Experience impact mapping

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What it is: a view of the changes you’re making, and what that means around the flow in scope.

When to use it:

• When you want to know who else to inform, to collaborate with

• As a way to catch edge cases and scenarios that might live on the fringe of stakeholder awareness

• As a way to build healthy cross-team roadmaps and backlogs

How to use it:

• Map out a generic user flow that captures your project’s scope

• Lay out your project’s channel(s) and the actions a user takes

• As you go through your flow, think about what other touchpoints might happen at this same moment - and how do they relate.

• Can a user take the same action in different ways (parity)? If the user takes the action in your project’s scope, is there something that you’d expect to change elsewhere (consequence)? In order for a moment to be successful, does something else have to happen (dependency)?

As in all things maps and stickies - the point here is not to lose yourself in the weeds. The key success factor for this template is that it helps you realize opportunities that might have been taken for granted, or catch relations between silos that could use some bridge building.

Maps like this can become great facilitation tools when you work with back-end architects. A way to ask questions, document hypotheses, and tie your storyboards, wireframes, and prototyping to specific pieces of an architecture diagram.

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This works great with

• Service blueprints - as part of an intake workshop, this map is the 5,000 ft view to a service blueprint’s 10 ft view

• Cross-project views - once you have a general sense of how your project impact the user’s experience, it is easier to have “ears to the ground” and pick up on work that is meaningful

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Service blueprint

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What it is: a view of how the internal company teams and processes act together to create the experience customers, clients, and others have.

When to use it:

• Service blueprints help highlight how teams two or more degrees removed from the user action still influence the outcome

• Seeing the relationship between the workstreams can help uncover dependencies and details of a requirement that are key to success

How to use it:

• Start broad, gather all the pieces you know

• Document gaps in knowledge so we don’t forget we don’t know

• As the project progresses, or in dedicated workshops, add details and questions

• As project decisions are made, use this as a tool to identify knock on effects

This works great with

• Cross-project views - service blueprints gives you a cross-section snapshot of your flow and who is involved in making it happen. Cross-project views give you a way to catch which of those back-end processes you need to pay attention to

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Journey maps

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What it is: a view of how the humans in your experience go through life

When to use it:

• When you want to share out research insights on how the current state is or the future state could be

• As a tool during ideation to stay grounded in the needs and mental models of the humans involved

How to use it:

• You can start filling out whichever swim lanes feel you know most clearly

• Be open to adjusting what is considered a “step” or a “phase” based on what you learn about how the humans involved think about an experience - it can sometimes be different than how a team internally breaks down a process

• Gaps are ok! It gives you a clearer sense of prioritization for what to go and learn next

This works great with

• Service blueprints - service blueprints gives you a cross-section snapshot of your flow and who is involved in making it happen. Journey maps give

• Assumption maps - assumption maps put your consumer sentiment / persona / end user stories into conversation with internal business motivations

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Cross project view

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What it is: a view of your project in context with other efforts underway

When to use it:

• When you want to know who else to inform, to collaborate with

• When there is a lot of work going on and you don’t want designers to be doing overlapping work (or developers make changes that will have an unintended knock-on effect)

How to use it:

• Map out a generic user flow that captures your project’s scope

• Add projects as you come across them - current or future planned work

• Try getting a sense of how your project relates to this other work - this will let you know what type of involvement you need

This works great with

• Service blueprints - service blueprints gives you a cross-section snapshot of your flow and who is involved in making it happen. The cross-project view gives you a way to catch which of those back-end processes you need to pay attention to

• Experience impact mapping - when you want to see what projects should be underway

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