INNOVATION DESIGN PROCESS STRATEGY WHAT WHO WHY WHERE
Successful companies put the customer at the center of everything they do and make it a priority to understand customers’ pain points and needs. By having a deep understanding of customers’ behaviors and preferences, a company can predict their needs as well as create appropriate solutions in the future.
WHEN HOW
DESIGN PROCESS
You can build a community that share contents about your brand, product or services and it will influence the brand awareness among a much larger audience of possible customers.
build COMMuNiTY Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it.
(VAluE)
Customer at the heart of strategy
2015/2016
POLITECNICO DI MILANO, SCHOOL OF DESIGN, MASTER DEGREE IN PRODUCT SERVICE SYSTEM DESIGN
ANDREA MALDIFASSI 814686 Relatore: LUCA FOIS
INNOVATION DESIGN PROCESS STRATEGY WHAT WHO WHY WHERE
Successful companies put the customer at the center of everything they do and make it a priority to understand customers’ pain points and needs. By having a deep understanding of customers’ behaviors and preferences, a company can predict their needs as well as create appropriate solutions in the future.
WHEN HOW
DESIGN PROCESS
You can build a community that share contents about your brand, product or services and it will influence the brand awareness among a much larger audience of possible customers.
build COMMuNiTY Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it.
(VAlu E)
Customer at the heart of strategy
2015/2016
POLITECNICO DI MILANO, SCHOOL OF DESIGN, MASTER DEGREE IN PRODUCT SERVICE SYSTEM DESIGN
ANDREA MALDIFASSI 814686 Relatore: LUCA FOIS
WHAT
WHO
WHY
WHERE
WHEN
HOW
The world is changing and continues to accelerate, even if we don’t want it to. No company operating in the free market can be successful in perpetuity by delivering the same products or services with the same marketing and the same approach. The changing nature of our environment requires us to change, to adapt, and to take any opportunity in order to innovate. Advances in technology are pushing everyone to a new life-model and mental perspective. The Internet with its social networks and mobile technology is turning the world into one big neighborhood. People connect with each other in an instantly and constantly way. Connectivity has enabled an engaged world where companies, users, and stakeholders connect, interact and cooperate.While technology provides a lot of new tools and opportunities, people are inherently still the same. If they feel a personal connection to a brand, they will be loyal to it.
Design is a fundamental part of creating an image and experience of quality, exclusivity, and tribal belonging. And yet the consumers who purchase these items often select them because they see a little bit of themselves (or whom they would like to be) on the shelf. Ravi Sawhney continues to say: “there is far more in common between design and business than may be readily apparent.� (Ravi Sawhney, 2010). Great designers, like visionary business leaders, create value by exploring without limitation through the psyche and psychology of consumers. Product Service System Design approach can create new business opportunities and the pathways to manifest consumer needs, emotions, and aspirations. By so doing, designers generate revenue and sustainable growth for business.
BUILDING COMMUNITY (VALUE) PROCESS
WHAT
WHO
WHY
VISION AWARENESS MISSION EXPLORATION PRODUCT UNDERSTANDING
PERSONAS
PURCHASE
NEEDS RESEARCH
EXPERIENCE
ANALITICS/ REPORTING
SHARING
SURVEY/ INTERVIEWS OBSERVATION
WHERE
WHEN
HOW EXECUTE
ON-LINE EXHISTING PLATFORM YOUR OWN
OFF-LINE
SELF-DRIVING COMMUNITY PROTOTYPE
COLLECT DATA FEEDBACK
I have worked a lot for the development of the Brand Awareness Project; working dayby-day cooperating with a new company and facing a new market lead me to a new level of consciousness. As a designer, I had to do research, find problems and design solutions able to answer the users needs and the companies objectives. The design process I have been going through comes from many disciplines and has the goal to grow awareness of the brand to a much larger audience which can create brand loyalty and advocates and not least a longterm increasing revenues. That’s what inspired this book. I wanted to share the processes, strategies, and tactics that I’ve learned over the last three years of studies, that I used for the project. Companies, designers, managers, social strategists can use this book in various ways. It shows research methodologies, strategic approaches, and some useful design tool.
Companies now need community to succeed. Leveraging the many-to-many interaction of customers, employees, or other stakeholder groups is essential for optimal and efficient engagement. This book wants to be a general first guide for those companies, designers and managers who want to create and managed a community around a brand.
INTRO Successful companies put the customer at the center of everything they do and make it a priority to understand customers’ pain points and needs. By having a deep understanding of customers’ behaviors and preferences, a company can predict their needs as well as create appropriate solutions in the future.
