James Kalbach - Mapping Experiences, 2nd Edition

Jim Kalbach demystifies the visual logic that underlies every possible design thinking or UX workshopping artifact with the intellectual enthusiasm of Edward Tufte. Kalbach gives meaning and studied attention to the ginormous service blueprint that covers an entire wall of your office all the way down to the humble sticky note thats fallen to the floor.

John Maeda
Technologist and author of How To Speak Machine

This is the book I wish Id had years ago. Ive made hundreds of alignment diagrams and maps while working with clients and startups, and it can feel mucky and murky. Jim crystallizes the benefits, clarifies the processes, and provides inspiring visual examples that will motivate design and business leaders to better serve their customers.

Kate Rutter
Consultant, designer, and professor of interaction design, California College of the Arts

How do you know that something (music, movie, book) is really great? Each time you listen to it, watch it, or read it, you find something new: new thought, new insight, new perspective. It just keeps ringing the bell again and again, and again. This book is exactly like this. It is the most comprehensive guide about creating value through maps and diagrams I know and recommend to my colleagues, our students, and partners.

Yuri Vedenin
Founder, UXPressia

Mapping Experiences is the essential guide to using human-centered mapping methods to align stakeholders across silos in any organization. Kalbach expertly provides both a framing philosophy and practical instruction, with a healthy thread of hard-won, practical advice, in an immediately accessible and actionable package. It is a necessary reference for any individual or team creating products and services in the 21st century.

Andrew Hinton
Author of Understanding Context

In this second edition, Jim expands on the topic of mapping that he had already crushed in the first edition. Jims insights bring clarity to what, previous to this book, had been a confusing jumble of boxes and arrows.

Leo Frishberg
Principal, Phase II Design

Its easy to approach projects from the inside out. By mapping out an experience, you uncover details about the people using your products and services that can change your viewpoint to look outside-in, and ultimately result in more thoughtful and impactful solutions.

Frances Close
Design lead, Open Systems Technology

We cant make a UX until we know the story that brings the user and experience together. Mapping Experiences helps people choose the right maps, processes, and structures to do the essential work of storytelling.

Torrey Podmajersky
Author of Strategic Writing for UX

This book is a treasure trove of diagrams. If you are searching to find one suitable for your specific needs, reading this book is the right first step. This book teaches you to focus on the basic concepts of alignment so that you dont get trapped in the labyrinth of jargons.

Saadia Ali
CX consultant and journey mapper at EPIC Consulting

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
Coauthor 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

by Jim Kalbach

Copyright 2021 James Kalbach. All rights reserved.

Printed in Canada.

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