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EXPERIENCE FLOW

EXPERIENCES SHOULD FLOW

Plato once wrote, “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.”

We’ve covered grids, personas, scenarios, storyboards, customer journey maps, and experience maps, and now it’s time to explore a method for bringing them all together, which is to create what’s called an experience flow. Different maps work for different people and disciplines. Whichever method you use, you’ll get closer to your customer than you are today.

Experience flows typically outline customer steps before, during, and after transactions. At the same time, they also consider scenarios, emotions, and actions. They help businesses optimize current experiences and identify opportunities for designing new and improved ones. An experience flow seamlessly brings together all of the experiences throughout the infinity loop of customer engagement.

A customer journey map got us to walk in our customer’s shoes. An experience map allowed us to home in on the touch-points at which the experience needs improvement or innovation.

Now, an experience flow distills all of the qualitative and quantitative information you have collected about the customer experience into a large poster. This is a device that brings the entire company together to create alignment about the vision and the standard for experiences, accounting for every step, stage, goal, context, and aspiration.

Over the past several years, I’ve had the good fortune to spend quite a bit of time in Amsterdam, and on one visit I met Thomas Marzano, global head of Brand Communication Design at Philips Design. He and the team at Philips are pioneers of experience flows, and our time together inspired this chapter.

Experience flows as a process and as a framework make you account for all of these as you consider BX + UX + CX. Philips describes them as a way of mapping all of the customer’s experiences “from expectation, to first impression, then through discovery, usage, and finally to memory.”

Essentially, an experience flow is a mashup of a storyboard, a sophisticated customer journey map, and an experience map. The process of making them incorporates all of the methods we’ve discussed and adds some new tools and steps.

Philips Design creative director Remco Timmer speaks to how effective the method is: “Suddenly everyone starts to think from the end-user perspective, thinking beyond our current propositions and identifying solutions that really matter.”¹ I’ve found that they help to align marketing, design, product development, customer care, social media, IT, and strategy around all aspects of experience architecture, from planning to execution.

Before describing the method for creating them, let’s talk about an example from Philips’s work.

One way in which Philips used the flow process was in working with Broward Health Medical Center, helping to identify and clearly illustrate both the clinical and emotional needs of patients, nurses, and doctors in a cancer center in Florida over the course of a typical day. The Philips Healthcare Design Consultancy team members were then able to create an environment better suited to those needs.

As Giang Vu, creative director at Philips Healthcare Design, explains:

We found experience issues and major bottle-necks in several areas of the center, such as where patients were waiting in corridors for treatment and where staff did not have direct visual observation on key treatment areas. We created numerous experience benefits in the new design including a social infusion café for patients and a new centralized care station for staff to improve communication among themselves, to help improve the delivery of care to their patients.

Chief operating officer of Broward Health, Natassia Orr, shared her reaction about the end result: “I was blown away by the new design. Our patients are going to be infinitely happier with the service that they’re provided.”

Philips has learned that creating a successful flow requires a multidisciplinary team, including sales and marketing specialists, data scientists, people researchers, and product designers, as well as thought leaders in an area that might inspire the innovation teams. Philips found that the process helps all those on a team to open their minds to possibilities for innovation, preventing them from getting stuck in a “we can’t do that, that’s not how we’ve done it before, this will never work, it’s too expensive, what’s the ROI?” mentality.

HOW TO DESIGN EXPERIENCE FLOWS

PHASE 1: SCOPE

A: FRAME THE PROJECT

Clearly define who the target group of customers is, and also describe the business objectives, the challenges, the timing, the core team, and the deliverables.

Pinpoint the purpose of creating the flow. Philips describes how the project might be framed for a particular flow this way:

The scope may range from something as broad as: “To explore how young professional women in Germany cook at home,” to something about a particular type of product, such as: “To explore how to make a blender easier to clean.”

Create the experience framework. This is a rough initial mapping of the current nature of the experience based on your existing knowledge, for which you could use one of the customer mapping styles.

B: Gather User Insights

Research customer psychographics, demographics, preferences, expectations, and aspirations. Methods to use include:

Conducting formal and informal interviews: These help to illuminate more fully people’s true motivations and aspirations, as there is often a difference between what participants in a survey will say and what they actually think and feel.

Homework booklets or diaries: These help persuade participants to open up, giving a more detailed understanding about their personal history, their perception about themselves, and specific topics.

Shadowing and observation: As discussed earlier, close observation of people going about their daily lives can uncover important behaviors and needs you would not think to ask about.

Generative sessions: These are workshops of groups of people in which the issues being researched are discussed, exposing commonalities between people that would never surface during a one-to-one interview.

Online community research: This ongoing dialogue with individuals and communities allows teams to better understand dynamics that cannot be captured face-to-face.

PHASE 2: CREATE THE FLOW

A: MAP THE EXPERIENCE

This is where team members review all of the research and identify patterns and insights about customer needs and desires, with the purpose being to identify opportunities for improving experiences and creating whole new ones.

