Making Impact Maps More Customer-Centric (and What's Wrong with Opportunity Solutions Trees)

Hey, I'm Veronica from UXpressure. Let me briefly introduce you to what we at UXpressure do. UXpressure is an online platform where you can build customer journey maps, impact maps, and personas for your organization. With more than 100 ready-to-use templates, you can speed up your persona creation and mapping processes. To help you build confidence on your journey and learn from other practitioners, we host community events on user, customer, employee experience, and all things journey mapping. Our speakers are industry experts that are willing to share their knowledge to help you design and build better products and services. We also speak at the events ourselves and share tips and tricks we learned through years of practice and numerous interviews with other mappers. On top of that, we have your Expressure Academy where you can dive into learning how to build journey maps, personas and conduct interviews. And do that all at your own pace. Don't forget to check it out and enjoy the event. This is the second time Debbie speaks at our event and we are happy to see you back Debbie. And last time was all about journey mapping and today Debbie will share her own approach to building impact maps. So without further ado, welcome everyone Debbie Levitt. Thank you, thank you. And thank you to UXpressia for hosting me again and the fun that we keep having together. I'm so sorry we've been working together so long. You have a slightly outdated bio. My third book is Customers Know You Suck. So everybody can check that out if they are curious cats. Hi, thanks to everybody in the chat. So give me a moment to, I want to share my screen and I want to set it up so that I can keep an eye on the chat. while I see my slides so I have to do a lot of slippery moving around okay so I think everybody is seeing my title slide super getting a yes from Yulia and I believe her um okay and uh okay great so there we go all right uh okay emojis up everybody here we go um so we i have just like eight slides today and then we're going to do an exercise um which you don't need to do anything with i'm not going to have you in the Miro board there's just too many of us so we're just going to write funky stuff in the chat and i'll put it on the Miro board um and uh let's see and please put your questions in the q a and at the end i will take questions until they throw me out of here. So that will be the plan. If you're curious about more stuff where this came from, you can check out cxcc.to slash space, which is my longer workshop with a lot more exercises. So let's talk about impact maps and how they can be more customer centric, because I believe many of them now are not. So let's dive in. And of course, you're welcome to disagree. So traditional impact mapping, especially if you Google for impact maps and you take a look. the different images it's normally visualized as a left to right tree starting with our key goal which is usually something that the business wants to see like more active users or higher conversion rates and then the tree kind of branches out we've got the next level in our hierarchy which is often labeled as actors these could be personas or segments or target audiences or sometimes they're internal teams as you those of you who see the slide will see the third level of the tree so again we're going down a hierarchy is labeled impacts now for our customers these impacts are often phrased from a business perspective so on the screen there's things like more referrals and i've seen increase purchase frequency or view more ads and then the fourth level of the tree is labeled deliverables and it appears to be high level solutions of how we will create these impacts and then once we've created these impacts we imagine we'll be achieving our goal and examples of deliverables that I've seen on both the map on the screen and other ones I found in the google images include things like increased communications and more sales promotions and the one on the screen here also says weekly email daily highlights, more new content, and then for the internal side, issue tracking and an FAQ. Now, this approach to impact mapping is credited to, and I apologize, I'm not going to pronounce this person's name well at all. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of Goiko Adzik. uh probably more of a ch sound on the end i'm still learning my eastern european sounds after just visiting croatia so please excuse me um but he wrote a book about impact mapping in 2012 and so a lot of this comes from that now i would say that this approach has a few weaknesses because those of you who know me know i am all about who knows what this is critical thinking if you've watched my youtube channel delta cx this is my critical thinking hat so let's put on our critical thinking hats and ask some tough questions about this standard impact map so number one Why did we start with a business goal? So our decisions and actions will be driven by achieving the business goal. If that business goal is not influenced by what we know about our customers and users, we might have a kind of an anti-customer-centric business goal. Number two, we built a map. Let's circle some things while I'm talking. We built a map. based on how we can push customers and users toward our business goal but where's the value to the customers and users why should they increase their purchase frequency or view more ads is that what they would choose for themselves will we really get more active users by having an faq what about more content do we know the types of content customers really want or need or are we guessing and assuming In a world where customers know we suck, customer complaints languish in our backlog and support can't help people fast enough, are an FAQ and more content really our top priorities? And also note that these deliverables are really solution guesses. We might not understand what users or