Customer at the heart of strategy
STRATEGY
CULTURE BRAND
CUSTOMER
MARKETING
PRODUCT
INTRO The customer journey is about touch points. This journey is ongoing and does not end when the customer makes a purchase. You must consider the whole journey, from how the customer was acquired, to what actions they took after making a purchase, to what they said about the experience. After making a purchase, the customer will continue to engage in a relationship with the brand, one that may continue over social media and experiential sharing. Digital tools have allowed today’s customer to be more engaged at every stage of the engagement process—awareness, explore, consider and buy, use and experience, sharing.
ONLINE
OFFLINE
PROMO EVENTS
VIEW VIDEO
SOCIAL MEDIA
AWARENESS
VIEW ADV
WORD OF MOUTH
RESEARCH PRODUCT WEBSITE
EXPLORE
EVENTS
ONLINE REVIEW
ONLINE STORE
CONSIDER & BUY
RETAIL STORE
TAKE PHOTO/VIDEO
USE PRODUCT
USE & EXPERIENCE
USE PRODUCT
UPLOAD MEDIA
MEETING
UPLOAD REVIEW
SHARE
RETAILER DISCUSSION
Customer Journey
View of a general Customer Journey that my be applied almost at every company
UNDERSTANDING
IDENTIFY
SETTING
The company The business
Your audience Your user
Your purpose Your goal
WHAT
WHO
WHY
VISION AWARENESS MISSION EXPLORATION PRODUCT UNDERSTANDING
PERSONAS
PURCHASE
NEEDS RESEARCH
EXPERIENCE
ANALITICS/ REPORTING
SHARING
SURVEY/ INTERVIEWS OBSERVATION
STRATEGY
The first row features three key strategic questions: What, Who, and Why. Answers based on the company’s unique needs will pinpoint to whom speak, and why, so focus resources on the most effective efforts for the business.
EVALUATE
TIMING
EXECUTE
The right place The connection
Your action Your management
Prototype Define
WHERE
WHEN
HOW EXECUTE
ON-LINE
OFF-LINE
SELF-DRIVING COMMUNITY
EXHISTING PLATFORM
PROTOTYPE
YOUR OWN
COLLECT DATA FEEDBACK
EXECUTION
The last row features three key tactical questions: Where, When, and How. They set up a pool of information to act on, so is possible to form a plan and begin using it effectively.
WHAT
are your business needs?
The first step of the process starts internally in the organization. Is necessary to know the company you are working for. Take note of questions you cannot answer alone and schedule a meeting or discussion with the people who can provide those answers: employees, managers, stakeholders, customers.
QUESTION TO ANSWER
What does your company make or do? Who wants or needs that product (or service)? What problem does your company product (or service) address? Who encounters that problem? How does your company solve that problem? Who would appreciate that solution? What are the brand values? Who shares those values?
HOW TO GET THE ANSWERS
If you’re short on time, you can use your company’s mission statement, vision statement, founder or executive mandates, annual business planning roadmap, and/or other business planning assets to guide you. You can make short interviews and surveys to spread to the different departments of the company. Collect the data and list them in a way you can use them later. You will need them to compare with other data.
WHO
is your target audience?
Think about what you’re selling, who would use it, and who’s actually going to pay for it. The target audience is your company’s ideal consumer. Typically, they’ll be defined by specific traits and interests that connect to the product or service that your company provides. Traditional ways to define target audiences include: age, sexual orientation, gender, economic class, religion, ethnicity, and location. Other factors might be a bit more specific, like “wearing glasses” or “health conscious” or even “what’s trending” classifications. These types of classifications are usually most useful for niche brands. Taken together, they allow marketers to profile the people to target in their marketing and advertising efforts.
2.1
general understanding
QUESTION TO ANSWER
Demographic: Have you defined the baseline character- istics as much as possible? (Age, gender, marital status, income, religion, occupation, ethnicity, education). Geographic: Where do they live? Why do they live there? (Country, state, city, neighborhood). Behavioral: What do they do regularly? (Daily routine, habits, types of activities, places they frequent).
General understanding
With the help of the data collected in “Step 1� you have been able to answer to these questionsn. In this case you have a general understanding of the potential target audience to which you will taylor the nest step of the process.
WHO
is your target audience?
