Types of Users and Their Experiences

For any product or service, a variety of user experiences (good and bad) will exist, so it is important to capture experiences for different user types and usage contexts. One or more prototypical experiences can be devised to capture the range of user experiences and how they might differ along important dimensions. The key, however, is for the team to test any assumptions about the user experience, learn firsthand about user experiences, and comprehend user experiences in a deep and holistic fashion so that opportunities for improvement can be identified and explored.

The goal is not to arrive at statistical precision in order to explain/predict user experiences. Instead, the team is primarily looking for insights that help them envision and devise better solutions. “Extreme” users (e.g., novices or experts in using a product) form an important part of any user research endeavor, since they can often better reveal behaviors or needs that typical users leave unarticulated or mask as they devise ways to work around product shortcomings. Researching the experiences of nonusers can also reveal insights about product alternatives and disadvantages that the innovation team could potentially address in a product improvement. Each type of user segment or prototypical user will typically have its own experience map, reflecting significant differences among user types in their experiences.

Research on a variety of user types should be complemented with understanding various usage contexts. The user experience can differ based on social aspects of the experience (e.g., traveling alone or with the family), personal situational factors (e.g., being fatigued or in a hurry), among other factors that constitute the user's experience space (Prahalad and Rangaswamy, 2003). Observing users in context is an important activity for the team if a deep, empathic understanding of the user experience is to be achieved (Brown, 2009; Christensen et al., 2007). The variety of usage contexts can be depicted within an experience map (e.g., noting different branches the experience might take depending on a specific situation) or shown in separate maps, each of which depicts a different usage scenario.

To illustrate with the physical therapy example, different types of rural patients could include patients with acute (recovering from knee surgery) or chronic (spinal injury) conditions, older patients with slower expected recoveries, or situations where the need for physical therapy is part of a broader, complex issue (Alzheimer's). Important usage contexts that could impact the user experience might include whether the patient lives alone or with other family members who could assist with home exercises or travel. Defining users and contexts is an iterative process—as the innovation team learns more about customer experiences, it better understands key issues that drive better or worse outcomes for users. Of course, the user research is conducted in the context of the design problem (rural physical therapy), but the project team can give itself freedom to explore adjacent opportunity spaces. For example, what factors besides proximity to the city suggest a need for better in-home therapy? The team's research should challenge assumptions that might limit the team's ability to innovate for a wider set of users facing similar problems.

Methods to Understand the Total Customer Experience

Generally, a combination of methods—both qualitative and quantitative—is used to comprehensively study the experience, which extends beyond the product usage itself. User research should capture elements that show motivations for usage, need arousal, and what happens after a usage situation ends to better understand any consequences from the customer's experience with the product/service.

Observation techniques are at the heart of research efforts to gain knowledge about user experiences (Brown, 2008, 2009). Leonard and Rayport (1997), for example, discuss the “empathic design” process based on observation and ethnographic techniques. It is important to observe users in a natural usage context and capture observational data through images, audio, video, and field notes for later analysis by the team.

Even though it often provides rich and insightful information about the user experience, observation is not a magic bullet. Lead user analysis and voice-of-the-customer interviews, for example, can complement observations to reveal attitudes and opinions the customer has about the experience (e.g., Christensen et al., 2007). Reflective user journals and photo elicitation can also convey stories about the user's experience, triggering insights about what is driving positive or negative experiences (e.g., Fraser, 2012). Regardless of the method, the experience context should be noted and understood by the team as it collects the data. The number of users to research is typically determined by the team's assessment of a sufficient variety of experiences that can generate insights, with the research continuing as long as new information is being learned (and budget and time allow). The team may also have access to existing data within the company, such as customer service logs, salesperson reports, or point-of-sale data, all of which can provide essential detail to certain aspects of the experience. The combination of methods utilized should capture the behavioral (what users do), emotional (how users feel), and cognitive (what users report thinking through articulation) elements of the experience (Brown, 2009).