B: TOOLS DEEPEN UNDERSTANDING

Issue cards: Here, team members extract all key issues that they’ve made note of and write them down onto issue cards, one issue per card. For example, a card might read, “I don’t have enough time to cook,” or “I’m worried that my diet isn’t healthy enough.” These help the team to discuss them individually.

Personas: The team uses the personas to think through solutions to the customer issues.

Stakeholder maps: This simple map shows how different types of people involved in an experience interact with one another in the setting of the experience. Philips cites the example of patients, their families, doctors, and nurses in a hospital setting. This is placed next to the flow.

PHASE 3: EXPLORE SOLUTIONS

Host an Opportunity Workshop. Gather people from the different departments together to discuss the issues on the cards and search for ways to address them.

Host an Ideation Workshop. Here, you invite people from outside the company and industry to meet with the team and examine each opportunity to surface even more ideas. The team records all of the ideas from these sessions and then creates scenarios and storyboards to envision how they would work in real life.

Get feedback. The next step is to test ideas with real people. The purpose is to get input fast to allow the team to iterate and improve on the solutions.

Illustrate the experience flow. At this point, the team is able to visualize full experience around the new solution or solutions. You put the persona at the center and all describe all experiences.

EXPERIENCE FLOWS VISUALIZED

Typically, Philips uses a landscape format to visualize a flow, comprised of several sections, including:

Personas and typical triggers

Phases

Events/touch-points

Statistics

Needs

Visualizations generally fall into one of these three templates:

1. Consumer decision journeys (CJDs)

2. Activity cycles

3. Life-stage transitions

Here, we’ll focus only on CDJs as they tie in so well to the overall theme of the book and the examples used thus far.

Thomas Marzano provided a rich example of a CDJ flow for Philips’s Kitchen Appliance line of business in Germany. It’s broken out into Philips and non-Philips elements that traverse the customer experience. The flow represents the phases, questions, and touch-points involved in finding, buying, and owning a product. This form of flow is typically used for:

Marketing innovation

Shaping brand experiences

Aligning messages

Activity cycles depict the steps and issues in using a product. For example, one might include the repair and disposal of products. They are most often used for:

Product improvements

SP (unique selling point) definition

Line extensions

Life-stage transitions portray longer periods in customer experience around a unifying theme, such as having children or getting older. They are most often used for:

Managing portfolios

Identifying new opportunities to move to the next phase

TRIGGER EVENTS

Events that trigger a customer.

TRIGGER TO CONNECT

Searching for a solution to a need.

INFORM TO EDUCATE

Researching the available options to find out whether they’re useful for you and worth spending money on.

Interact to Convince

Making your choice—shopping and comparisons.

Convince to Reassure

The initial use of the machine, discovering what it can do and trying it out.

Encourage to Purchase

Finding the cheapest, most reliable, and quickest way to get my product.

Engage to Delight

Recommending the product and sharing the experience with others.

Motivate to Promote

Reconnecting the product and sharing the experience with others.

CONNECTING BRAND PROMISE TO EXPERIENCES

That moment when your brand promise was kept . . .

Philips proposes a question to all brands about their experience architecture efforts. This is where brand architecture meets experience architecture.

If . . .

“We are caring, innovative, and impactful,”

Then . . .

“How can we get people to think and feel that way about our brand?”

Philips’ answer for its own experience is:

It’s the way you experience its products and services.

It’s the way you find the company and interact with them in every touch-point.

It’s the way you find and interact with Philips online.

It’s the way the company speaks to you in advertising and commercials.

It’s all the little things that shape how you think and feel about Philips.

That’s the brand.

But if . . .

All of those micro-experiences shape the feeling people have of a brand and we want to create a distinct experience and be ruthlessly consistent about it at every touch-point . . .

Then . . .

What should they all have in common?

X.

The experience starts with the core of your brand—what it means, what it stands for—and then evolves from a commitment to following through on the brand promise in all of the micro-moments of the customer’s journey. After all, if you can’t keep your promise in every step of the relationship, then what kind of relationship do you have?

Philips reminds us that a brand promise is a commitment to customers, consumers, and stakeholders. The company defines its own brand promise as to “deliver innovation that matters to you, ” and it defines its core identity, the company it wants to be, as:

Caring

Innovative

Impactful

The company advises that in creating a flow, distill your brand promise and your core identity to be written up in a manifesto, making them fully expressed and clear to everyone at the company.

Phillips has portrayed how the values articulated in your manifesto should feed into the creation of the experiences you offer at every moment of truth with this concise graphic, which should serve as a helpful guide for you as you launch into your own experience architecture journey.

Advertising = Trigger to connect

ZMOT: Website = Inform to educate (and wherever consumers go for information)

Apps = Interact to convince (in addition to shared experiences and information in non-Philips properties)

FMOT: Retail = Encourage to purchase

Packaging = Convince to reassure

SMOT: Product = Engage to delight

UMOT: Customer Care = Motivate to promote

I find experience flows to be a beautiful medley of all of the mapping processes we’ve reviewed thus far. Again, use one, or several elements of each.

Whatever you do . . . do something.

¹ www.design.philips.com/sites/philipsdesign/about/design/aboutus/Experience-Flows.page.