customers really need, but we think these things will create impact and achieve our business goal. we've all been in that meeting where everybody is shrugging because we were so sure that more content weekly emails and an faq were going to grow our active user base and wow this is so weird but it didn't grow our active user base we have no idea what went wrong because it seemed like such a solid plan to create business impact and three We didn't map user problems or tasks. If a template doesn't include customers' problems, pain points, or unmet needs, we're unlikely to find customer-centric solutions. And current impact maps, in my opinion, aren't customer centric users and customers aren't in the conversation other than how we hope to manipulate their actions i've seen impact maps adjusted to add hypotheses experiments and more but if we're starting with a business goal and the users are pawns we move around the board this isn't customer centric it's anti-customer centric which i like to call customer periphery And I've seen, again, variations of these that say experiments and A-B tests and more steps and KPIs, but it still doesn't solve the diagram's core problem of not being customer-centric. And the same is true for opportunity solutions trees, which I'll go into next. These are business-centric. And if the customer is in the conversation, it's probably just questions about what can we make them do to achieve our business goals. The opportunity solution tree credited to Teresa Torres appears to be a cousin of the impact map. We still start with a business goal, so this can't be customer centric or user centered. Instead of showing deliverables and the business impacts, we map opportunities related to the outcome we want. We then map solutions to the opportunities and you might expand this to experiment. that prove or disprove your potential solutions. But this map also raises critical thinking questions like how did we know what the opportunities were? Now, Teresa wrote this stuff in 2016 and she says, we'll know the opportunities from generative research. Ooh, someone mute. We're getting sneezes. Bless you, unmuted attendee. So Teresa says we're going to know these opportunities from generative research, which is usually early CX or UX research that studies people's behaviors, habits. tasks perspectives and unmet needs we normally observe and interview people to get the details and evidence we need to guide strategies decisions products and services but let's look closely at an example teresa uses on her own website the company wants more engagement whatever that is and the opportunities our research revealed supposedly are engage with stories and share more stories okay it sounds like a social media website but now i'm suspicious of the research that drew these conclusions did we send people a survey asking if they would like more stories did we learn from observing users that they want to engage with stories more but they can't figure out how to do it or don't have a good way to do it I can see the risk of our so-called opportunities being guesses, things we wanted to build anyway, or solutions looking for a problem. And additionally, the opportunities found from good generative research shouldn't be written as features like make people engage with stories. opportunities pain points and problem statements detail the unmet needs that solutions might solve people are unlikely to have an unmet need to engage more with stories if we're mapping opportunities they should be solution agnostic and not based on something we hope to make people do an opportunity should be an area that our company hasn't yet explored that solves a real problem for users it should be customer centric so i'm suspicious that this tree easily could have nothing to do with good or bad generative research and once again i'm concerned that we're working from what the business wants which could be opposite from what a customer wants or needs maps trees diagrams they can be garbage in garbage out so keep your critical thinking flowing and look for garbage and then get rid of garbage So earlier this year, it's 2023, hello in the future, Teresa posted a video to LinkedIn where she said, and I'm quoting, and I also have this up on the screen, an opportunity solutions tree starts with a business need, the outcome, at the top of the tree. Next, we map out the opportunity space by exploring unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires. Some people ask, why don't we start with customer needs? a product team's job is to create value for the customer while creating value for the business if we ignore business value our solutions won't be viable over time if our products aren't viable over time our products will be shut down or worse our company will go out of business when that happens we don't create any value for our customers so to maximize customer value we have to start with business value Oh, did you have your critical thinking hats on during that direct quote? I know I did. First of all, nobody said we should ignore business value. This is a straw man argument. We can't ignore business value and business goals. We have to be considering those as well. But the better you understand customer needs and deliver value related to their unmet needs, the more business value you'll create. better word of mouth more loyalty higher spending more frequent spending so many wonderful business positives await teams and companies who are more customer-centric wow did anybody notice how fast this escalated i felt like she really created fear by telling you if you don't start with what the business wants your company will go out of business and that means you're gonna lose your job so this is designed for you to be like oh my god i'd better put the business first no matter what you might not question what she's saying you might shut off your critical thinking because you're focused on what it takes to not lose your job It's true that your solutions won't be viable over time