Why you need Experience Mapping (EM)?
Do you really need Experience Mapping (EM)? Also, what’s a better choice between User Story Mapping (USM) & (EM)?
“The cost of fixing an error after development is 100x than that of fixing it before”
- The ROI of User Experience, Dr. Susan Weinschenk.
If you think about it, it isn’t at all unusual for a product manager to spend time on research vis-à-vis the other facets / phases of the PLC. Better research obviously leads (/ ought to lead) to a better understanding of the juxtaposition of the users & the markets. And that understanding ought to convert to better flexibility in terms of coming up with alternatives that are ranked by relevance. Given those alternatives leading into a few odd approaches to the problem would then convert to a few better alternates in terms of solutioning, putting them respective teams at a better stead when it comes to building great user experiences (UX).
Another talking point here would be the cost towards changing something post rollout, which could still be pegged down as minor when compared to fiddling with / overturning the whole strategy & having to work on an entirely different problem itself given how the relevance to the market is lost. That could be a whole bunch of dollars washed down the drain.
“The [COST OF IMPLEMENTING CHANGE] as a metric ought to suffice towards enforcing teams to rethink their whole research as that could still be far better than running the product up & down the flagpole post build & rollout”
Risk avoidance >>> risk mitigation.
The cost of fixing errors post product rollout is ~100x as opposed to fixing it during or before development. You’d rather think & brainstorm ways towards eliminating bugs / errors much earlier across the initial phases of the PLC rather than wait for them to turn into huge blunders. It all comes down to maximizing the ROI & the fixing of bugs post release is a total dampener as it eats up a lot of effort & is the last thing a team / an org. would want to do, which is also why teams end up allotting a significant budget on research, leading to all of these:
A clear Problem Statement
All the possible User Personas
All interactions envisioned over the USM (User Story Mapping)
Given the behavioral understanding of the user groups, the single point of truth that’s spoken about largely across Agile teams & serves as a great tool that helps mirror the user’s needs is a USM (User Story Mapping).
As much as that serves a great deal in terms of plotting the user’s needs towards prioritizing a few problems & helping teams advance a step further in the solutioning process, there could be times when a few extra questions could crop up & that surely would go well beyond scope here.
Given the specificity of a USM, it focuses on & dives deep into what could be part of the workflow of a product, leading to a feature, detailing the manner in which the user would interact with the product towards reaching an outcome while mapping out their emotions just as much. That usually tends to serve the solutioning teams with all essential inputs so as to determine & plan those user flows well.
But what if the requirement is much bigger than that, something to do with the overall experience of the customers, the manner in which they would perceive & interact with the whole brand or a product suite as a whole across multiple touchpoints that aren’t necessarily limited to the software / the Apps?
Well! The Solution to that could well be “EXPERIENCE MAPPING”.
What is Experience Mapping (EM)?
You can think of experience mapping as a framework that lends the holistic understanding encompassing each of those interactions a user would have with a product or a brand across their entire lifetime. It won’t be wrong to think of it as a tool that makes way for many odd journey maps deep diving into the workflow of the users & depicting tasks, processes in much greater detail. The EMs tend to carry a much wider scope given how the interactions of the users have with a brand could run into years or even a whole lifetime.
So, it may not be altogether wrong to quote that experience mapping helps paint a bigger picture of CX (customer experience) when USM (user story mapping) restricts itself to some specific interactions governing the UX over a specific feature.
The comparison:
Here’s a comparison between the two, just to add more context & clear out any clout (if there still is):
Mandatory steps an EM ought to cover:
What would you need to identify towards building an experience map?
1. Lifecycle of a User
Given how it all starts with the identification a few prospects would discover your brand owing to a product that fits the bill for them & is of utmost relevance, convert to users, begin using the product & then finally decide to part ways, the whole lifecycle could be of major significance here when plotting an experience map.
2. Journey Stages
The stages the users cross all along their journeys with the brand as a whole ought to be captured. Some journeys could be simple (like say WhatsApp) where one downloads, signs-up, uses & then cancels / drops off. But there could be some other brands that have nuanced journeys split across many stages, like say an online car buying app given how the decision from discovery to purchase itself is fraught with many hurdles / complications.
3. Interactions
Each interaction the user has with the brand across those journey stages do matter & make a lot of sense to capture & depict, given that level of detailing becoming imperative for the teams to design / craft strategies towards incorporating it into their workflows, ideating towards offering the best of experiences to the users at all times.
4. Emotions
How can you provide for a user if you don’t understand what exactly they are going through? The user journeys are always fraught with tons of emotions, in fact each of those interactions they have with the brand could generate a whole P&C of emotions, capturing which becomes essential if you want to build a holistic understanding.
5. Problem Stages
One could often stare at an elaborate & enumerated list of problems when one is referring to an entire brand & the possibility of a whole product suite catering to a whole assortment of user groups typically carrying nuanced problems.
6. Solution Stages
There can’t be a product if it doesn’t solve for a problem & there can’t be a brand if that problem-solution cycle doesn’t keep repeating itself across those nuances of the user workflow.
7. Exit Conditions
Although many may stop at STEP 6, the reasons that could lead to a user dropping off a brand / a product from their regular use, this last STEP is a great way to explore & be prepared for things that could go wrong & think of ways to plug those loopholes.