In the physical therapy example, observational research would be conducted through home visits to understand the patient's home environment and exercise routine, and observing therapy sessions with the PTA. Interviews of the patient, PTA, PT, and MD would reveal attitudes about the therapy regimen, areas of uncertainty or concern, and opinions about what may be helping or hindering desired therapy outcomes. A patient journal could document the type and frequency of home exercises (how well does it conform to the therapy plan?), as well as contemporaneous reflections on achievements and frustrations. In the “as is” map, we give several examples of the patient's perspective of the experience in what they do, say, and feel.

Identifying Touch Points and Key Elements of the Experience

With the variety of customer experience data in hand, the team can begin to fill in additional details about what is driving each part of the experience. Who participates in each phase of the experience (e.g., salesperson, third-party agent)? What activities by the firm and other entities define and create each part of the experience? The deep customer experience research, by definition, takes the customer's perspective. The purpose here is to fill in the background perspective of the company and other players/stakeholders that are involved in making the experience happen.

The firm's perspective in the customer experience is often portrayed as a series of touch points that detail each occasion whereby the customer interacts with the product, service, and brand components of the firm. Obviously, whenever a touch point occurs, this will necessarily be reflected as part of the customer experience. In this sense, specific interactions captured by a touch-point analysis will overlap with an experience map. However, a touch-point perspective is often incomplete because it tends to focus on customer interactions or transactions with the company, without understanding the more comprehensive customer experience. Rawson, Duncan, & Jones (2013) discuss the pitfalls of a firm trying to optimize each touch point without considering the overall customer experience.

In the physical therapy example, one important factor that defines the user's experience is the information exchanged among various individuals about the patient's progress (see the “as is” map). For example, the MD and PT communicate to devise the best therapy plan for the patient. The patient does not directly experience these communications, but the plan is conveyed to the PTA, who then administers in-clinic sessions that the patient experiences. Based on the therapy plan, the PTA also directs the patient to conduct specific in-home exercises with a certain frequency. The patient may or may not adhere to the home regimen and may incompletely, or inaccurately, communicate with the PTA about what is being done at home. The noise in such information exchange makes it difficult for the PTA to adjust and administer exercises that might be more effective for the patient, and the PT and physician consequently have difficulty knowing whether the planned therapy is being as effective as it could be for the patient. Note that some, but not all, of these information exchanges would constitute a touch point. The goal in researching drivers of the experience (details of which may be hidden from the user) is to not only understand what the customer experience is, but also to gather valuable information about how/why the experience unfolds as it does.

Synthesizing for Insights

Once the experience information is gathered, it is time to organize the raw data into a usable form. The goal is to identify key insights about the user experience that can be translated into opportunities for innovation or product improvements. Sophisticated analytical techniques for qualitative data can sometimes be used to identify patterns or categories of emergent themes. However, the team should not let analytical sophistication substitute for their involvement in synthesizing and understanding the user experience to gain insights.

Teams will engage in a series of sorting, mapping, and clustering exercises to organize the information in a usable form. Fraser (2012) and Kumar (2013), for example, summarize and depict numerous techniques that can be used. The goal of these techniques is to help the team begin to abstract from the raw data and synthesize meaningful insights. Brown (2009, p. 70) calls this a “fundamentally creative act,” related to divergent thinking, that can identify new opportunities for enhancing the user's experience. The series of activities involving data analysis and synthesis of insights is naturally an iterative process meant to generate inspiration for the team to generate new solution ideas. Numerous methods exist to aid the team in the synthesis process, but it takes practice and skill for the team to arrive at actionable insights about innovation opportunities (Brown, 2008; Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2009).

Utilizing Personas

A user persona is a composite character that encapsulates data gathered and synthesized from the user research (Fraser, 2012). Although it may be feasible or even advisable to draw a separate experience map for individual users the team has researched, the team at some point will create prototypical maps that correspond to specific user types and usage contexts deemed most relevant. These maps will depict the typical experiences of the user personas that can reflect key insights from the user research. Although seemingly analogous to customer segmentation, personas are driven by the experience data the team synthesizes into an insightful and somewhat prototypical understanding of user experiences.