without business value because the business is unlikely to put resources or budget behind something from which it doesn't gain revenue or achieve goals. That makes sense. But... Your solutions won't be viable nearly immediately if you aren't focusing on the needs and tasks of potential and current customers. I'm worried less about the solution won't be viable over time if the solution is partially or wholly wrong for customers now. Ultimately, it sounds like... We'll put business goals and needs first, and then we'll do whatever we think is best or good enough for customers within the box of what we pre-decide is best for the business. Remember that we have to balance business and customer needs and goals. We know the business wants more growth, more revenue, and saving time and money. We know that. But what will best serve customers and users? Focus there. Find that balance. I expect people who offer advice that sounds anti-customer centric, like I believe this advice is, anti-customer centric advice, training, books, et cetera. I expect those people to double down and possibly use more fear and logical fallacies because if they switched to all of a sudden being customer centric now that would undo everything they've been selling you so far which in teresa's case is like eight to ten years of selling you on on something else and that might be bad for her because you might have a lot of questions about all the books and training that you paid for so rather than having to explain why they now recommend the opposite of their own book or training i expect these authors to double down and use a lot more of these logical fallacies and fear tactics to make you think you've got to do it their way so keep that critical thinking hat on And consider what authors and trainers suggest, including me. Think critically about me. Oop, I have another thing here. Right, so remember, we already know what the business probably wants and needs. We might not know the specific KPIs, but we still have to find the balance. So I've seen that impact maps and opportunity trees, they're really going to help us see our assumptions. And then we can create the right research so that we replace assumptions with knowledge and evidence. But are they really helping us get in touch with guessing, assuming, wondering, crappy hypotheses, or making things up? not unless we are really self-aware and really honest about when we think we know something versus when we have the research and evidence to show it's true I haven't seen any articles telling you to mark anything that is an assumption or guess on these diagrams. So the diagrams are probably taken as wholly true and fact. This means we could end up with plenty of guesses and assumptions about users, opportunities, impacts, solutions, and deliverables that are totally made up. I would expect these maps to mostly be guesses, especially where we workshopped them. If we had great evidence from research, we'd be able to fill out these maps and diagrams based on that research. If we wanted to run a group brainstorming session, then the only thing attendees would be guessing at are solutions and deliverables. And these should be marked as guesses. hypotheses or untested ideas now pay attention here because we're going to be doing this one as an exercise after a few more slides this is what i like to call the research collaboration exercise or for short on youtube i call it the quadrant exercise because there's four spots you can write something here every project should stop and do an exercise about what we think we know about users their contexts and their needs What do we wish we knew? What are we guessing and assuming? Do we have outdated or incorrect information? Like, yeah, we ran a survey in 2017. Doesn't 2017 feel 100 years ago, everybody? I think I feel 100 years older and 100 pounds heavier. Sometimes we haven't researched users in years, and the data can be misleading. So this quadrant is kind of a cousin of a fog exercise. facts opinions guesses when we realize what we don't know it's time for research the more unanswered questions we have as we allow our project to progress the more risk we incur and the more expensive it is to fix mistakes later therefore you want to invest in early research as your insurance policy against mistakes guesses and uninformed decisions later So quickly the the willed practice this exercise but the way you can do it at your job is get the team together get them together virtually get them together on site however you're working right now get them together hybrid maybe do this in Miro or mural or something like that and just focus on a particular project or area of your products and services and let's talk about let's fill this screen with all of our guesses assumptions what we think we know whether that's about humans customers users partners or maybe about the technology or our own capabilities let's get all the questions out there now some of them will be out of scope and i will drag them to the side of the board and say well we can't really answer this one right now because usually someone will say what will someone pay for a future thing we might build don't even know what it is hey that's too many unknowns that is a guessing sandwich i cannot tell you that in the immediate future so that's out of scope let's move it over we'll have to address that when we know what this is but there's never a bad time to do this exercise you can do it late in a project especially if the team is wondering why an mvp failed or an a b test failed but it's best to do this super early when you're just starting project planning or quarterly planning or release planning or discovery planning learn what you don't know so that your team can be aware of the risk of moving forward without the knowledge you need and then your researchers who are probably cx or ux researchers can plan the research with the right methods that will answer the questions on the screen that way we can remind our teammates we