The New York Subway map has nothing on our Experience Transformation process diagram. Illustration by the author.

Inside the Experience Transformation process.

or, it’s no longer enough to improve your user experience. It’s time to transform it.

Consider customer service…

AT&T’s business customer service is organized into a series of silos: some by channel (e.g. in-store, phone, social), others by service (e.g. billing, technical). If a customer needing support contacted AT&T first by phone and then on Twitter before finally going into the store for help, support associates for each channel had no idea what had happened via the other touchpoints, assuring customer frustration and negative sentiment. While this limitation may correspond to how AT&T organizes itself behind the curtain, it’s precisely the opposite of the customer’s expectation. For them, customer support is a singular entity. They don’t care how it works, only that it solves their problem quickly and easily.

When Sharpen’s designers were brought in to work on Spotlight, an AT&T customer-insights dashboard for their business sales and support teams, we immediately saw the opportunity to alleviate this particular customer pain point. Our recommended “Interaction timeline” aggregated every contact between the customer and the business into a single, indispensable view, so any support associate could see a holistic view of all the customer’s interactions.

The needs of the customer redefined the associates’ tools and way the business works. All without any additional business or digital transformation spend.

This is Experience Transformation.

Another example of Experience Transformation creating an indispensable resource: AT&T Spotlight required the development of a host of new APIs to accommodate user-defined views, including this holistic customer profile. Additionally, the “Customer opportunity” module extrapolated values based on the known “Customer spend” and averaged like-customer data — all on the front end with no additional backend support. Illustration by the author and design team.

“They fostered a smooth adoption of a cultural transformation to a customer-centric focus. Spotlight garnered a 90% adoption rate in the first 30 days after launch, serving 40,000 unique users, and helping associates meet or exceed their NPS targets and win JD Power’s 2019 Business Wireline Satisfaction award for Large Enterprise Business. ”

— Senior Project Manager, AT&T Business Global Operations

What is Experience Transformation?

Experience Transformation is Sharpen’s tested and repeatable process for elevating both the user’s experience and the business’ results through the rigorous application of design-thinking principles and an omnichannel approach to tactical execution.

It’s pretty cool.

This process aims to do more than simply improve the usability or desirability of a solution. Through empathy and analysis, we elicit the most valuable user and stakeholder data. And by creatively prioritizing these validated user needs within existing technical or business constraints, time and time, we’ve again elevated solutions to a level of indispensability that have dramatic impacts on how businesses are able to meet and exceed user needs.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need informs how we look at product health and market potential. Typically, this hierarchy caps out with “overdelivery” (or some synonym). But our point of view is that there’s further room to climb beyond simple innovation or disruption. That if you let user needs lead and adapt your business and requirements to suit, your business may reach that rarest of peaks — indispensability. Illustration by the author.

Experience Transformation lets us:

• Elicit meaningful data from users, stakeholders, and competitors before synthesizing those inputs into immediately-actionable artifacts.
• Design data-informed solutions that transform the users’ experience with our business or product, maximizing the organizational and technology resources available.
• Conceive of measurable strategies and plan detailed tactics to deliver on user and stakeholder KPIs.

As experience designers, we believe the fearless sharing of ideas — within our team and without, too — is critical to exceeding client expectations, to improving peoples’ lives, and to building the most rewarding place for problem solvers to work and thrive. Therefore, this article provides a peek into our Experience Transformation process, describing how we deploy a robust toolbox of activities to transform project discovery into an aligning and strategic phase of work that identifies opportunities for innovation and differentiation while indispensably improving every phase of work which follows.

Let me show you how…

The role of Experience Transformation at Sharpen.

At a lot of creative agencies, consultancies, and product companies, experience design runs second-fiddle to marketing or technology. There are many reasons for this, ranging from a company’s founding services and the later addition of UX, or to its organizational structure fragmenting designers among various squads or teams.