Rarely will a single persona capture all the research and user insights developed by the team. There is certainly a trade-off between too many personas that would be cumbersome for the team to address with a single new solution and too few personas that might omit promising opportunities that address user needs. A rule-of-thumb might be between 3 and 10 personas to capture and frame the range of experiences and usage contexts (Kumar, 2013).

The physical therapy example could involve several personas. One might be a relatively young patient recovering from a sport injury, where a proven physical therapy regimen should lead to full recovery. Another could entail an older patient suffering from a chronic condition where physical therapy is designed to maintain certain functions as well and as long as possible, given a changing patient condition as time progresses. Each of these two personas would capture distinct user types (acute versus chronic) and usage contexts (short-term and well-defined regimen versus a longer-term flexible regimen) to cover a range of user experiences.

Creating the Map

It is critical to have a cross-disciplinary, diverse team working collaboratively to create the experience map. To begin, the team should create a timeline on which to construct the experience map. Users navigate experiences through time, and the team's perspective should match the user in this regard. The team will then work to populate the timeline with steps, or stages, of the user experience. There is no hard-and-fast number of steps that will always work best. The trade-off is one of detail and accuracy versus usability. Making an experience map too detailed with too many steps can bog the team down in minutiae, when their job is to consider the user journey in just enough detail to allow for insights and eventual improvements. Conversely, too few steps can result in a lack of insights into the user journey, which can limit the range and quality of innovative solutions that can ultimately come from the experience mapping effort. If the team wants to consider more user experience detail as they move forward in the innovation process, they can always return to the experience map and hierarchically drill down into specific steps as needed.

Once the steps are connected to the timeline, the experience map can be fleshed out by considering the surrounding environment within which the user journey takes place. During the journey, the user may interact with other people, information, physical objects, supporting services, and so on. Depending on the specifics of the experience, these considerations may drive a deeper understanding of why the current user experience is less than ideal and how it might possibly be improved.

The output of the mapping effort should be a clear, visual, accessible map and associated narrative that engages team participants as they develop it, and fosters interaction with others once it is completed. Once an initial snapshot of the experience map is developed, the team should share the map with others who may be able to provide useful feedback. The first version of the experience map is rarely a perfect and complete representation in all aspects, and iteration should be expected and even welcomed.

The experience map for our physical therapy example was previewed earlier in the “as is” map figure. For simplicity, details of the user type or persona are not shown, but the map corresponds to what might be experienced by an older patient with chronic mobility difficulties. Each of the five steps or stages depicted could be drawn in more detail to reflect the user's more specific activities in each stage.

Two key elements discussed as inputs to the experience map have been highlighted in the example. First, each stage of the experience shows important findings from the user research in terms of what users do, say, and feel for that part of the overall experience. These reflect the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional data gathered in the research. In drawing an experience map, the team will often select quotes or data that reflect critical insights about the user. Second, the map shows important information flows that are key elements of defining the user experience. Some of these flows are touch points, such as when the PTA communicates an in-home therapy plan with the patient, but other flows are not directly part of the user experience, such as a therapy evaluation the PTA sends to the PT.

Identifying Pain Points

Armed with a well-defined user experience map, augmented with important “do-say-feel” elements and key factors that help the team understand and explain how/why the experience unfolds, the team can summarize important insights. This is frequently done by identifying important pain points that users experience, reflecting gaps in the experience that a new solution should potentially address. Pain points generally reflect specific aspects of the user experience that result in reduced value or benefits to the user (or opportunities for increased value), reflecting stated or latent needs that are relatively important to solve.

Pain points can exist at different levels of granularity. A single step in the experience map can be the source of pain for the user, or a pain point may come from a group of related or connected steps that are a portion of the entire journey through the experience. The entire journey should also be considered as a whole, to examine whether user needs are ultimately satisfied.