probably shouldn't jump into solution brainstorming or solution guessing when there's so many things we don't know this screen when I do this with my clients this screen is easily filled with dozens of questions we probably shouldn't move too forward too fast when there's so much we don't know and that's a great conversation starter for your team why would we move forward when there's so much we don't know I've also seen some sites say that impact maps and opportunity solutions tree and some other derivatives and similar maps are great team building. But we need to be careful of these claims that you can just run a team workshop and create great collaboration and interaction. Put on those critical thinking hats. First of all, if team building is really done by group exercises and workshops, where are all the group exercises and workshops run by marketing, project management, scrum masters, developers, or QA testers? They all have work that we could all sketch or brainstorm. But how many of those workshops are done at your company? Probably zero. That means the excuse of team building. It's probably a lie, since if this is how we build teams, we would do it in all areas, all disciplines, all departments and all domains, not just UX and things that aim at the user experience where we're trying to strategize or decide or design customer and user experiences. Second, I researched how to build teams online and found mountains of articles, including those from the New York Times, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and entrepreneur.com. Zero of these articles said to hold exercises and workshops where everybody is trying to do one role's job. The articles actually suggested the opposite. Most of the team building advice included get to know each other, understand what each role does, value and respect those roles, lay groundwork for work styles and deadlines, improve communication, set measurable team goals, celebrate successes with awards and recognition, and talk about failures and where things could improve. That was team building. And third, I've often seen critical thinkers thrown out of workshops and exercises or never invited back to the future ones. The people in the workshops and the facilitators might not want people pointing out risks, mistakes, and all of the guesses and assumptions we're making without good research and evidence. It can't be team building if we're excluding certain team members. if we only want the team members who sit nicely shut up play along and don't raise any concerns this is theater so now let's talk about what to do instead i'd like to introduce my delta cx impact map and you are welcome to use it as it is or adjust it for what would work better for you but i've got a sample one on the screen and i'm going to explain it and we'll also try it out as an exercise as well and this is kind of my last slide so i promise we're getting to the exercises make sure you're getting your questions in the q and a for later So what if we created an impact map where the goal is something our customers are trying to achieve? We could map the current business impact, including numbers, if we know them. we could include kpis and okrs for how goal achievement will help customers while achieving business goals so let's take a look at how my map lays out at the top of my tree or map or diagram whatever you want to call it is our key customer problem or need in this sample map i've written frustrating and difficult to find the right products on our site Okay, so it sounds like it could be a business website offering different products or services, or maybe it's an e-commerce or shopping site, but it's just an example. Now, the next level of the map indicates some or all of the root causes that are creating or aggravating... this problem. So now the idea here for the root causes is these shouldn't be guesses or assumptions. If it's a guess please mark it as a guess because you'll want to do the research that validates or invalidates that later but as examples I'm imagining that we've done good research both internally to figure out what's wrong with our search and search results and maybe externally by watching some users use it and seeing why it sucks so bad so as examples i've written poor metadata customer knowledge gaps maybe there's things they don't even understand about our products that we assume they do non-standardized data sometimes entered by third parties i saw that a lot when i worked years ago at macy's.com they had so many other companies entering dresses and other things into the macy's database and the the data just didn't look like each other and that made search results really funky and the layout of the results not matching users mental models or needs maybe we gave them a list of search results when they really needed more of a grid style again we're just imagining that we've done the research and we know these things if you don't please do mark something as an assumption and again root causes should come from our generative qualitative research if we don't know these or we're not sure do your quadrant exercise and spin up a research project so we're not guessing now after this on my map i kind of break the map i don't have lines going to the next level because if there isn't a one-to-one relationship where this exact root cause is causing this exact business impact they're really all affecting all of them so we don't need to draw every line pointing to everything that would just make this a little bit uh brain uh painful cell you can break it there and not bother showing all those lines the third level of my tree is business impact because customers have this problem so this is the impact to the business customers are suffering and here's how that plays out for our project or product or company now in this sample map i've imagined that i've done some digging maybe i've talked to customer support i've talked to sales i've talked to data and analytics maybe i've read some of our complaints and