5.5 – Experience Design

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What is Experience Design?

Experience Design is a process of bringing together your top ideas for serving your customer needs and mapping them out into an “idealized” customer journey or customer experience map through storyboarding. You’re essentially creating an ideal story of how your customer might experience your products and services, and then putting together a visual representation of that journey.

It’s important to design your customer experience map by showing the customer’s journey from first finding out about your business to long after they’ve finished their purchase or service.

Why is Experience Design important?

It helps you think about how your new ideas can fit in to your customer’s life
It helps you generate more great ideas
It helps you find ways to engage and satisfy your customers from beginning to end
It results in more customer loyalty and more income!

How do I design a customer experience map?

To build a “super experience” map:

Step 1

Step 2

Create a storyboard that shows how your persona might experience your new ideas. Describe the most ideal experience (think about things that will be possible in 10–20 years with no limitations) by answering the following:

How might your customers first hear and learn about your product or services?
How might they buy or sign up for your products and services?
How might they use your products or services?
How might they get follow-up support from your business?

Step 3

Think carefully about the intent behind your ideas. What are you trying to achieve with your idea/product/service. Think about the ideas that may seem impossible at first but that you can potentially make viable without losing your intent. For example, maybe there’s more than one way to provide your service/product to your customer. Even if you can’t do it yourself, maybe you could provide the service if you were able to partner with another business.

Planning for the long term and the short term, you get a sense of the big picture, but also what is more manageable for you as you’re in the first stages of your business.

What is a Storyboard?

We’ve talked a lot about storyboarding, but what is a storyboard? It’s a way to organize and show your ideas graphically/using images, usually in a sequence. It’s used in film and animation to show how a story will progress shot by shot, but for experience design, it’s a visual way to show the steps your customers will take on their journey – from start to finish.

How to Storyboard or Map Your Customer’s Experience

Click on the video to learn more.

Now that you’ve looked at these examples, take some time to think about the two questions below before clicking to reveal the answer.

Why do you think it’s important to include how the person first hears about your product or service in your Experience Map?

Why do you think it’s important to include the follow-up activities in your Experience Map?

Note that some of these storyboard/experience map examples, like the Canadian Tire one, were created by people who have a lot of experience storyboarding – yours doesn’t have to look like that, but don’t be afraid to think big or get creative!

In the next lesson, you’ll learn more about how to build the internal and external messages that will help you describe what you do (and how it’s different from your competition), as well as where you want to be with your business in the future.

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