Find new opportunities with Experience map, CJM and ‘How might we’ method

Diagrams and maps are great tools for looking at data from a different angle and finding new perspectives. Moreover, they can help bring a broader team to the table.

First of all, hello to all my new subscribers who joined last week. This blog post is not my usual step-by-step guide but an article on a different approach to looking at data and UX artifacts from another angle. You can check out my other posts here if you like this piece.

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A good question is half of knowledge. To generate good ideas and solutions, you need to set the right inputs and tackle the right questions. Diagrams and maps are great tools for looking at data from a different angle and finding new perspectives. They can focus on business and users, emphasizing time, space, and other numerous dimensions. These visual structures help us remove the mental load of remembering, organize information in our heads or just plain text, and focus on solving problems.

The primary subjects of the post are Experience map and CJM, but I won’t dive deep into the process of creating them. However, I will show the example of a Hybrid map and how it can prime the team with the right inputs to brainstorm the solution.

Image credit: Emerge Creative, Fine Art America

Application

The approach I will describe further can be helpful when users of your product take on a much longer journey to solve their problem than your product covers. For example, in the case of a product that helps users to find an apartment to rent, there can be more steps to achieve a goal than just finding an apartment on a website or app. They need to communicate with landlords or realtors, get to the location, negotiate, sign the contract, move in, etc. And probably addressing some of these steps might make your product more competitive and valuable in the eyes of the user.

I can also give you an example from one of my previous companies where we used this approach. It was an esports portal covering fighting games, and our features list was limited to news and event coverage tools. Still, we knew that there is much more to it in the life of a gamer and esports fan than this, like learning, practicing, competitive play, collaboration, analysis, and several contexts of watching the event. We were figuring out the most important of them and what to solve first.

A bit of theory

Experience map vs. CJM

Experience maps and CJMs are among the most popular topics in the UX space, along with personas, probably because there is an intersection between marketing, customer support, operations, and other parts of the business. And there are so many crappy promotion articles on how to create them. So my only suggestion to know more about mapping and diagrams in UX is the book by Jim Kalbach called ‘Mapping experiences’ which I reference a lot in this post and recommended in one of my previous posts:

Five books to step up your product design skills

Experience maps have a completely different point of view than CJMs. As said in the book mentioned above, in experience maps,' rather than seeing the individual as a consumer of a brand or offer, you can instead focus on their objectives and goals regardless of the solution.’ Experience maps allow organizations to ask, “How do we fit into the lives of individuals? Where CJM focuses on a user within a particular product, service, or organization context.

But still, these two terms can overlap significantly. People mashup terminology, and you can find phrases like ‘customer experience maps’ and ‘experience journeys.’ However, still, there is a need to separate both terms s they mean different things and can be used for other purposes.

Hybrid maps

However, different maps can usually be mixed into one and combine the individual’s fundamental experience with a specific solution. Here is an example of an experience map by Gene Smith and Trevor von Gorp of nForm, where they map the life of a video game enthusiast and combined Experience map and CJM.

Social Gamer map by Gene Smith and Trevor von Gorp of nForm, taken from the ‘Mapping Experiences’ book

My hybrid map template

As you may already understand, my hybrid map is also a combination of Experience map and CJM. I would consider the Experience map part primary as it is the main source of data external to a company which is very useful for finding new opportunities. Consider this map as input for further discussion. 

As I mentioned above, I won’t go into detail about creating these maps, but ideally, these maps should be created independently and then merged. When you combine them and align the phases, that’s when the real magic happens.

Experience map part

• Persona

• Main goal

• Columns: Phases

• Rows: 

  • Actions, behaviors

  • Tools, channels, products

  • Goals and motivation

  • Pains

  • Gains

  • Emotions and thoughts

  • Opportunities

CJM part

• Persona

• Goal

• Columns: Phases

• Rows: 

  • Actions

  • Touchpoints

  • Pains

  • Gains

  • Moments of truth (‘Wow’ moments)

  • Emotions

  • Opportunities

I have a Miro template for it, so if you are interested in getting it, comment or reply to this post, and I will share it with you. I will make a Miro community template later and share it in the Substack chat.

Exploring the Hybrid map

Firstly we need to find areas on the map where you can potentially generate the most opportunities. This will help you to pick phases of the journey to focus on by yourself or address in the ‘How might wee’ workshop.

Generally, you can look for the following:

‘Empty’ sports

It’s important to check the quality of your data before starting the analysis. Are there places on the map with no or little stickers? If yes, ask yourself why. Maybe you didn’t focus on these aspects in the interviews. Perhaps you didn’t analyze your data source well. Then decide on how you can get this missing info: organize additional interviews, ask on Discord, Reddit, or your internal communities, review feedback logs, etc.

‘Weaknesses’ spots

Look for places with pile-ups of pain points or negative emotions. They might signal severe problems in experience for particular phases and can be an excellent place to find improvement opportunities for your product.

‘Satisfaction’ spots

What are the phases with the most gains’ stickers, peak emotions, or moments of truth? These might be the areas your product can capitalize on to improve the user experience even more and create more opportunities.

Gaps between CJM and experience map

When you merge CJM into the Experience map, you’ll probably have some phases that are missing on CJM. These are evident areas of opportunities that you might want to explore with your team.

Compare CJM’s touchpoint and Experience map’s tools and channels

Look for other products people use or touch points different from your product for a particular phase. They might give you ideas for improving communication between your product and users.

Organizing the ‘How might we’ workshop

Clear statements or questions focus the team on finding a specific solution. The language used is important: starting questions with “How might we…” provides a sense of safety for exploring a range of options together without fear of failing.

I suggest narrowing down your team's focus to one or a maximum of two phases of the map for a single workshop. Because such maps can be very big, and humans’ attention span and time, when they can generate ideas productively, is very short. So it would be best if you approached your map one step at a time. You can create multiple workshops to address more phases.

The structure of the questions to ‘fire start’ the discussion can be like this: ‘How might we help users achieve [their goal for this phase].’ In 90% of cases would focus on the goal of the user, but if you have some specific problem, you might want to try these examples:

• How might we help users remove [their pain(s)]?

• How might we help users capitalize on [their gain(s)]?

• How can we improve communication between users and our product?

Of course, it takes more than a good question to facilitate a productive workshop. You can find some advice on how to do that in one of my articles about remote workshops.

How to facilitate a remote affinity mapping workshop

I will finish this post with a quote by Jim Kalbach: ‘Diagrams don’t provide answers; they foster conversations.’ I hope the approach to experience maps I laid out here will help you foster conversation and find alignment inside your team and, of course, new growth opportunities for your product. Experience mapping is a very powerful tool, so don’t be afraid to mix up different elements and different types of maps. Looking at the same data from a different angle can bring unexpected results.

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Thank you for reading my post till the end; I really appreciate that!

I would like to hear back from you, so if you have any feedback regarding this or other posts; ways to improve; a topic that you want me to write about in the future; or you just want to say something nice or not nice, please feel free to reply to this email.