tweets and voice of the customer so let's imagine that i've done the correct research and i'm not guessing and we know that because our search stinks we might have lower conversion rates people are dropping off they they don't like it they get stuck they leave maybe we're seeing um decreased shopping frequency people are not coming back as often as they used to maybe we're seeing lower AOV which is average order value people are spending less maybe they can't find the right things on the site and they don't buy as many things and also what about complaints and customer support I think a lot of us who work in tech and don't work in customer support forget that customer support costs our company a lot of money and especially when there's higher call volumes please hold we are really burning a lot of time and budget that we don't always put into the budget of the project and so we just push our problems down the line at customer support but this costs our company money and we could be saving them money if we had a better customer experience Now, before I talk about, well, let me also mention the last part and then I'll circle back. The last part of the tree is what are some conservative early KPIs and OKRs that we might see if we fix this customer problem? If we addressed these root causes and we fixed the customer problem? we're not going to fix everything in the third level the orange level right away it's not all going to undo itself overnight so that's where we need to make some conservative promises we believe that if we improve this search results to make it closer to what users really need maybe we can increase our conversion rate half a percent 1%. Sometimes even these small numbers are significant at our company. We don't have to promise big numbers. I've got a couple of big numbers here, but again, go conservative. Maybe we can increase our average order value 2%, 3%, 5%. What if we say these customers will purchase? twice a year instead of once again this would have to be based on our data and analytics and our research to know what's the right conservative things to promise so some of these might not be the right thing this is just a sample um what if we could reduce customer support calls about our crappy search by 40 percent wow that that could save a lot of money we might even have an exact number if we talk to some customer support managers and finally wouldn't it be great to have 10 percent 15 percent 20 percent fewer angry tweets about how much our search sucks and how much people hate our site that would be great that's better word of mouth and and hopefully maybe someone will even say something nice So the idea behind this map is not only are you getting your teams on the same page about the customer problem and being customer focused and what's causing the customer problem, which hopefully aren't guesses but are known. But we're tying a customer problem to the business impact. And the importance here is because very often when we go to our stakeholders or our leaders or whoever's kind of controls things wherever we work and we say, hey, it looks like our search and search results suck. We're getting a lot of complaints about it, even a few angry tweets and some customers aren't coming back. What will everybody say? Put it in the chat. What's everybody going to say? doesn't matter we're good enough they'll contact support who cares we have higher priorities we don't have time to fix things put it in the backlog we all know the songs of we don't care and we're not going to work on this but i think that if we could take real customer problems show that we know what's broken maybe we don't know how to fix it yet that's fine this isn't a solution tree this is a this is looking at the problem and the impact this is an impact map so we can say hey i know you might you may or may not care that this is what our customers are experiencing but we've done a little digging and look at how much money we're leaving on the table then someone might wake up and care because ultimately the business cares about money they don't care about users they can say empathy all day long and and they mostly don't care they care about money so you've got to bring all of this back to money and I think the more we can tie potential or real business losses and business goals going straight down the toilet to customer problems, the more our companies might actually care about being more customer-centric because we can bring this together without saying delight, without saying empathy, without saying don't you care about the users. Now we have a clear diagram that ties these things together. So quick, thank you for attending. And then we're going to do an exercise together. And then I'll be taking your questions. So again, thanks. You can check out my book. You can head to Delta CX. We've got the Delta CX YouTube channel. We've got a Slack and Discord community. There's lots of ways to connect with me. So please do. And then let me switch over to my Miro board. And I'm going to give you a prompt. going to imagine we all work together at the same company. Woohoo! I love working with all of you, all 900 of you. I didn't see how many people are here, but I'm sure it's like 900. And let me check, 90 almost. And so we're going to imagine we all work together and we've become aware of a problem. We've learned that people hate applying to jobs on our site. And whether that's because it's our own system or maybe it's a third-party system that we brought in, but filling out job applications on our site sucks. We have a long form. We ask people a lot of questions. We ask them to write essays to answer long questions about... their job philosophy, we ask them to upload their resume or CV, but then we don't parse it well, and we ask them to recreate their resume or CV in a long form with their work dates and their work titles and stuff. So let's face it, our job applications suck. Now, someone might say, hey, look, we should probably fix this, but before we can fix