We take a different view, embracing a broad-spectrum definition of design commensurate with its place in the vanguard of successful business and innovation: business analysis, research, strategy, information architecture, interaction design, UI and visual design, content, and prototyping are all products of our interdisciplinary design team.

Our design team is fortunate to have been recognized across the Southeast and around the country as thought leaders in design-thinking and translating design process into innovation — and the process described in this article is a huge reason why. We’ve designed solutions for companies such as AT&T, Deloitte, IHG, and many more. Our work has been published in a wide variety of outlets, including O’Reilly publications, Smashing Magazine, and Newsweek. And we’ve run workshops at conferences all over the United States for organizations ranging from Mailchimp to Georgia Tech and even the US Department of Defense.

Design is core to everything we do. And we don’t do anything without considering the opportunities for Experience Transformation.

Experience Transformation is the most important step in any project.

Many clients or product owners dismiss the importance of any discovery or planning phase. They might liken it to onboarding or “getting up to speed” — a speed they assume they’re already operating at. And many designers, even veterans, believe they can skip research and still deliver transformative solutions.

They’re wrong.

As designers, we often describe ourselves not as experts in a particular industry, but rather as experts in a process. A process that works for nearly any client in any industry to solve for any problem. And our Experience Transformation process is the most important step in how we solve those problems: exploring both business and user needs to clarify the competitive space, validating requirements, defining success metrics, and facilitating a shared vision of an innovative solution at both strategic (high) and tactical (low) levels.

Our Experience Transformation process combines activities (described below), their inputs, their outputs, and their relevant RACI roles (who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed) and organizes them into seven discrete stages which can easily be divided among the team and into agile-ish sprints. Illustration by the author.

Consider the following scenarios:

• A startup needs to upgrade their proof of concept or developed MVP to get to market.
• A service company needs to create new customer-facing tools to retain customers and increase sales in the face of a disruptive competitor.
• An enterprise company wants to create an internal tool for associates to manage customer services.
• You have a great idea for an app — but has it been done before?

In which of these situations can research be skipped? In which do we already know everything we need to know to answer the client prompt? What metrics are we trying to meet? And who is the user? Do they know something we don’t? And what strategic and tactical approach will work best?

Of course, the answer is none. So, while the client is an expert in their business, we need to be experts in a process that dives deep into the whats, hows, and whys by:

1. Evaluating current-state materials, competitors, and comparable solutions.
2. Inquiring of stakeholders and users.
3. Processing these data.
4. Synthesizing actionable deliverables, corresponding to the needs of the project.
5. Presenting a consolidated, data-informed rationale describing how to move forward.
6. Visualizing what the proposed solution looks like.
7. Recommending strategic and tactical next steps, in the client’s language, so everyone involved understands how to move forward and how to transform the user experience.

What problem does Experience Transformation solve?

Product companies — be they startup or enterprise — typically live with their product for years. This longitudinal relationship between creatives and their deliverables allows for frequent research, iteration, and pivoting. If you’ve ever read a book about design process, it almost certainly describes how such in-house teams operate.

But this isn’t how the rest of us work.

Agency and consultant design partners often don’t share this long-term relationship with a product. Frequently, we engage on a project basis and, as a result, our process needs to be timeboxed and efficient, corresponding to shorter timelines and more limited resources. Our process also needs to be flexible, given the wide range of clients and products we might encounter. A consumer e-commerce app and an enterprise business-intelligence tool operate at dramatically different scales with wildly different user types and stakeholders, yet our process needs to accommodate both with equal aplomb and transformative results.

How long does the Experience Transformation process take?

Sharpen’s Experience Transformation process, as described in this article, typically takes a team of two-to-three designers about eight weeks to complete. Four consecutive sprints, in an agile-ish framework.

Of course, teams and timelines can scale up for more complex work or down for more tactical projects. With our team, we offer several variations on our model. At one extreme, we offer a one-week Unicorn Invasion design sprint that handles stakeholder research, user research, synthesis, information architecture, and usability testing over five consecutive days. We also offer an abbreviated version of our process that delivers research findings without certain artifacts or tactical recommendations. But our preference — and what we believe is the most effective use of everyone’s time, money, and resources — is the eight-week model described herein.

