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8 minutes: Everyone makes a story narrative, in bullet point form, describing what the future (five years from now) experience will be like using the product or service.8 minutes: In groups of 4, everyone shares their story with the rest of their group. No critique or discussion.8 minutes: Everyone rewrites their story narrative, based on ideas they got while listening to the others.12 minutes: Everyone shares again. This time the others in the group take a minute to share what they liked best about the stories.8 minutes: Pair people up and have them craft a single story, taking the best parts of their individual stories. Now they’re fleshing the story out a bit more to add detail.2 minutes per pair: Everyone shares their stories with everyone else in the room. No critique or discussion.8 minutes: The pairs revise their stories, based on ideas and insights they got from listening to the other stories.4 minutes per pair: Everyone shares their stories. This time the others in the room take 2 minutes to share what they liked best about the stories.Dot voting: The entire room picks the stories they think are the most exciting visions.
Setting Up For Success: Create The Action Plan for Change
Step 1: Choose your experience vision team
List out all the people involved in the process of helping us with the Vision. You can divide them in three categories: vision implementer, vision promoters and vision creators.
Vision Creators
These are the people who you think need to have a say in the vision to buy into it. These are folks who you need to be behind the vision. If they have given input in the vision, they'll be more likely to push it.
Vision Promoters
These are the people you'll need to promote the vision through the organization. These are the folks who you need to communicate the vision far and wide. Ideally, they're influential to get people aware and bought in to the vision.
Vision Implementers
These are the people you'll need to execute on the vision. These are the folks who you want to use the vision when they're deciding priorities and taking action towards the vision. The ones who are making the decisions to make everything happen.
The vision creators are your essential starting team. If they are involved in the creation of the vision, they are far more likely to participate and promote this than if we leave them on the sidelines and give it to them as a done deal.
If they are involved, they will be proudly telling people how awesome the vision is, because they had a say in it, and they’re gonna go and get the next group of people - the promoters - excited about it on our behalf, and the promoters are gonna get the implementers excited, so everybody is going to help us move everything forward one step at a time.
Planning this through, understanding who the players are, is an absolutely essential part that people forget. They put their vision out there and it falls flat.
Some of those people may be people who have role power in the organisation, like executive managers, but some can be also very influential leaders who endorse your idea. Then the people who love what they say will say “Yes, I’m gonna do that too”.
Implementers are usually focused on business metrics and don’t know anything about the user experience. Unless they are, nothing will happen, and the vision will only be a cute story that nobody pays attention too. For the vision to have transformational power in the organisation, you need to get to the implementers. You can only get to them through the promoters, and you can only get to the promoters through the implementers. So you have to build up the understanding of who’s in which group.
Step 2: Get a shared understanding of the current user experience
In particular, we have to know who is in the first group, the creators. Once we have that group, we can start working on the experience vision. But in order to work on the experience vision, we need to make sure that everybody who’s creating this vision understands the current experience. If they come in and they don’t have a shared understanding of the current experience, it’s not gonna work, you won’t get traction, because all they’ll come up with is simply new shiny ideas that really don’t solve the problems that people have today. If they are very disconnected from what users go through today, their visions will also be disconnected from what users truly need.
People have to see the difference between the current experience and the experience vision: the experience vision is aspirational. We have to understand what the difference between the two is. We can start with a : we can draw the current experience as a series of frustration and delights, and the experience vision will be the raising of those frustrating parts. So we need to understand what are the problems to be solved.
We can tell people what that difference is, but it’s better to show them. So we have to figure out how to get that exposure. Ideally, you can get them directly exposed to users and what it’s like to use the product or service. Even a little bit of exposure goes a long way.
If you can’t easily get them directly exposed, having them guess what the experience is like, and comparing it to research you’ve done is a great trick. If you can make a game, to see who is most aware of how hard you’re making it for your users, that can have an impact. The exercise can be a fun way to talk about what the current experience is like.
The goal of this step is to get the leads on the same page about what the current experience is like.
The duration of this step will depend on how aware everyone is of the current user experience. If everyone has detailed knowledge, this should go quickly. If it’s all new to them, this can take a while. But if there is that insulation (between the people in the organisation and the users) that stops people in the organisation from getting that knowledge about the users, how they do, and how they use the product, then it can take weeks.
Step 3: Map the current experience as a journey
You can use very simple maps with time and a scale from frustrating to delightful, or , or any of the techniques in . The whole goal is to pull out scenarios and map them out, because what we’re gonna do is create the aspirational version of those same scenarios.
The more we can detail and capture what the current experience is, the easier it’s going to be, and we can use that information when we’re promoting the vision to say “This is how the experience looks today, and this is what it needs to look like in the future”. If the people who are seeing the vision have no knowledge of what the current experience is, you are gonna have to promote that: when Apple launched the Knowledge Navigator vision, everybody was living the experience of how horrible computers were. They thought it was the best that could be done, but that was quickly dislodged when they saw the Knowledge Navigator, and suddenly they could see the distance between the current experience and the experience vision. They could see how that difference would make a difference in people lives.
The duration of this step is correlated to how clear everyone is on the same page about the current user experience. Teams that are aware of it already have journey maps that they’re quite familiar with. If this is all new to the team, it can take a while to get everyone on the same page, especially if the products or services are complicated or have lots of variations.
Step 4: Choose a UX Outcome
If we do a fantastic job on this product or service, how will we improve someone’s life?
That’s the basic question we want to get consensus on. This becomes the basis of our vision. When we’re telling the vision story, it’s demonstrating the improved life we’ve made. This is easy to do when everyone is clear on how we’re currently making users miserable. It’s much harder when that’s not widely understood. That’s why we have to do all the preparation work in steps 2 and 3.
Step 5: Conduct a story studio exercise
It’s a technique similar to a design studio or a writing workshop: we get everybody in the same space and have people first work individually, then we pair them up, then we pair them up again.
This 60 minute process will produce, depending on the number of people in the room, up to six very decent stories. We don’t care what the first stories are. We’re trying to get a flag in the sand that people will go towards, and since it’s in the sand we can move it and adjust it later on. We want something that people find exciting. Pick the stories that people liked the best and run with them, because the people who chose them, had part in the creation of them, gave inputs on them, they will help you promote them.
Now you can start creating envisionments.
Step 6: Create your first envisionment of the most exciting stories
Start with the easiest envisionments first: a couple of paragraphs, storyboards, graphic comments, still photography and audio narration.
See which ones get traction in the organisations, which ones you hear people talking about. From there, put together bigger, better promotions of the ones that are catching on. (Apple had about thirty stories, only six of which got made into videos, and only the Knowledge Navigator took off).
Step 7: Promote the most exciting visions to a wider audience.
Work with the teams to understand how the experience vision should be influencing decisions. Break down the work ahead into baby steps for the team to achieve.It's critical to keep the vision alive.
Keep working with Vision Implementor teams. You want the vision to be taken into account when critical decisions have to be taken. You want people to think "Which option would get us closer to the vision?" as a decision criteria, because everything else is technical debt.
Make sure Vision Promoters are using the vision as they give direction to their teams.
Thank Vision Promoters for their efforts to keep the vision alive.
Give Vision Creators public credit for their contributions to the vision.
Make research available to support the team's decision making. Reward teams for choosing this option. Make everybody a hero in the process to get them excited about it. Show progress.
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