Utilizing Mapping to Gain Stakeholder Alignment
Jim Kalbach · Monday, March 5 · 8:30am – 5:30pm · Salon B
Engage your internal stakeholders with compelling diagrams that visually represent users needs. Get your team seeing the experience through the eyes of the users.
Provide a seamless experience for users across all channels and touchpoints. Inform product and business strategy with real-world user insights.
Jim will unpack and go beyond the wisdom and advice he’s packed into his fantastic book, Mapping Experiences.
The Day’s Agenda
Morning
Map your users’ experience with a proven process
- Explore mapping techniques, including journey maps, service blueprints, and workflow models
- Facilitate each phase of your mapping project: initiating, investigating, illustrating, and applying
- Define your map’s point of view, scope, focus, structure, and intended use
Inform your experience map with a data-driven investigation phase
- Establish the best research strategy for collecting real-world insights
- Aggregate data through existing studies and interviews with users and internal experts
- Find patterns across your user base by analyzing your qualitative data
Afternoon
Illustrate a compelling visualization filled with your users’ data
- Discover the ins-and-outs of translating user data into illustrations
- Assemble your data in a meaningful and chronological timeline
- Integrate color, lines, shapes, and icons to communicate user behaviors and emotions
Engage stakeholders in data-driven conversations about product solutions
- Learn powerful techniques for communicating an experience map to stakeholders
- Explore how to integrate alignment diagrams into all design projects
- Put your visualization to work by brainstorming future solutions
Explore the User Journey Across All Channels
Achieve a consistent user experience across all touch points
All too often, product teams get so immersed in their own processes that they fail to understand what the users are struggling with. Alignment diagrams help teams empathize with users by powerfully communicating their experiences.
Innovate without breaking the bank
Products and services are increasingly interconnected. Ecosystems are the new competitive advantage. The winners will be determined by how well their offerings fit with each other and how well they fit into people’s lives.
Base product decisions on real-world user insights
Maps are not just made up. They are based on robust, in-depth research with real users and internal customer-facing stakeholders.
You’ll see how to:
- Adopt a proven process for mapping user experiences
- Learn interviewing techniques for gaining rich insights from users and internal experts
- Create a compelling visual to communicate behaviors and emotions
- Go from assumption-based to insights-driven maps
- Integrate mapping techniques into your team’s design process
- Communicate what you’ve learned with teams and stakeholders
Return home with new Experience Mapping techniques
Gain a better understanding of your users’ experience from end-to-end
Identify every physical and digital touch point your users experience on their journey.
Collect powerful mapping tools to visualize the user experience across all touch points
See how effective alignment diagrams are at communicating the user experience and achieving team consensus on the most important opportunities to address.
Learn facilitation techniques for communicating user insights
The ultimate goal of an Experience Map is to engage stakeholders in a conversation about future solutions. You’ll learn some of the ways to put your insights and your visualization to work.
Align your team by asking the right questions
To create a powerful experience map that effectively informs product decisions, teams must agree on five important questions: What’s the users’ point of view? What’s the scope? What’s the focus? How will you structure the user data? How will you put the map to use?
Uncover the core principles of Experience Mapping
Put your map-making hat on. We’re going to make some maps! Throughout the day, you’ll apply Jim’s fundamental principles and practice your map-making skills.
Jim Kalbach
We fell in love with Jim long before we fell in love with Jim’s book, Mapping Experiences. We first ran into him when he was leading design teams on design inside LexisNexis. Back then, we were impressed by the forward-thinking thoughtfulness he was bringing to design projects, especially around getting stakeholders and designers at the same page.
When he moved over to Citrix, he made it his mission to make design part of their corporate DNA. Now at MURAL, where he’s leading the mission to provide robust, remote tools—a hard space with difficult problems to solve. His work has been the complete embodiment of design leadership.
If all Jim did was to read his Mapping Experiences book aloud that would be enough, as it is packed with such great advice and case studies on how teams get on the same page. However, to our delight, Jim will do much more of that in his full-day workshop, guiding us through the steps for creating effective maps and beyond. We can’t wait to apply what we learn!
On Tuesday, Jim will give a featured talk, Peace is Waged with Sticky Notes: Mapping Real-World Experiences.
