The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision
When the long-term perspective vanishes, it becomes difficult to feel like you’ve made any significant progress. Sure, you’ll have checked many items off the ever-growing to-do list, but have you really improved how the business serves its customers?
As we conduct our research exploring best practices for experience design, we’ve discovered that nearly every successful team has actively created an experience vision that they frequently refer to. Often their visions are for experiences five or ten years in the future.
The experience visions of the successful teams all have the following qualities:
They are research-based They focus on the users’ experience They are shared across the entire team
Step 1: Focus on Research
most organizations don’t have a visionary at the top of the organization. These organizations need to get their inspiration from someplace else.
few people would’ve told researchers they wanted home-delivered DVDs. However, through careful research, the team at Netflix saw how miserable many people were with the video store experience
Research techniques, such as field studies, give us the foundations of what the current experience is like. We can see what’s working and where people’s experiences are less than desirable.
The space between the current experience and the ideal experience is where the insights come from. Innovation happens here.
Step 2: Focus on Experience
Experiences don’t change quickly and make for a better long-term target.
A high-quality vision integrates all the instances when the elements of the designs are part of the user’s experience, not just when they’re interacting with the specific product or service.
Step 3: Share the Vision
The successful teams make sure everyone making decisions is aware of the vision.
There are many techniques for sharing the vision. We’ve seen everything from video reenactments to comic strips. They all have two things in common:
The technology is downplayed keeping the focus on what the user is experiencing. The team shares the vision frequently, not relying on a single presentation or document to make it permanently sink in.
Visions are reached through baby steps — the hundreds or thousands of little, incremental changes to the design. As the team takes on each change, they need to ask, “Is this getting us closer to our vision?”
you may discover the vision isn’t quite right and needs adjusting. Remember, we stuck the flag in the sand because it would be easy to move if we had to do it.
Posted on August 14, 2019