this, Let's do a quadrant exercise and let's do an impact map. Yes, we're guessing today. We're making this up. We're role playing. But please, in your companies, don't guess. Don't make it up. And where you are, color code those notes or write assumption on it or do something so that people can tell the difference between, you know, what's real and what's not. But in this case... we don't know any of this so put some stuff not in the q a put some stuff in the the chat room i think i'm watching the chat room um thank you to julia for recreating my central sticky note um in the chat and since i'm not going to invite 90 people to a mirror board let's put some stuff in the chat and i'll get some stuff up on the mirror board um let's think about what are some guesses assumptions unanswered questions things we wish we knew about maybe people applying to jobs on our site maybe the people in our company who are going to receive these job applications because if someone wants us to fix this we could guess at a fix we could guess at a solution but it would be so much better to know first So I'll get us started while people are writing stuff in the chat. I know that one thing I would like to know is... Devices. I want to know, are people trying to apply for jobs from a phone, from a computer, from both? What are some of those habits and behaviors? Yeah, and Preeti's pointing out they have to retype everything on their resume. Caroline or Caroline says, is there a process or application are users like better? Okay, so maybe a question here is, What's the best system out there? What percentage of people abandon the process? Yeah. What percent abandon and, oops, I can't spell. I'm trying to go fast. Abandon and where? Now, again, I don't have to run an interview to answer that. We probably have analytics and data that will answer that. Why do they want to apply to my company? Okay, why do they want to apply to my company is a curious question, but will it help us redesign a form? Because remember, we're saying applying at our, the form on our website sucks. So I'm going to, I'm going to ask you now, someone wrote, how clear are the instructions? And I'm going to write that, but I'm also going to remind everybody. that it shouldn't we shouldn't need instructions if something's really intuitive and a good user experience it shouldn't need instructions so I would challenge you how do we build the online job application that is so easy doesn't need instruction and that is a great question How do we, is it accessible and how do we make it accessible? Yep. Preeti says, at what point do they drop out? We've got that. Beth says, assumption. Essay questions are long and folks might be applying to multiple roles. Sure. So we have an assumption that people will fill out long essay. Oops, sorry. Whoa, wrong buttons. Miro has gone weird. Please hold. What happened? Did it log me out? I don't know what it's doing. Anyway, while Miro's going funky, let me read the chat room and let me react to these even though they're not going up on the board. Mattia says, why do we need to ask so many questions? How many questions are really necessary? That's a fantastic question. I hope Miro will let me back on my own board. And that's really ultimately research we might need to do with our internal team. So maybe our HR, maybe our hiring. what information did they need so let's put something here i must have had an internet blip we we lost some stuff i'm sorry about that um so what info do internal people need from applications super question and uh something that could definitely help us streamline this when we understand yeah i only need this this and this to process an application ej's here good to see you i wish i knew do people who hate filling out our job fall into a certain category is it just mobile users okay that's an interesting question Now we already have the question about devices, but we're going to narrow that down a little bit to, are people having problems limited to certain category? That's a good one. Can the application automatically fill once the resume has been added? Yeah, so I guess a good question here is, what about better tech for parsing uploaded resumes or CVs? Right now, in our example, And I think we've all experienced this and probably recently these systems don't parse our resumes and CVs very well. They make us fill it out again. And it's a freaking nightmare. Let me see what's coming up that I'm missing. Can the user email themselves a copy of their application where the system sends a confirmation email? I'm not sure that's in scope for this particular problem because we're talking about the application itself. And so I don't know if changing the confirmation makes application form any better that might be something to look at uh in maybe another study that's just my thought um laura's curious how long does this all take uh let's take let's take a look so uh that's a good one again i'm not getting all of these on the mirror board we're probably they're coming faster than i can even get my cursor over to the mirror board because i've got two screens here so uh let's see uh how how long does Filling out our application. Oops, out our application take. And also, what do we think is the right amount of time? You know, if it takes 20 minutes, do we think the right amount of time is 15? Do we think it's three? So we have to take a look at ourselves as well. Diana says there is a lot of irrelevant generic. questions. Right, we might think that our forum has some irrelevant questions on here. Also, I like to put up the assumption that user is at home or work. have you has have any of you ever tried to fill out a job application on a bus a subway car being a passenger when someone else is driving you might not even have both hands to try to type things on a phone so there's a lot of guesses now you might say do we need to move these sticky notes around a lot of people who facilitate exercises think well after we do this for some period of time i