When identifying pain points, the variety of inputs to the experience map matter. Note that pain points should not be limited to the user's physical activities in an experience (e.g., the patient has difficulty traveling to the clinic for sessions). More complete and even promising insights about the user experience will also arise in other areas. This is part of the motivation for ensuring that experience map inputs reflect not only physical behavior (what they do), but also user emotions (what they feel) and how users articulate their attitudes about the experience (what they say).

One popular method to help broaden the scope of user insights that reflect opportunities for improvement is the SPICE framework (Fraser, 2012). SPICE is an acronym for the social, physical, identity, communication, and emotional components of user needs and experiences. In our physical therapy example, many of the user concerns are not just physical. The experience map also reflects social (family's role in travel), identity (lack of self-worth due to thinking “something is wrong with me”), communication (information on doing home exercises correctly), and emotional (lack of motivation) aspects. Often, innovative solutions with real benefits to the user arise from addressing the nonphysical part of the experience.

In the physical therapy “as is” map example, three different pain points have been identified by the team. We will discuss and utilize the pain points to illustrate how a well-crafted experience map can help springboard the team to devise innovative solutions.

Reframing the Opportunity

Translating pain points into potential opportunities arises from the team's insights and by changing their perspective about the situation in different ways. This can include thinking about the experience from other stakeholders' perspectives, thinking more broadly about what is within the bounds of feasibility for a new user experience, changing perspective by questioning assumptions and standard ways of operating, and calling for order-of-magnitude improvements in performance metrics that matter to the user. This is expansive, divergent thinking.

An important method for opening up possibilities is to ask questions that often begin with “Why?” or “What if?” and relate to discovery skills such as associating and deep questioning (Dyer et al., 2009). A common phrase to begin reframing an opportunity is “How might we…?” (HMW), which is part of a series of innovative questioning to frame opportunities (Berger, 2014). HMW works best with design challenges that are ambitious, yet also achievable. Often, the original frame or scope of the team's project will change based on what was discovered from the user experience research.

For the physical therapy experience, we can frame specific opportunities for new solutions that correspond to each of the identified pain points (marked as PPx in the “as is” map). In creating the “as is” experience map, the team noted that patients often have trouble traveling to the clinic (PP1), sometimes causing missed appointments or even increased physical pain from travel. Also, the team noted considerable doubt about whether in-home exercises are being done effectively (PP3), which can compromise coordination of an effective therapy plan (PP2). At some point, the team may use information about the market context to prioritize which pain point reflects the most compelling opportunity from a business perspective (e.g., the highest profit potential). However, the team often lacks such data early in the development process, and the goal is to ideate possible solutions that can then be examined in more detail from the user, technical, and business perspectives. Opportunity statements frame the team's activities in devising new ideas that can address the pain points and improve the user's experience, as depicted in Table 4.1.

Conceptualizing a New Solution to Enhance User Value

Using the “as is” experience map as a foundation, the team now has a good sense of what the key user pain points are and has identified associated opportunities to reduce or eliminate those pain points. Ideation for new solutions can now be conducted by brainstorming and other effective techniques such as storyboarding, role-playing, storytelling, analogous thinking, and rough-cut prototyping.

Given the identified opportunities for the physical therapy example, consider a new concept developed by the team called “Tele-PT” (see Figure 4.2). This concept would allow the patient to video-connect with the PTA while doing home exercises. In-home sessions could be recorded for later viewing by the PTA, or the PTA could watch live during the exercises and offer real-time advice on how the patient could more effectively complete the exercises. Not only would the PTA now be able to help the patient with in-home exercising, but the need for the patient to have therapy sessions at the clinic would be reduced due to increased effectiveness of home exercise. The Tele-PT concept has sophisticated video and 3D imaging technology so the PTA can see important details about the home exercises.

Note how the new concept addresses the three main pain points and opportunities identified by the team. With greater confidence that in-home exercises can be effective, the PTA can reduce the number of clinic sessions, reducing patient travel. By being able to directly observe the patient's home exercise regimen (either real-time or via recorded session), the PTA can give better direction to the patient about effective exercise techniques. The increased interaction and more accurate assessment of the in-home regimen help the PTA communicate and coordinate the overall therapy plan with the PT and the physician.