Now that you have sufficient information to form a hypothesis, it’s time to develop that hypothesis through research and testing. Research falls into two main types: primary research, which is original, and secondary, which relies on existing sources. All research generates data, which is either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative data is gleaned from open-ended questions, such as the part of a survey that asks you what you liked most about a product or event. Even though these responses are difficult to measure, they do provide valuable insight into what people like and dislike, or why they might use your product instead of a competitor’s. Sometimes you can quantify this information based on sentiment, but the value of the data itself is the ability to understand people’s reactions and thoughts as it applies to the question. Quantitative data is numerical data, such as how many people signed up for your email list, or how much it grew over the course of a month. In fact, most of the data ascertained from analytics, reporting, and performance tracking is quantitative data.
2.2
research
TO DO
Performance Tracking, Analytics, and Reporting: This describes the practice of using data to develop key findings and generate inferences and insights about behavior. The Internet makes it easy to track and collect data about your fans, followers, website visitors, and much more. In fact, many web and social media tools have analytics built into their dashboards, including social media brand pages and email marketing tools. Others, such as Google Analytics, are simple to integrate into almost any website. These analytic tools can be very detailed, capturing information over time, by country, and even by which languages your users speak. Focus Group, Survey, and Interview: these describe different methodologies used to obtain information. If you want to collect qualitative information about a product or service, you might hold a focus group, which involves taking a sample of your target audience and asking them to come in for a few hours and talk about your product. This can generate a lot of information, all from a sample of your target population; however, focus groups can also be long and expensive to run. An interview is like a focus group, except that it is done with one person as opposed to many so the researcher can get personalized information. They’re usually conducted in person, but may be conducted via phone or over Skype. However, if a focus group or interview sounds too time-consuming, you might opt instead for a survey. These can be conducted simply via phone or email, and give you both quantitative information or qualitative through open ended questions. Observation: observational intercepts describe information a person gathers from observing behavior. In the digital era, the most accessible form of observation is a listening study, a method of identifying and learning from the conversations most valuable to your brand.
EXAMPLE
data gatering and analysis
At this stage of the process designers or marketers have to be careful in not being already oriented to a certain outcome or results. The more you are open to the unexpected the more it’s easy to find original connections and innovative ideas. get all the data and start analyzing them. The best way to analyze is to get the most hidden insights, connect the dots and brainstorm with colleagues and your team to figure out the most useful information. Here you can see a Social Media Data Report and its analysis done for Vibram.
WHO
is your target audience?
Now that you’ve done all the brainstorming, research and definition work, it’s time to go deeper. Creating a persona is a bit like writing a (very useful) short story. Basically, you use the traits listed in your audience profile to describe your “ideal” customer. This is a tool that makes all the information you’ve collected feel tangible and relevant in work situations by asking, “What would this persona want right now?” Many brands use this tool to build communication and marketing strategies because it defines such a clear target. The characters you create with this exercise become reference points for your team, and, since they are based on factual data, can help support a clear vision for major brand decisions like partnerships with other companies or deciding if an action would be off-brand. Your goal is to create 3/4 personas that collect all th insignts got in the previous exercise. While you are making up a lot of the individual details for each persona, remember to base those details on the information you’ve gathered. This will make the personas highly effective as tools for your brand.
2.3
create personas
HOW TO
1. What is the person’s first and last name, age, gender, per- sonal information, job description? What does he or she look like? (Find a photo online.) 2. What are a few details about the person’s life—an inter- est or a habit—that makes each person unique and mem- orable? (Make this person come to life.) 3. How does this person spend their day? Sketch out a brief outline of their daily work routines or home schedule, highlighting specific habits, likes, and dislikes. 4. What is this person’s work environment? Describe hab- its, personal and professional goals, and colleagues with whom the person works most closely. 5. Do the same for the person’s life outside of work. Where do they hang out and who do they hang with? 6. What comprises their “me” time? What media, leisure activities and hobbies do they enjoy? When and where would they be interested in your product or learning about your product? 7. Who influences them? Who do they talk to about the pain point they’re experiencing?
XiaoY en Architecture - Art Blogger Beijing, 29 Years Old
Daniel Manager - Runner Bosnia, (Shanghai from 2 years) 32 Years Old
LingLou Professor - Mother HongKong, 38 years old.
EXAMPLE
defining personas
Four are the main typologies of users that the project would address which I decided to translate into personas. The four characters come from a long research done through social media analysis, on-line survey and observation. The personas helped me understand the real needs of the users I was designing for.
