Experience Strategy
The Experience Strategy defines and prioritizes your innovation pipeline and provides the tools to make the most informed decisions throughout the product development cycle. The Experience Strategy consists of two primary components, the Experience Design Toolkit and the Innovation Roadmap.
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Experience Design Toolkit
The Experience Design Toolkit is a significant building block of the Experience Strategy and the culmination of our Problem Space research phase (phase 2 of 3). It synthesizes qualitative and quantitative research into four essential strategic tools that define innovation opportunities, contextualize the users’ experience, and build empathy for the future customer. The tools in the toolkit include Opportunities for Innovation, Consumer Mindsets, Experience Principles, and Experience Maps.
Opportunities for Innovation
Opportunities for Innovation represent the ‘consumers’ most disruptive and widespread unmet needs. Each opportunity is defined through rigorous qualitative and quantitative research and scales appropriately to a large audience of potential customers. Simply stated, Opportunities for Innovation represent significant gaps between the needs of people and the support they have available to them in the market.
Mindsets
Mindsets cultivate empathy and understanding of diverse need-states of people throughout their process. Unlike personas, Mindsets focus on specific circumstances impacting an individual's approach. For example, someone preparing for the day may switch between an Efficiency Mindset (rushing to get ready for work) and Contemplative Mindset (slowing down, taking a deep breath, and enjoying their time before work). Defining customer Mindsets helps product teams tailor solutions to unique needs in different contexts.
Experience Principles
Experience Principles represent the universal needs of users relevant to our topic of study and serve as rules to make and evaluate design and business decisions. Unlike Design Principles that often focus on aesthetics, usability, or brand values, Experience Principles guide from the end-user perspective, focusing on the ideal experience a person has with your current and future offerings. A principle like Make Me Feel Smart reminds designers to avoid jargon, complicated menus, and unintuitive interfaces while making users feel worthy and able.
Experience Maps
Experience Maps visually communicate a person’s process, inner dialog, and feelings while trying to accomplish an objective. It provides context and helps product teams develop empathy for people on their journey to get their job done. Opportunities for Innovation and product and service concepts are later added to align with particular moments in their journey.
The tools in the Experience Design Toolkit are essential and valuable throughout the product development cycle and play a foundational role in the activities in the final phase of the Balance Innovation Framework, The Solution Space.
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Innovation Roadmap
Using the tools created in the Problem Space phase, we ideate, refine and prioritize product & service concepts. The goal is to communicate each concept’s value propositions, features and benefits, and requirements (e.g., user, business, and technical) to provide concrete direction for product development.
Written Concepts
Written Concepts are an essential precursor to visual design. Each concept is created to showcase the value of new products and services to the market. They are carefully crafted by synthesizing ideas from ideation and applying the Experience Principles, Mindsets, and Experience Map to maximize the benefits of the solutions.
Written Concepts articulate each concept’s vision, value propositions, features, and user, business, and technology requirements. By developing this first, designers deeply understand the intended value and experience they must support.
Visual Concepts, Ecosystems, & Storyboards
Visual concepts communicate creative ways to deliver the value outlined in the Written Concepts. A common outcome of our programs leads to a combination of physical products, digital products, and services, but that will depend on the nature of the program and our client’s core capabilities and strategic direction. Final documentation communicates the Written and Visual Concepts together and acts as a portable reference for use throughout the extended development of the product or service.
Solution Ecosystems represent how multiple product concepts work together to help people get their jobs done more effectively, efficiently, and enjoyably than they could with a single solution. Like Written Concepts, an ecosystem of solutions will have its own value propositions and requirements. It communicates how the value of the system is greater than its parts.
Storyboards communicate the future experience each concept will provide its end-user. It helps designers empathize and understand the social and emotional aspects and context of the ultimate user experience.
The Experience Strategy is the outcome of our Balance Innovation Framework. Our time-tested and rigorous process reveals your customers' unmet needs.
Learn more about how the Balance Innovation Framework leads to breakthrough products and services.