Before we begin: Client’s homework.

We typically prepare for our Experience Transformation process by asking the client — new or retained — to do some homework by collecting the following information and resources for us:

• A RACI list of stakeholders, and their contact information, whom we’ll interact with over the course of the project.
• A list of project requirements and KPIs.
• A list of current and aspirational competitors.
• A list of admired comparatives.
• All current-state materials relevant to or adjacent to the project, including access to online systems or demos.
• A list of potential user contacts of interviews or surveys and any available user data or analytics, synthesized or raw.

With these data in hand, we’re in a good spot to put together a project plan that fits our estimated team and timeline. And without some of it, we’re also in a good place to see what holes we’ll need to fill. But we typically can’t start a project until most or all of this information is provided without inviting avoidable delays and stoppages.

Step one: Evaluation.

Step one illustration by AB Designs from NounProject.com.

We begin every Experience Transformation project by evaluating client-provided current-state materials, practical and aspirational competitors, and comparable solutions from other industries. This is often an all-hands effort as we subscribe the idea that a designer who knows the research first-hand is astronomically more informed than the designer who only consumes synthesized reports or anecdotes. This is one of the main reasons our design team is predominantly made up of generalists.

That said, the heuristic evaluations we perform in this step of the process often demand the attention of team members with certain specialties — architecture, content, visual design, etc. And we consider technology from day one so we never lose sight of feasibility.

Within step one, Evaluation, our toolkit includes:

• Current-state content audit. A heuristic evaluation of all relevant and available current-state copy, imagery, and video messaging materials to assess their strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize future content needs and strategies.
• Current-state design audit. A heuristic evaluation of all relevant and available current-state branding, motion, and visual design materials to assess their strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize future content needs and strategies.
• Current-state technical audit. A heuristic evaluation of all relevant and available current-state technologies, platforms, and integrations to assess their strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize future content needs and strategies.
• Current-state usability audit. A heuristic evaluation of all relevant and available current-state experiences, interactions, and touchpoints to assess their strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize future content needs and strategies.
• Competitive analysis. An assessment of specific direct and aspirational market competitors to identify user expectations, conditions, and gaps in the competitive landscape.
• Comparative analysis. An investigation of how similar content, design, technical, or usability issues are addressed by best-in-class solutions or organizations in other markets.

It should be noted, the activities and deliverables in our process toolkit vary from project to project, and what we’re reviewing herein is meant to signal, typical. The process, itself, is both repeatable and customizable. For a proof of concept with no current-state materials, we’ll scale up the competitive and comparative effort to make up for the absence of current-state assets. Or, for a branding project, we’ll dismiss the usability and technical assessments and focus more on the content and design heuristics.

Step two: Inquiry.

Step two illustration by vectlab from NounProject.com.

Now that we’ve educated ourselves about the current state of things and familiarized ourselves with the market and comparable possibilities, we’re informed enough to dive into more generative human-to-human interview activities.

Like step one, these activities are largely all-hands activities. Especially the interviews. Our design team will often divide up the interview list to limit fatigue among us introverts (LOL). We aim to have two people on every interview — one to lead, and one to take notes. We also record and transcribe all our interviews for internal-only use.

Within step two, Inquiry, our toolkit includes:

• Stakeholder interviews or workshops. Individual or group discussions with client-side parties who are affected by, have a direct interest in, are resource gatekeepers, or are otherwise involved with the project to seek their input and achieve consensus.
• Technical requirements elicitation. Individual or group discussions with client-side parties — including other third-party partners — who have direct knowledge of current- and future-state technical requirements and limitations.
• User interviews or workshops. Individual or group discussions to validate assumptions and discover user needs and requirements. Typical research methods include face-to-face or telepresence interviews.
• User surveys. An electronic survey used to aggregate users’ inputs and provide quantitative data about users, their needs, and their relationship to the business or market.
• Current-state usability testing. Where available or relevant, a contextual inquiry into how users engage with current-state products and services. These tests are typically according to a test plan and conducted face-to-face or via telepresence platforms.