George Liu Urban Planner / Skater Shanghai, 24 Years Old
G
eorge Liu moved to Shanghai for university study and since 5 years he lives with a friend. He works as an urban planner in a Shanghainese studio, and as soon as he can she goes skating around the city. As part of a skater community, he uses to go always in the same place. Every weekend he meets with his friends in Xuhui Park, West Bund. As every skater, George Liu focuses on having an original outfit, always comfortable and as much as high-catching. He wears the same shoes as the other members of the community, and he always tries to customize them. He has never heard about Vibram.
WHY
are you building this community?
Think about the intent and purpose for the community around your brand. For some companies, building reputation in a market niche matters more than driving sales in the short-term. In those cases, the intent is to gather trendsetters in a specific category, win them over with the product or service your company provides, and enable them to share their experience with the groups that they influence. Use the first two strategic questions to answer the third question. Once you understand your business needs, you can ask yourself how a community can serve those needs. Likewise, after you’ve defined your target audience, ask yourself whether that audience has the same purpose as your community. This is an important step to ensuring that your community strategy is aligned with the natural interests of your customers.
DEFINE YOUR GOAL
For your community strategy, the most important thing you can do is set goals. But it’s not enough to say “more subscribers” or “more sales.” It’s imperative to have a specific goal in mind to help you affect the broader success of the company. You can do this by identifying the KPIs, which are the most impor- tant metrics. Singling out KPIs guides your testing. You can’t test effectively if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish. Start by identifying which goals are the most important to your company: are you trying to build awareness, to create new customers, or to engage previous customers so they become repeat, loyal customers? For each of these goals, you’ll rely on a different set of metrics to figure out whether you’re reaching these broader goals. If your goal is to build awareness, then one of your KPIs might be as simple as getting more “likes” on Facebook. If you’re trying to get more past customers to become repeat customers, then it will be more important to identify email open rate and click-through rate as a key performance indicator.
Here’s a list of possible metrics that can help guide your testing: - Creating a customer - Email signups - Cost per conversion - Visits to your Web site - Unique visitors - Average visit duration - Email open rate - Click-through rate - Page views
- Facebook engagement (shares, likes, and comments) - Number of followers - Number of website visitors (including returning and repeat visitors) - Cost per click - Demographic metrics
VIEW ADV
PROMO EVENTS
EVENTS
WORD OF MOUTH
OFFLINE
AWARENESS
EXPLORE
ONLINE VIEW VIDEO
SOCIAL MEDIA
EXAMPLE
why are you building this community
The purchase path is a model which describes the theoretical customer journey from the moment of the first contact with the brand to the ultimate goal of a purchase. This model is important when marketing the brand business as it provides a method of understanding and tracking the user behavior. Consider this map to understand why you are building the community. Positioning your strategy in one or more segment will guide your choices.
RESEARCH PRODUCT
WEBSITE
RETAIL STORE
USE PRODUCT
CONSIDER & BUY
ONLINE REVIEW
ONLINE STORE
TAKE PHOTO/VIDEO
RETAILER DISCUSSION
USE & EXPERIENCE
USE PRODUCT
MEETING
SHARE
UPLOAD MEDIA
UPLOAD REVIEW
You can build a community that share contents about your brand, product or services and it will influence the brand awareness among a much larger audience of possible customers.
UNDERSTANDING
IDENTIFY
SETTING
The company The business
Your audience Your user
Your purpose Your goal
WHAT
WHO
WHY
VISION AWARENESS MISSION EXPLORATION PRODUCT UNDERSTANDING
PERSONAS
PURCHASE
NEEDS RESEARCH
EXPERIENCE
ANALITICS/ REPORTING
SHARING
SURVEY/ INTERVIEWS OBSERVATION
STRATEGY
The first row features three key strategic questions: What, Who, and Why. Answers based on the company’s unique needs will pinpoint to whom speak, and why, so focus resources on the most effective efforts for the business.
EVALUATE
TIMING
EXECUTE
The right place The connection
Your action Your management
Prototype Define
WHERE
WHEN
HOW EXECUTE
ON-LINE
OFF-LINE
SELF-DRIVING COMMUNITY
EXHISTING PLATFORM
PROTOTYPE
YOUR OWN
COLLECT DATA FEEDBACK
EXECUTION
The last row features three key tactical questions: Where, When, and How. They set up a pool of information to act on, so is possible to form a plan and begin using it effectively.
WHERE
will you host your community?
