Designing Full Experiences: Design Maps
Tucked away in Tamara Adlin's and John Pruitt's book The Persona Lifecyle is a gem of a process for brainstorming about and mapping out great experiences. The process is called "Design Mapping" and builds some neat ideas from general brainstorming technique, process flow, affinity mapping, and other techniques. Parts of the process are a bit similar to Patty Seybold's Customer Scenario Map process, but Design Maps are a little looser and more organic and don't really need training if you're working with an experienced and clever team.
Here's how it works, from a chapter of the book by Tamara and co-authored by Holly Jamesen Carr. In this simple example, they take a known process (making a pot of coffee) and annotate the Steps (blue) with Comments (green), Questions (yellow), and Ideas (pink):
We used this technique to design many of the concepts in our My Sun Connection portal. In our case, since we didn't have an existing process to map, we dived in with a "desired state" flow and we slightly modified the stickies categories: Task (blue), Observation (green), Question (yellow), Issue/Note (pink).
After about 45 minutes of brainstorming, you'll have a pretty well populated wall of stickie notes. Here's a picture of Jennifer, me, and Marilyn who worked together brainstorming the flow of downloading a product and having it get provisioned into your portal. (Margaret did a lot of the brainstorming, too, but I think she is the one who took the picture.)
Here's a close-up so you can see the large number of ideas generated in a short time.
When you're done, you have a nice set of notes that you can turn into a flow for the project (the sparse area at the right represents some followup steps that happen over time):
And a few magic steps later, we had designed, engineered, and launched the portal:
By the way, we're still working on a few of the ideas that we came up with during that afternoon Design Maps session many months ago.
- Martin Hardee
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