January 9, 2018

The larger the business, the more likely it is that departments work independent of one another, even when their goals are aligned. When we engage with our peers and clients across department silos in strategic conversations, it can be a challenge to get everyone on the same page, to say the least.

Experience maps are visualizations, and diagrams, that serve as artifacts of the customer experience. They are based on research, but don’t need to be exhaustively researched or slickly produced. Visualizing the customer experience in this way shines a light on problems that teams across silos can immediately recognize and find alignment around.

“The reality is, very often, we don’t know, companies don’t know, what their customers actually go through,” explains Jim Kalbach. “I see that time and time again and that’s part of the activity of mapping, is to shine a spotlight on that, to say, “Well, here is the real experience, slowed down, frozen in time, so we can diagnose that and actually step through it step–by–step.”

Creating experience maps takes some care and consideration, because your map can’t contain all of the information that you’ve uncovered in your research, lest you want to overwhelm everyone. It needs to offer relevant, pointed, organized information about an experience. While experience maps don’t contain answers, explains Jim, they do provide an opportunity for deep engagement that helps teams identify strategic solutions.

Join Jim at the 2018 UX Immersion: Interactions Conference as he explains how teams can Utilize Mapping to Gain Stakeholder Alignment, and learn the many ways you can approach experience mapping to communicate the customer experience.