Step three: Processing.

Step three illustration by the author.

We’ve used the first two steps in our process to accumulate an enormous amount of information. Using team shared-workspace platforms like Miro to capture interview feedback as discrete “stickies,” to collect competitive data in a shareable matrix, and to record current-state screenshots and flows. Now, we’re ready to start making sense of things.

In many ways, this is the most exciting part of the process. Trends and patterns emerge. Strategies and tactics begin to suggest themselves. I’ve never not learned something new in this step of the process.

Within step three, Processing, our toolkit includes:

• Affinity mapping. Aggregating qualitative and quantitative data to find patterns in the results that reveal and validate project and brand goals, codify customer requirements, and establish KPIs and OKRs.
• Task analysis. An analysis of how a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, frequency, allocations, complexities, requirements, and any other unique factors.

Step four: Synthesis.

Step four illustration by Umer Younas from NounProject.com.

We pride ourselves on the pace of our work. We follow an agile-ish framework and practice a lean-UX approach to artifacts that lets us focus on creating usable artifacts over fastidious reports. I can hear the enterprise and product shop UXers “harumph” at this point, but the reason for de-emphasizing research reports isn’t negligence. It’s being good stewards of our client’s budgets by prioritizing deliverables which have the greatest impact on the project.

Put another way, we don’t do “book reports” — we do Cliff’s Notes. Because we want to give both our team and the client team actionable materials they can understand and use as quickly as possible. To achieve consensus, refine the scope of work, and lay the groundwork for the strategic recommendations to come.

Within step four, Synthesis, our toolkit includes:

• Data-informed user personae. Segmented, data-informed, aggregate syntheses of users to facilitate empathy, define success metrics, and contextualize usability issues.
• Journey & service maps. Diagrammatic illustrations of user or customer engagement and how that connects to lead generation, content strategy, data throughput, associate and service requirements, and more.
• User requirements definition. Based on user research results and intended to complement business and technical requirements, user requirements provide KPIs for user experience, information architecture, and interaction design.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) definition. Definition of measurable values that demonstrates how effectively a solution or experience is achieving key business objectives.
• User scenarios definition. Detailed descriptions of user macrointeractions and why they need them.
• Use cases definition. Definition of specific microinteractions where an experience may be useful to a user as well as potential situations in which the responding system receives an external request and responds to it.
• Technical requirements definition. Definition of specific technical issues — architectural, availability, operational, performative, security, etc. — that must be considered to feasibly and successfully complete a project.

Step five: Rationale.

Step five illustration by Travis Avery from NounProject.com.

In this step, we aggregate all the work-to-date into the Experience Transformation process’ first grand deliverable. As before, this is often an all-hands activity, where each team member finalizes the relevant research summaries and artifacts they know best or have synthesized.

The purpose of this step of the process is not really about revealing findings. By this point in the project — often into weeks 5–6 — we’ve had numerous conversations with the client about what we’ve been learning and what those data might mean. We’ve also likely engaged these stakeholders in some the processing activities, directly, to take advantage of their subject matter expertise.

Rather, the real value of this step is alignment. Both that we all agree on where we’re coming from and share a vision — informed by data — of where we should be heading. We aren’t yet showing how to get there (hold on a step or two 😁) but, if we present the data insightfully, we’re rhetorically preparing the way for our solution.

Within step five, Rationale, we’re really focused on just one thing:

• Research results consolidation. A high-level overview that consolidates research inputs followed by detailed summaries and artifacts (supported by appendices) designers, developers, and clients can begin using, right away.

Step six: Visualization.

Step six illustration by Maxim Kulikov from NounProject.com

Here’s where the rationale meets the road.

