stanford’s d.school. If you haven’t yet heard about Unreasonable@Sea, I strongly encourage you to take a look — 11 ventures, 20 mentors, 100 days, 1 ship, 13 countries, and 1 believe that entrepreneurship will change the world. Exciting.

My twin brother George Kembel (d.school’s Executive Director, and who’s on the ship helping lead the U@S program) and I had a hunch that Journey Mapping would 1) be as powerful and approachable for entrepreneurs as it is for intrapreneurs (who we tend work with in the Customer Experience world); and 2) provide a compelling way to illustrate the connection between customer-centered design and business/operations design in an actionable way.

So, we seized the opportunity to collaboratively set up and run a CX Journey Mapping Workshop for the Unreasonable entrepreneurs.

Given all the U@S activities while in port, we didn’t know exactly where we’d be able to run the event until the night before, nor precisely how many people would be able to join until the morning of. This is why we needed a flexible way to easily transport, rapidly set up, and run a workshop; and this is why we first prototyped and then further developed our new Tabletop CX Journey Mapping format.

The HUB in Singapore graciously offered to host the workshop on short-notice — they have a fantastic and flexible collaboration space downtown. And, we had over 15 people show up in the morning — a wonderful mix of Unreasonable Entrepreneurs, U@S learning partners, and even a few local business/government/design folks. We ended up running 7 tables with 2-3 per group.

Here are a few pictures from the event so you get a feel for how it came together (The Hub Singapore also posted a couple pictures on their fb page).

To wrap, I’d like to highlight a few things we learned from running the test (more on these later):

Indeed the entrepreneurs found CXJM to be a compelling and actionable way for them to see their new ventures through the eyes of their current and future customers
As hoped, the Tabletop format was incredibly easy to transport, flexible and rapid to set up, and even simple to clean up
The Tabletop format had an unexpected affordance of enabling teams to write directly onto the paper, which worked well for annotating the maps and jotting down thoughts/questions/ideas
We were able to run a complete workshop in under 2 hours (!), and we believe the key reason for this (in addition to tightening the time we allowed for each step) is that smaller 2-person teams were able to collaborate, build consensus, and make decisions more quickly than larger 5-person teams

Special thanks to U@S co-conspirators George Kembel & Daniel Epstein (fellow Coloradan, Unreasonable Institute founder, U@S CEO), The Hub in Singapore, and all the workshop participants for their collaboration and support.

New Tabletop CX Journey Mapping Format

Posted on February 26, 2013 by John Kembel

As I mentioned, we recently had a couple of short-notice workshop opportunities surface where we had little visibility into the venue or the expected number of participants.

To prepare for these events, we iterate on our mid-sized journey mapping format prototype with the hope that the smaller format would give us flexibility to adapt the setup and scale of these workshops on the fly.

Specifically, we transposed our standard “cake-mix” mapping scenario to the smaller format and downsized the supplies selection to fit. The result: a tabletop format that can be rolled up and carried in tubes for easy travel.

The ah ha came when we figured out that we could leverage standard architecture blueprint-size paper (24″x36″). As such, we could work with a local blueprinting facility, which turns out to be substantially more cost-effective that other printing options we’ve found. Moreover, blueprints are intended to be printed in large numbers and rolled up, so there’s an existing set of pack-and-carry options.

After selecting a paper size, the next most important element was the size of sticky notes, as that determined how many action steps could fit on a single map. We opted for ~2” square sticky notes (1 ⅞” exactly) as they are readily accessible, allow for 15 action steps per map, and yet are large enough to write well on with ultra fine sharpies. I’ll detail the complete list of smaller-scale supplies we selected in a separate post, but here’s a sneak peak:

We’re excited about the flexibility and potential of this new portable mapping format, so wanted to share the files so you can give it a try too. You can download pdfs of the tabletop format here (all 3 chapters of the ZoomGo mapping scenario).

Or, do as we do and send the dropbox link directly to your printer of choice. As I explained, we’ve worked with a local blueprinting company (rapid turnaround, reasonable prices) to print these, but I suspect Kinkos can help too. If you’re in the Boulder area (and by way of example), here’s who we’re working with for prints: Rocky Mountain Blueprint.

So that you can see these in action, I’ll share details on the event where we first ran and tested this format (a workshop at The Hub in Singapore) in subsequent post.

Compelling Example of Journey Mapping

Posted on February 18, 2013 by John Kembel

The journey maps pictured above are one of my favorite examples of collaborative mapping to date.

A large cross-organizational team at the University of New England in Australia gathered for a day, divided into groups, and mapped a series of adjacent student and applicant journeys (the rectangular maps shown at right).

The best part is that they didn’t stop there. A smaller team, working in parallel and continuing after the initial session, painstakingly remapped copies of these journeys onto a single, cohesive and connected student life cycle (shown at left). Incredible.

I particularly like how they chose to use the infinity-loop form of a customer lifecycle to visualize this. Not only is this form effective, it’s also visually stunning (more later about leveraging this to attract attention in your organization).

Best of all: according to the folks that we have been working with there, the work produced a lot of “low hanging fruit” — opportunities to improve the student experience that they simply hadn’t seen before when working inside-out, in their departmental silos. Moreover, the teams left aligned and motivated to act on the opportunities they discovered.

Amazing what a bias towards action produces.

PROTOTYPE: Medium-size Journey Mapping Format

Posted on February 13, 2013 by John Kembel

Building on our recent prototype of a (small) portable journey mapping worksheet, we’re working on a medium-sized format as well.

