E-commerce Link : It's All About Experience

Bolster your digital strategy with experience models

Most people who have participated in a website or application design project of any heft are familiar with a standard set of user experience deliverables. Storyboards, sketches, sitemaps, wireframes and use cases are just a few of the usual suspects. For the most part, these documents capture how online content should be organized and how digital interactions should work. They are early indications of what a website will become.

However, particularly in a user-centered design process, a lot of thinking has to happen before user experience specialists can begin scribbling boxes and content zones in their Moleskine notebooks. Often, the current set of deliverables doesn’t do a great job of capturing everything that was learned during these initial parts of projects—through focus groups, contextual inquiries and other audience analysis activities. Discovery information often gets buried in text-heavy reports or diluted in stereotypical personas. Even the most thorough user research is wasted if findings aren’t translated into useful input for design.

Enter the experience model. This is your chance to bring something new to your client or
project team.

Build the Model
Experience models are visual frameworks that describe how people experience a product, service, environment or process. These models are essentially stories about an experience, told from the point of view of the people actually having that experience, and not from the point of view of the related brand or business. These models document the stages people go through to accomplish a goal, as well as illustrate people’s changing needs over time and highlight bright spots, pain points and gaps along the way.

Last year, I helped pitch some interactive work for a well-known lawn and garden care client. They sell garden soil, grass seed, bird food and other products to help beautify homeowners’ backyards. In the past, this company has marketed these items individually in a very product-
centric way.

When presented with this problem, my team hypothesized that our client might be missing a higher-level perspective: Homeowners generally don’t think in terms of single bags of plant food, but rather in terms of creating and maintaining their entire outdoor space. By creating an experience model and showing how customers move through it, we were able to strategically identify marketing opportunities and a digital strategy that was better aligned with the end consumers’ thinking.

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