need to move these sticky notes around i like to talk through the sticky notes but i don't move them other than moving out anything that i think is out of scope like i thought the confirmation message might be out of scope because it doesn't fix whether or not it's easy to fill out our form so we've had a few people say some things that are interesting and probably worth looking at but not for this particular project where we're trying to fix the form the job application so i'll just kind of move those stickies off to the side and say out of scope these are for a future project these are not for now that's the only facilitation you really need to do because all four of these quadrants really say the same thing they're all just variations of what do we think we know that we might not know or we might not have correct or could be an incorrect assumption so don't feel like you have to move the sticky notes to different boxes they're fine where they where they are let's take a look even if we don't put it on the board let's take a look at some other things in the chat room I want to know what is an amount of effort people would find reasonable Sure. How long should a job application form be? There's so many questions we could ask about that. Should we require a cover letter? if we don't read the cover letter so you can see how in a situation like this we'd probably end up creating a research project that looks at users or candidates or applicants and then we'd also do some sort of research project with some of our internal staff like our hr or recruiters talent sourcers or hiring managers to learn more about them if we're making people upload a cover letter but no one at our company ever reads it That is an unreasonable effort and we kind of suck. Preeti says, do we have any existing research and how accurate is it? Yeah, that could definitely go in the potentially outdated box. You know, I've spoken to a company where they say, oh yeah, we get very high scores on our careers page and whatever. And I go, yeah, your job form still sucks. Congratulations on your crappy survey that made everybody think this is good enough. It's not. Let's also talk about quality because remember when we talk about customer centricity, let's remember to focus on the quality of the experience. And that would be, what is the quality of the experience? Are users having a good experience? But let's also ask our internal people, HR, recruiters, hiring managers, are we getting the talent that we wanted to get? if we're not getting the right applicants or what we think are the best applicants there's probably something wrong with our site could be the job description sure we should look at that too could be the site we could have a site i mean there's one system out there that i dislike so much that when i see that that's who a company uses i won't apply even if i want the job it's that bad Can the user come back and complete a saved application? Great question from D. Especially if we think we want a longer application for some reason, can they come back and save it? Now that is a little bit solution focused. It's not necessarily a question that research would answer, but it is a possible feature for the future. What about our job description? Serena reminds us our job description might stink. um Jan or Jan I apologize is uh what kinds of data are we asking for um what and grant reminds us about errors error messages suck a lot of people don't understand them uh workday errors my telephone number every time I put it in just when I think I know what format they want my phone number in it's not right for the love of god you know it's a phone number you format it however you want uh so okay we got lots of great stuff here and again you can start to see if i look at all the comments we have we have dozens and dozens of co of comments here and you can imagine all of these going up on the mirror board this mirror board would be full overflowing you'd have to ask people to start using smaller sticky notes and feel free to make a bigger board than I did so you can see how we would easily end up with 20 30 50 things on this board and then the sobering moment to have with your team is look at all of these unanswered questions we have about our external candidates our internal job teams, our technology. I don't think we're ready to fix this problem yet. We don't really understand all... of the right pieces and context and people for us to make the right decision remember someone thought it was right to make the form the way it was now so someone made some sort of guess informed or uninformed and now we have a crappy form so let's not fix it with more guesses look at all of these questions that we have um yeah you're still putting up great things everybody thank you for for that and your great interaction um Let's see. Yeah. What Jan wants to go even root causey on this. What made us make the crappy form in the first place? Yeah. Go. I'm sorry. Jan or Jan. I never know where anyone's from. So I apologize if I'm pronouncing you wrong, but yes, you know, these are some tough conversations we should have. How did we get here? So all of this can go here and then remember to utilize this, not just to plan the research that will answer these questions, but to have that tough conversation with your team. let's not rush into solution brainstorming let's not rush into a design sprint let's not rush into these other exercises where we think we're going to solve all of these things we don't even know all of this stuff um yes and questions go in the Q&A EJ says um let's say a researcher has answers where does that go on the grid yeah we've had some people ask about that and the problem is that sometimes the answer is an assumption And someone told me they ran one of these and their manager went around and added sticky notes with all of the answers, but they said they even knew that some of the answers were wrong. And so I would say if people put up answers, we will need to say to people, okay, it