Here’s our latest prototype (props to Mike Alber for building this):

And, here’s why we’re working on it:

Our team has two opportunities in the next couple weeks to run journey mapping workshops on short notice. Unlike events past, we’ll get little-to-no visibility into what the venues will be like before hand. Moreover, it’s unclear exactly how many participants we might expect at these events.

This means we need a radically more flexible approach for setting up journey mapping activities for teams than we’ve used in the past. Our normal large-format maps (on 4′x8′ foam board) are too big and take too much time to coordinate before hand for these conditions. And, our small format (11″x17″ prototype) is too small for team work (3-4 people).

The current prototype uses mid-weight paper that’s approximately 20″x30″ and small sticky notes (just shy of 2″ square). As you can see, this setup can produce maps with about 13 action steps (half the resolution of our 8′ large format boards). Ultra fine point sharpies and a couple pieces of string (for the back stage line, and line-of-focus) round out the kit.

We figure that a stack of rolled up paper this size and a small set of supplies would make for an ultra-flexible workshop setup.

Not Lost in Translation

Posted on February 8, 2013 by John Kembel

Last week we had the unique opportunity to run a CX Design Workshop in Tokyo, teaching our approach to CX Journey Mapping.

I have traveled previously in Japan, but had yet to conduct business or directly experience the culture of work there.

Not surprisingly, as we prepared for the event, our team wondered what language and/or (business) cultural translation issues might surface — in the subject matter, in the methodology, in our normal style of discussion and discourse, in facilitation, and in group work.

It was encouraging and exciting to discover that very little adjustment or translation was required, especially for the methodology. In fact I’d say the fundamentals of the mapping approach required no translation.

Indeed, we made only 3 minor adjustments to our workshop facilitation approach to accommodate working with multiple languages (where English was the second language), and where we had a range of fluencies in the room.

Here are the three minor facilitation adjustments we made:

Teams worked in the language(s) they were most comfortable with; most teams ended up using a mix of both languages. In the pictures, you’ll see that some sticky notes went up in Japanese, some in English, some a mix. As for the CX Strategy Design Canvases and CX Design Proposals, most were written first in Japanese and then translated into English
Coaches spent a little extra time with their teams to make sure that the step-by-step mapping instructions were clear from a language translation perspective
In-region team leads were identified to 1) help the coaches translate any instructions or concepts if necessary to their team (as per above); and 2) present back to the group during the exercises (sharing, as we normally do, their team’s decisions and design proposals). And when presenting back, we had folks present first in Japanese then repeat in English

Here are some specific visual examples from the event:

I should re-emphasize the point that methodologically, there were really no translation issues. In other words, the CX Journey Mapping technique was language agnostic. Not only did everyone breeze through the activities step-by-step, the resulting group decisions and proposed experience designs were as focused and well-framed as any we’ve seen before.

Here’s why I believe this is exciting:

We have seen how CX Journey Mapping helps people from different departments within and across an organization work together in more aligned and customer-centered ways, even when each department has their own “language” and way of approaching business challenges. We’ve also seen how journey mapping integrates the perspectives and expertise from folks at all levels of an organization, bottom-up and top-down. And, based on all the workshops we’ve run, we know the CX Design fundamentals apply across different industries. Now, we’ve seen that journey mapping flexibly spans languages too, with ease.

Clearly, this is a powerful and versatile approach for global brands.

PROTOTYPE: Hacking time

Posted on January 22, 2013 by John Kembel

Previously, I discussed the benefits of blocking time and introduced my favorite visual timer for this. Here, I wanted to share a prototype we built by hacking this timer.

First, the context: At a recent workshop, we decided to rapidly re-imagine and test a new way to run a particular 60 minute session. This was a session that we normally ran as standard lecture with a little discussion. But, once the workshop was underway and we began to get to know the particular group of participants better, we figured it would be more effective and engaging to introduce the session’s topic more experientially.

Our goal: Run the session more like a crash course on the topic rather than a lecture and bring the key points to life by adding a story up front and a couple team activities.

The challenge: Though we had a hunch of how to redesign the session, we had never run through it that way before; it was a live test. I believed our greatest challenge trying the new format as a facilitation team would be managing time on the fly (especially with new activities), because we had low confidence on how long each new section would really take.

The prototype (pictured above):
My hunch was that all we needed was a simple way to visualize and track our overall time as well as our time for each sub-section. We could then rely on the team’s instincts and experience working together to land the session on time. So, we created a super-simple hack using our Time Timer and placed sticky notes directly on the timer to demarcate the expected start of each section.

The test: As a facilitation team, we rapidly did the following (starting 30 minutes before the session):

discussed and agreed to try the new approach
rapidly redesigned the session (broke the session down into sections, trimmed/assembled content, created the story and activity prototypes, and guestimated how long we thought each section would take)
built the timer prototype

The Result: Our simple timer hack worked extremely well. We kept the timer prototype in our peripheral vision during the session. As expected, it enabled us to track and collaboratively manage time as a facilitation team, calling audibles and making minor adjusting along the way.

To try next: In addition to helping manage event sessions, I could also imagine this being useful in my own daily work — breaking down and rapidly sequencing project tasks on an hourly basis — kind of like the pomodoro technique modified with a little sprint-like agility.

Designing CX

design & agile practices for customer experience innovators

Video: Human-Centered Design & Customer Experience Innovation

Tabletop CX Journey Mapping Supplies List

Example CX Strategy Design Canvas

Blank Tabletop Template for CX Journey Mapping

Unreasonable Journey Mapping in Singapore

New Tabletop CX Journey Mapping Format

Compelling Example of Journey Mapping

PROTOTYPE: Medium-size Journey Mapping Format

Not Lost in Translation

PROTOTYPE: Hacking time