With a specific concept in mind, the team can now reimagine what the user experience (again, for one or more personas) might look like. The team would draw a “to be” experience map that reflects how the user experience would be re-designed for increased benefits to the user. In the “to be” map (Figure 4.3), a major portion of the experience map is highlighted. Since the new concept is meant be used in the home and address pain points related to in-home therapy, the at-home stage of the original “as is” map is now configured as a series of experience stages with the Tele-PT concept. As illustrated, the team focuses on stages that would be required for the patient to get the most benefit from Tele-PT, including delivery and installation, user training so Tele-PT usage can be most effective, actual Tele-PT usage during home exercises with PTA interaction, and the need to make any required servicing as efficient as possible. An actual reenvisioned experience map would contain more detail than what is illustrated, and several maps may be drawn to reflect different personas and usage situations.

A “to be” experience map (see Figure 4.3) helps the team accomplish several things. First, drawing a revised experience map as new concepts are being developed helps the team stay grounded in the goal of improving the user's experience. Second, by considering how a new concept potentially changes the user experience, the team will discover important issues that the evolving new concept design may lack. For example, the team may come to realize that the Tele-PT should be usable for home exercises in various postures (sitting, standing, lying down), with direct implications for the product design. More generally, by mapping the new experience, the team can identify specific gaps or areas of concern with the new solution that should be explored and tested.

Testing and Refining the New Solution

To address any areas of concern and determine whether a proposed solution is plausible and valuable, the team must take the proposed solution to users and other critical stakeholders for testing, refinement, and evaluation. This need not be a highly formal or structured process, at least early on, nor should it be a one-time effort. Instead, user and stakeholder engagement should be done as soon as possible and iteratively as the solution takes shape.

Before engaging users, however, the team should communicate with others internally to clarify and examine the overall viability of the solution. The experience map serves as the team's user-based understanding of their value-enhancing solution, which can be shared and tested in more detail through the use of sensory techniques such as storyboards, narratives, and role-play. Along with clarification, this initial vetting of the solution builds consensus and a shared understanding of the new concept across the team and the internal organization.

At the same time that the team begins to share information about the proposed solution, they should also take time to explicitly evaluate the expectations of all significant stakeholders. A powerful way to do this is to determine what value the stakeholders receive and provide to others, as it pertains to the new solution. The stakeholder value map (Figure 4.4) allows the team to create a visual representation of the exchange of value for the set of stakeholders.

The stakeholder value map (see Figure 4.4) for our physical therapy example demonstrates how the tool can be used. The user and key stakeholders (physician, physical therapist, hospital, etc.) are connected through a number of value exchange arrows, based on how they interact with the user's “to be” experience. From any given stakeholder, the flows of tangible and/or intangible value to others are represented by outward-pointing arrows. The team needs to reach out to each stakeholder to verify that the value exchange as defined is reasonably accurate and complete and reflects an acceptable value exchange for their role in delivering the user experience.

Along with understanding the value exchange, the team must also test the proposed solution with users. It is helpful to consider external testing of the solution as a series of learning cycles. A proposed solution is rarely if ever correct and complete in its first version, and the “to be” experience map may have hidden assumptions or significant gaps that must be addressed. Learning cycles at this point in the innovation process consist of rapid experiments and good use of prototypes. The speed and ease of rapid experiments has a beneficial side effect: it fosters excitement and brings energy to the team, and keeps potential solutions alive while they get refined and improved.

The “to be” experience map notes two areas of concern to the team if the Tele-PT concept is to effectively deliver an improved user experience. User training and user acceptance issues raise a number of specific questions around which the team could devise experiments to refine the concept. For example, the team could role-play a series of exercises in different postures (standing, lying down, etc.) to test how well the Tele-PT device captures the range of exercise motions likely to be performed by patients. The team could also test training material with several types of users to see how well patients understand the Tele-PT features and usage. By conducting a variety of experiments, the team can quickly learn about any shortcomings in the new concept, take corrective action, and move the concept closer to successfully implementing a more valuable user experience.