Once you understand the who and why that defines your audience, the next step is to find the right places to connect with them. There a key component to answering this question: knowing where your audience is. This is one of the essential questions to ask when building a community strategy. Many times, people who are less experienced in the space immediately assume Facebook and Twitter are the best channels for them. This makes sense on one level, given that they’re both widely recognized social media outlets, but what if most of your audience is in another country where Twitter isn’t such a widely used tool? You have to think carefully about these issues when building your strategy. If you’ve done your social media listening exercises, you should have a pretty good sense of where your audience already exists online. However, the social media and web world are not the only one where you can host your community. If you provide services and products strictly related to a physical interaction you can even image to host your community in spaces, like stores and laboratories, or designing events tailored for them.
IDENTIFY WHERE TO HOST YOUR COMMUNITY
When trying to identify which of these paths to follow, be sure to consider the following: The main place of action: Where do these conversations take place? You might find that the action takes place on your own website, via message boards or blog comments, and, if this is the case, you can consider hosting your community on your own platform. Where you’re going to drive traffic: If you’re trying to drive traffic to get involved with a community platform that you own, then it may not make sense to have communities spread out all over different social networks. Think carefully about how the network can help you drive traffic, for instance, Instagram makes it somewhat difficult to do any real marketing, but it might be a great outlet for a celebrity or an aspiring brand. Your target location: What is the end goal? In other words, where do your community members already spend time and where do you want to host them? Remember that people use different platforms in different ways, so if you have a professional networking self-hosted community, you might also want to have a LinkedIn group to help drive people to use your product.
4.1
choose a platform
Like communities in the real world, platforms exist to serve basic functions. Most are designed with a certain purpose in mind, and then they allow people to form subcommunities within those platforms. This is why a brand that has its own community, such as Vibram, may also have a Facebook group, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account, etc.
Here are some questions to help you choose: - Do we want to be here? - How do we want to shape our presence? Think about the user behavior of the people who already live on the social media platforms you’re considering, and figure out how you can integrate yourself in those use patterns. - What are we going to do? This means tactically figuring out how to best get started in establishing your social media presence. It means making sure the brand message is consistent across platforms, and taking care to make sure you have a plan of action before you try to execute it. Once you think at one platform ask to these questions, so you can understand the user behaviors and make a strategy according to that. - Who goes to the platform and why? - What do they share? - What does the content look like? - What content are the users creating? - What content are users sharing that other people have created? Once you recognize patterns, you should be able to identify whether this platform is a good fit for your business or you should focus your energy elsewhere.
4.2
do it yourself
There’s one more approach to hosting your community: do it yourself. In fact, there are entire businesses built up around this model, and some are hugely successful in niche spaces. For instance, companies like Kickstarter or Nike with Nike+ have done an excellent job of cultivating a community within its own platform as well as on other channels. At least initially, this approach can be more resource-heavy, but, for some businesses, it can also facilitate interactions that can help grow the brand over the long-term. By drawing people into your own hosted platform, you can create a place where your fans can feel free to interact and engage with one another. You can do this by creating a “members� area with a login, or a message board, a mobile application or a dedicated website.
EXAMPLE do it yourself
The digital platform, working both on web and mobile, is the core of the community. Here the Vibram users can interact with each other providing and getting information about Vibram products and how these (products) are used to achieve the challenges of everyday life. The platform works as a showcase of the selected users pictures showing activities and passions which are driven by Vibram products and services. While there will be already Vibram’s users posting pictures and descriptions of their activities and passions, there will be the new potential user that can look at the contents and have more trustful information. The user can go through the gallery and look at every content or can filter the pictures and select the #hashtag more promising for its interests.
4.3
off-line
So much of what we do is digital and sometimes we lose sight of the personal connections that bring community members together. For some businesses, events are a key part of an effective community management strategy. When people with shared interests get to meet each other in person for the first time (or third time, or tenth time), it elicits a real satisfaction in creating online relationships that lead to real-world communities. Think of companies like Meetup, which have built entire businesses around the idea of meeting virtually first, and then moving on to real-world friendships. Today, Meetup receives, on average, 100 RSVPs a minute, bringing people who meet in offline communities into real-world activities. If you are building an events-based strategy, make sure your in-person event is an authentic representation of your voice or brand. Depending on the nature of your business, events may be a crucial forum for airing your ideas. Events represent an opportunity to enhance your brand and engage with your audience. On any given night, thousands of brands around the country are hosting events to help create and maintain relationships with their customers, or to help facilitate relationships with their target audience. Events help get your “family” into one room and get them to do what you really want them to do, which is to interact with each other. As much as offline communities can add value to peoples’ lives, live events can help establish camaraderie and connections that create special moments for people who have shared interests. And they can also aid your company’s bottom line in several ways: by collecting event fees, facilitating important business development needs, raising awareness of potential customers, and creating general goodwill with your customers.
