Tools

A list of tools frequently employed by experience designers.

Journey Map

A document that shows the sequence of events experienced by a user (Stickdorn et al., 2012). Typically, these documents look something like a large comic strip, or simpler yet, a line graph where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is the user’s satisfaction level with the service. Like most things in experience design, the format is not prescribed, and it’s advantageous for designers to choose a medium that best suits the context — whether it be a video animation, a written story, a photo slideshow, or anything else. Journey maps can audit what already exists by diagnosing an existing service, or they can help us understand a new product by describing a fictional journey that doesn’t yet exist.

This map, made by Hyper Island students (@davislevine on the L and @karakane_kk on the R) tracks the emotional journey of teens going through a mentorship program with a youth education nonprofit. The client kept this poster and hung it up in their office because they wanted to do a better job of keeping user needs at the forefront of their minds.

User Interview

Experience designers rely heavily on one-on-one interviews (as opposed to focus groups or surveys) because they allow for in-depth understanding of the behaviors, needs, and motivations of an individual person.

Getting to know just four or five individuals in-depth can yield more vivid, inspiring results than shallow information on large swaths of people.

The purpose of these interviews can be less about information and more about inspiration, a necessary fuel for innovative and creative design solutions (Cooper-Wright and Wakely, 2016).

Personas

A persona is a profile of an individual used to help a design team maintain a human-centered focus (how will Stacey feel about standing in line for up to 20 minutes if we know she has two small children? How will Bob pay for this product is we know he doesn’t have a credit card?) (Walter, 2011). There is much debate about personas in the field, as some believe that fictionalizing a persona can lead design teams to gloss over important human quirks and oversimplify the problems people face, creating an idealized and unrealistic “fantasy user.” Because of this, some practitioners (myself included) prefer to use personas that are tightly or even fully based on a real life interviewee.

Prototype

A tangible reproduction or simulation of one (or several) features in a given design. The purpose of building prototypes is to run tests, collect feedback from users and other stakeholders, and incorporate that feedback into the next prototype. This ongoing cycle of building and testing successive prototypes is a great way to develop products and services that users need, understand and enjoy.

Figure 1. This is an “infinite souvenir” containing a small amount of nuclear waste. The gadget is sold by nuclear energy companies to tourists visiting Cumbria, England. (Well no, not really, but that’s what makes it diegetic).

Diegetic Prototype

A prototype that brings fiction to life in some way. Sometimes designers seek simply to provoke conversation rather than to build a product that’s ready for market. Diegetic prototypes may not be destined for real-life production, but they can create an illusion that inspires those who see it. The word “diegetic” comes from film and theater, where inert props are often produced to add detail and realism to the staged world. This is especially true in works of science fiction (Sterling, 2016).

Survey

A spoken or written form that asks a series of questions to be answered by a user. When seeking to find wider behavior patterns and phenomena, surveys can be useful. It’s good to support design decisions with a blend of qualitative and quantitative evidence.

However, surveys aren’t the best form of research, as users often do things like fib, under/over critique or fail to remember (Kitson, 2016).

Analogous Experience

An unorthodox research technique whose goal is to trigger a serendipitous “eureka moment” rather than traditional quantitative data. Many of history’s cleverest inventions have happened in the moments when a person switches contexts (say, from the physics lab to the hiking trail) and was inspired by a surprising analogy (Stanford University D.School, 2014). Experience designers studying hospital room stress, may try to precipitate such a surprise by embedding themselves with a NASCAR pit crew, or a team studying anaesthesiology may go for a scuba lesson (Bennet, 2012).

Stakeholder Workshop

A session bringing together various individuals involved in a product or service, especially those who might not usually interact. Gathering people from IT, design, operations, customer service, finance and the executive board all in one room with an equal invitation to speak up and contribute can lead to atypical conversation, unforeseen insights and unblocking of bureaucratic obstacles.

Figure 2. A co-creation session between a Hyper Island student team (@mayrakapteyn on the upper right) and high school students.

Co-creation Session

A facilitated workshop where experience designers and users of a product come together to create ideas and/or prototypes together.

Experience designers know that they ought to design *with* and not *for* the populations they serve.

This is an excellent technique to realize that ideal.

Ideation Tool

Simply sitting in a room and trying to come up with interesting new ideas can be extraordinarily difficult. To make this process of “ideation” easier, experience designers (and educators, and business experts, and others) have come up with hundreds of tools to break the ice and get ideas flowing. Some examples of these tools include silent brainstorming, negative brainstorming, bodystorming (IDEO, 2003), s.c.a.m.p.e.r. (Eberle, 2008), and the fast idea generator (Nesta, no date).