How to create transformational change using a product experience vision
We’ll go through what an experience vision is, how they’re used, what they look like, and how to co-create a successful one with your team.
Creating a transformational change of a product or service experience requires strong company-wide alignment and understanding of the desired customer experience you’re trying to achieve. However, communicating a future idea, feeling, or experience that isn’t tangible yet is actually really difficult to do, especially across a large organization. A great way to do this is to use a product experience vision.
This information has been shaped through research and my learnings after failures and successes with creating experience visions over the past year. In this article, we’ll go through:
- What a product experience vision is.
- How they can be used. Why it's important to have one.
- What they look like. Communicating the vision through a visual tool.
- How to co-create an experience vision as a team.
- The measure of success.
What is a product experience vision?
A product experience vision is a reflection of the ideal customer experience you’re working towards. They show us how users will experience the product by addressing known pain points or missing gaps without specifying the exact solution.
Sometimes the vision might seem boring or obvious, but if the current experience is disjointed and disconnected, by comparison just making the experience not suck is revolutionary.
5 years in the future is generally the ‘sweet spot’ for an experience vision.
If it’s too far in the future it tends to feel like you’re describing science fiction — unless you’re SpaceX. A vision that is too near tends to feel unachievable given current technology, resources, or engineering constraints.
Just remember, not all people are using the latest technology of today. There is usually a 3–5 year lag in adoption. So imagine that future vision is based on the advanced technology of today — but if everyone was using it now.
How can a product experience be used, why is it important to have?
A product experience vision acts as the ‘flag in the sand’ for the transformational experience you’re all marching towards.
As Jared Spool explains in The Experience Vision: A Self-Fulfilling UX Strategy, this ‘flag’ is used to set the same directive for everyone in the organisation. Everyone is “marching towards the same point of convergence, even if they’re starting someplace different…these marching steps are often baby-sized”.
This ‘flag in the sand’ product vision helps teams to —
- Plan and strategize the decisions they’re about to make and evaluate how they’re tracking along the way. Without it, you’ll have teams making decisions that stray further away from others, further perpetuating a disjointed experience.
- Generate discussion and speak to what your team is working on currently, and how it relates to the vision.
- Help customers understand what you’re offering and whether they should invest in a long term product relationship with you.
- Teams across the company can see how they fit into the bigger picture.
“Decision makers ask –What baby steps will it take to get closer to our vision?” — Jared Spool
What does a product experience vision look like?
Create a visual, memorable, and shareable story to show the future customer experience.
Storytelling is one of the most important techniques that humans have used since primitive times to pass on memorable knowledge to one another. When combined with imagery, this helps people align on a shared mental picture about what the experience looks like.
Communicating a product experience vision through a visual tool is a powerful way to —
Create empathy for the customer by depicting emotion and eliciting audience participation in the narrative at hand — Airbnb hired a team from Pixar to illustrate their experience vision. These were placed on display around the office for all to see. The emotive facial expressions and the fairytale-like illustration style encouraged the viewer to see themselves in the place of the characters and empathize with their situation.
Make a new experience easier to understand and visualise — Apple’s 1987 ‘Knowledge Navigator’ video shows a professor in his home office using a host of Apple products that did not exist yet — such as voice controls, and video calls. At the time, this experience would have seemed like science fiction but, three decades later, it’s clear that this vision had a big impact on the various teams working at Apple. It helped them see how they fit into the wider transformative experience for customers.
The video carefully kept the focus on the experience, rather than the exact interface or product being used — helping Apple communicate a new conceptual model and user experience that was far from the current day reality.
Explain a complex idea or concept in a simple and engaging way — In 2008, Google had artist Scott McCloud create a comic book, targeted towards journalists and bloggers, which explained the inner workings of their new product, Google Chrome. This comic book format helped explain a complex idea in an exciting, engaging, and viral way.
How do you create an experience vision as a team?
It’s imperative that the team who are building or changing that part of the product are directly involved in doing the customer research and co-creating the story. Don’t create something on your own and expect your team to embrace it — they won’t.
Over the past year or so at SafetyCulture, we’ve been experimenting with ways to create a product vision. We’ve found that the most effective approach was for each feature team to co-create their own vision. Keeping it small and making it themselves allowed teams to have more ownership. By contrast, attempting to create a single narrative for the whole company left us with a vision that felt too distant from our teams.
With several feature teams, you’ll wind up with multiple vision stories focusing on different aspects of the experience. We found these would then overlap across different features, which helped us find opportunities and work together to create a more holistic experience.
Our high-level steps for creating a product experience vision —
- The whole team must participate in the customer research process.
- Synthesize the research as a team to capture everyone’s perspectives and insights. The vision should be based on this.
- Hold a workshop for the team to sketch and present their own customer narratives.
- The team votes to select key moments that resonate with everyone.
- Pull those moments together into a single narrative that everyone is excited about.
- Polish and simplify.
- Share it out to a wider audience, in a clear, and engaging way for those who were not involved in creating.
What is the measure of success?
The ultimate measure of success of a product experience vision is if people are using it, talking about it, and referring to it to make decisions. You should hear someone telling the story to someone else from memory.
Your new product experience vision can become a starting point for developing your next steps as a product team. It can inform your JTBD, generate ideas for features, and prioritise your roadmap. Ultimately, if it’s effective, you’ll be using it to guide your decisions together as a team.
Hey, thanks for reading! If you’d like to chat, reach out to me on Twitter — or follow me on Medium for more. In part 2, I’ll be going into more detail about how to run a product vision workshop in more detail. Stay tuned!