WHEN
will you organize contents?
After you know where to find your customers, you need to talk to them. In most cases, it’ll be clear that there’s no time like the present to get started with your content and community efforts. However, this question digs deeper. In asking “when,” we’re talking about your tactical planning, and how it relates to your social media cadence and frequency. Assessing this requires understanding that your audience may be active at different times of the day, different days of the week and even different times of the year.
Take into consideration that you can build a community that communicates with itself without your effort in creating contents. In that case, your role will be to manage the community and the “space” used to host it.
UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMUNITY
If you have a good understanding of how to talk to your target audience and what the message should be, then you will understand the best way to communicate within your community. This includes everything from how often you post on each channel (e.g., Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Instagram), exactly when you post (day of week, time of day, etc.), the voice and tone best suited to each channel, and the kind of content mix needed. What are we asking our target audience to do? How do we want them to behave? What would be most beneficial to our business? “What are the business needs?” “Why am I building this community?” In understanding the answers to these questions, we can also discover how to answer the “when” question. If we want our customers to visit our site, we use analytics to determine what times of day our posts engender the most traffic. The goal here is to understand your audience well enough to make sure that your community strategy encourages them to complete those tasks that help support the business goals.
HOW
will you execute this strategy?
Before getting to the costly development of a new or improved service, low fidelity models are often used to prototype and test the ideas quickly and cheaply. The tools used for prototyping can go in the direction of mainly evocative simulations but also of very realistic descriptions: from rudimentary acted-out scenarios with hand-sketched screens or improvised props to detailed mock-ups of the system, the environment and the staff. Mark Jones -from IDEO- has recently explained in an interview with Rachel Hinman –from Adaptive Path- how prototyping could support a service design process as it happens in the traditional product design: “If you use an analogy from the product world, a prototype can just be a foam block to gauge the size of a product with no buttons on it or anything else. A rough prototype answers a question. An early prototype for a service may be a group of people role-playing a new service without any technological infrastructure. Or it might be something in the middle, where you’re designing touch points for how a new service might look. Until you start an early pilot, you may not have real data behind a technological infrastructure. You may not have a real protocol but you can set up a simulated environment in a pilot situation.”
AGILE EXECUTION
Agile execution is a work style derived from tech startups and web developers. Time and resource scarcity provide natural constraints for entrepreneurs, forcing them to use an iterative process to find out what will resonate with their customers. This ongoing process of “discovery” and “validation” allows them to make wise investments and fail fast—or as I like to say, “learn fast.” This is a valuable approach to lead by example in their initiatives, as there are so many opportunities to engage internally and externally across all stakeholder groups. With this process, companies move forward quickly with a single course of action, instead of being slowed down by planning every minor detail. The process is “agile” because there is room to demonstrate progress but still course-correct, so that results (including customer feedback) immediately inform how the process changes and evolves.
EXAMPLE 1
prototyping tools
The touchpoints matrix merges some features of the customer journey maps with some features of the system maps and is based on the use of personas. The basic idea is to provide a visual framework that enables designers to “connect the dots of the user experience� in order to see the different configurations, interfaces, contexts and results of the interaction with a particular product-service system. Once this structure has been composed, I can put a specific persona inside and imagine his journey through the different touchpoints, connecting the related dots. In this way, the matrix brings to a deeper comprehension of the interaction and facilitates a further development of the opportunities given by the system shifting the focus of the design activities to connections.
EXAMPLE 2
prototyping tools
The experience prototype is a simulation of the service experience that foresees some of its performances through the use of the specific physical touchpoints involved. The experience prototype will allow me to show and test the solution designed through an active participation of the users. This step of the process is, I could say, the most important one. I will put in the real world the idea developed and look at the interactions the users will have with the system. I will dedicate an entire chapter to this frame in which I will explain in detail the process applied and the results and insights taken.
This is the case of #IAMVIBRAM# project. To test the solution developed I prototype the digital platform and the physical interaction. Here I could understand the user interactions and validate or not my solution.
WHAT
WHO
WHY
WHERE
WHEN
HOW
By reading this short book and understanding its principles, you can learn some of the step designers use to build robust strategies be successful in the market. This book shows the process I used for my project that can help you build a strategy that meets the business needs of your organization, or the one you are working for. I want to clarify that this is not a scientific process and its application and results will depend on from the size and the stage of the company, your effort, and convenience.