James Kalbach - Mapping experiences a guide to creating value through journeys, blueprints, and diagrams

Mapping Experiences will help both designers and consumers of design services understand how to visualize experiences and the system ecology in which products and services exist with the all-important customer. His approach to the subject is both broad and deep. The analytical and practical/practice chapters speak directly to the current interest in visual artifacts associated with strategy and service design.

Paul Kahn
Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow
Author of Mapping Websites

As designers grapple with ever more complex services and systems, the need to visually map them is paramount. There are hundreds of different ways of mapping and diagramming experiences and they are locked away in hundreds of different books and academic papers. Jim Kalbach has pulled them all together in an excellent book that should be on the desk of everyone involved in UX, service design and business.

Andy Polaine
Design Director, Fjord

Adopting an outside-in perspective, developing empathy with the people you support, and creating visualizations of these perspectives is the power-trio for the future of your organization. The trio allows you to support people, internally and externally, in a more nuanced, coordinated manner. It also enables you to see new paths ahead, so that you can branch away from your competition. Jims book is an excellent explanation of this trio, and includes a collection of tools that you can put to immediate use.

Indi Young
Research consultant and empathy coach
indiyoung.com

With Mapping Experiences, Jim Kalbach has done a terrific service for anyone tackling complex, systemic design challenges. He not only documents the best approaches to experience mapping, but also pushes the topic forward, by sharing his insights and hard-won experience about this rich, still-evolving area of design practice. Mapping Experiences will be an essential guide for many years to come.

Andrew Hinton
Author of Understanding Context

We live in an age where images are more powerful than words. Everyone working in the areas of customer experience and strategy will benefit from learning how to express ideas visually, and Mapping Experiences is a great place to start.

Victor Lombardi
Author of Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures

This book offers the right approach to using maps as a tool in experience design and execution, and that is, there is no one-size-fits-all. Instead of offering just one idea around how to best align your teams around the idea of better experiences, Kalbach offers several tips, tricks, and processes to actually get things done. This is the down-to-earth manual thats been missing. Readers will find the right way for their unique challenges, not one unique process to try to make fit for their situation. Everyone can benefit from reading this book!

Jeannie Walters
CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator of 360Connext, writer, and speaker

Our experiences interacting with faceless companies often make us ill. Mapping Experiences, wielded properly, might actually do something to eliminate the all-too-typical shoulder shrugging and buck passing we faceand help designers and decision-makers alike become customer experience heroes.

Lou Rosenfeld
Publisher, Rosenfeld Media
Co-author of Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond

Kalbach gives clarity to the growing number of customer-focused visualizationand provides readers with practical guidance for creating their own.

Kerry Bodine
Coauthor of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

Thoughtful. Rigorous. Clear. Jim Kalbachs Mapping Experiences literally creates a new cartography for organizations and innovators to successfully navigate design processes. His essential themes of designing to align and aligning to design address the key issues I see in enterprises seeking to better organize around UX.

Michael Schrage
Research fellow at MIT Sloan Schools Initiative on The Digital Economy
Author of Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

Mapping
Experiences

A Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams

Jim Kalbach

Mapping Experiences

by James Kalbach

Copyright 2016 James Kalbach. All rights reserved.

Printed in Canada.

Published by OReilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.

OReilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (.

Acquisitions Editor: Nick Lombardi Developmental Editor: Angela Rufino Production Editor: Melanie Yarbrough Copyeditor: Phil Dangler Proofreader: Rachel Monaghan Indexer: Lucie Haskins

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Revision History for the First Edition:

2016-04-01 First release

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The OReilly logo is a registered trademark of OReilly Media, Inc. Mapping Experiences, the cover image, and related trade dress are trademarks of OReilly Media, Inc.

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978-1-491-92353-5

[TI]

For my mother and father

PREFACE

Then the Ping-Pong match begins.

Thats what a customer told me about his experience with the billing process of the company I was consulting. After digging deeper and having conversations with other customers, it became clear to me what he meant.

Apparently, the company was known for sending incorrect invoices. Finding a resolution often proved difficult for customers. They instinctively called the support hotline first, but agents there werent empowered to fix problems with invoices. Customers then called their sales representative, who wasnt responsible for billing issues. Relatively quickly, customers fell into an aggravating communication loop with the company.

But it got worse.

The collections department didnt suspend its scheduled warning notices. And they didnt know if a customer may have questioned an incorrect bill. So amidst customers frustration troubleshooting an incorrect bill, they received a past-due notice.

That not only added insult to injury, it also made the resolution exponentially more complicated: three or four parties were now involved, and the customer was caught in the middle. Ping-Pong, indeed.