With our research (momentarily) behind us, and our ready-to-use artifacts in hand, we begin visualizing what the solution might look like. This view begins, necessarily, from a high-vantage strategic viewpoint. Frankly, a lot of agencies and consultancies are really good at this — taking research results and connecting them to strategic goals. But, also frankly, most agencies and consultancies leave it at that.

Providing a strategic framework is really only doing half the job. If we’re going to present a strategic solution, we have to break that down further and show exactly how, tactically, we can make that vision a reality. And we have to do it visually, so all parties involved can see what the project is going to look like and how it’s going to live up to its promises.

The goal of this step isn’t to present final designs or technical architecture. Ours is an iterative process and this is just the first draft. Creating the solution is a whole other process and further creative and development remain as we work through the details of project delivery. What we’re trying to show is just the tip of the iceberg — enough to suggest the mass of work yet unseen and offer view enough to guide future work.

Within step six, Visualization, our toolkit includes:

• Strategic concept design. A research-informed vision of what the solution needs to accomplish to meet project objectives and the context in which that vision should be assessed, including KPIs, differentiators, value propositions, and more.
• Tactical concept design. A research-informed plan of how the solution will meet its strategic goals, detailing discrete components and initiatives and specifying — to their highest degree possible — their individual impacts and costs.
• Technical architecture. Synthesis of functional and non-functional requirements into a system design of discrete service and software components.

Step seven: Recommendation.

Step seven illustration by Travis Avery from NounProject.com

Like step five, Rationale, step seven consolidates prior materials into a single narrative describing both our high-level strategy and our ground-level tactics. It illustrates how our recommended solution meets project needs and requirements while delivering for and exceeding client and user expectations within each of those segments’ context.

It’s a tall order, to be sure. And, as with many steps above, is often an all-hands effort. But in combination with the research results consolidation deliverable, the effect is oftentimes dramatic: The presentation of the project problem, an alignment on the data surrounding that problem, a collection of meaningful artifacts which show the way beyond the problem, and now — beautifully rendered — a concrete image of the transformed future. Maybe just the tip of the iceberg, but the future, nonetheless.

Within step seven, Recommendation, we’re really focused on just one thing:

• Strategic + tactical recommendations. A synthesis of all discovery activities focused around high-level and ground-level recommendations with corroborating rationale and data and a preview of the solution to come.

Where do we go from here?

This isn’t where our Experience Transformation process ends. This is where the work of delivering begins.

From a project perspective, the next step is to use the strategic & tactical recommendations discussion as a jumping off point into a much larger — and impossible to scope until this point — process of creation, testing, and delivery of the promised solution.

From an ideological perspective, the next step is to think about how you might apply this process to your work — in or out of the office. The great strength of any design-thinking process is that it can be applied to any problem. And the more you make yourself an expert in that process, the more at ease you’ll be applying to a wider variety of issues (I’ve even applied it to parenting!).

As you’ve likely noticed, the walkthrough above does not break down every detail of our Experience Transformation process. But the larger motions of the process are repeatable and effective. The unspoken details outline precisely how we follow the process, but you can achieve similar results with your own intricacies. This is a universal process open to interpretation. But if you take the time to become an expert at it, you will see improved, more consistent results.

Let’s begin your Experience Transformation.

We’re excited to show you how Sharpen’s premier team of creative problem solvers (with their fingers on design thinking, technology, architecture, and more) is the right team to help you. Because we do a lot more than just create beautiful, functional solutions — and that “lot more” informs how we approach every problem.

Contact us for a free remote consultation with our innovation leaders to see how we can help you and your company bring your visions to life and be more innovative than ever.

This article was originally published at:
https://www.sharpen.partners/blog/experience-transformation

At Sharpen, innovation is our only business.

Sharpen is an omnichannel experience-design agency whose nimble and diverse team of veteran creatives use empathy and design-thinking to create exceptional solutions for real problems.

Our design-thinking approach identifies the sweet spot between business needs, technical requirements, and user insights. And our veteran design teams create those unique experiences for users and customers across any platform. And behind the scenes.

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