looks like we have some... information here, but we're going to have to check if this information is still true. This information, you know, where did we get this information? And maybe you want to open it up as a discussion. Hey, put up this, who put up this sticky note that said that 90% of people love our form. You know, we're getting... a huge amount of drop-offs and bounces who put up this sticky note that said 90 of people love this form can ask you where you got that from but again that might not even be a can of worms you want to open because you might say well someone put up a sticky note that says 90 of people love our form but congratulations that they have a positive emotion about it they're leaving they're not filling it out they're dropping off so a survey that said people liked it might not be our best day to hear because whether or not they claimed to like it, they're leaving. So I think we're going to have to keep those critical thinking hats on. And as the facilitator, make some judgment calls and talk about things so again if people have answers to this that's fine but I would say if you're the researcher and you've done previous research don't start putting up answers everywhere I would say you can always circle back later and say okay Before we went and did a research project, we checked what we have now. We checked existing surveys, we checked existing customer support tickets, we checked data and analytics, and we checked previous research studies. Some of these we were able to answer. Some of these we were not able to answer. So I tend to recommend kind of like a second pass where you answer what you can from good data. question some of the data if you think it should be questioned and then say here's the research project i want to spin up so that we have the most current knowledge and evidence that will answer these And Tariq says, I think the main push we often get in our company is that we know all of this. Can't we go ahead and come back later to address these issues? Well, the problem is that's what we're doing now. Usually a company is trying to fix or improve something it's already done. And usually the thing it already did was. rushed out and that's where I think the impact map comes in so we're going to do that next together but the impact and I know we only have a few minutes left and I should get to questions but the impact map reminds us that there are risks and consequences of not doing this well or not doing this as well as we could have and chances are this is how we got here we got here because someone said we we know what we need just put this form up it's good enough and so and um it's not so much that design and research don't have the weight to say no they don't say no i think a lot of us don't say no we're worried that people won't like us we're worried about what people will think of us and i'm not sure anybody else at our company does the same thing i think we say yes more than we should and we can't wait for someone to give us the power to say no they're not going to they're going to try to tell us what to do we have to exert we in ux have to exert our own power and autonomy in our own domain and stop being order takers and saying yes to everything so knowing that we're almost out of time and I apologize that some of these things ran a little longer than I expected I'm trying to slide over to my impact map Remember that the impact map is just a template. You can find it at cxcc.to slash Miro. These are where all of my templates are. You're welcome to use them and adapt them for your needs. But hypothetically, we could create an impact map and say candidates. are uh or x percent of candidates are not filling out our uh job application form and we have a large number of customer complaints okay what are the root causes some of these we'll know for sure some of these we might be guessing so remember mark anything that's a guess or an assumption as an assumption so people don't take it as tarik said we know this let's say this is an assumption we don't know this And then once we have those root causes, we can do a little bit of digging and map what this might be losing us. So for example, we might say impacts to the business. Hiring managers are complaining that they're not getting good applicants. That's a big deal. We might even have a sub. impact to the business what does it mean to the business when we aren't getting good applicants for our jobs it might mean projects are delayed it might mean teams are overworked it might mean more stressed out people leave so you might have uh business impacts with sub business impact feel free to grow the tree if you like so think do a little digging and figure out what does this cost us what does it cost us when people aren't uh applying Chances are our HR or internal recruiters have to spend more time going out there and looking for people. They have to spend more time posting to job boards, which probably costs us money. I know one company who charges a thousand euros for every job that a company posts. This adds up. So they have to spend time. They have to spend money trying to... do more ways to bring in candidates. These are the types of impacts we want to remind our company that this is the trade-off. Yes we have a crappy form but let's look at the impacts to the business so that we can justify and get the buy-in to work on this project to either completely reinvent the job application or significantly improve it. Let's not be afraid to completely reinvent it. We always say we want to be innovative. Go ahead. Yes, Sean says, can you get, can we post the link to my recommended Miro templates? And yes, they are, oh, Ana Lucia beat me to it. She knows it. These are where all of my templates are. It's just my short URL. slash miro cxcc.to slash miro and um that's where all of my templates live so i'm sorry we didn't get the chance to fill out this impact map together you can always make one and kind of play with it on your own you can always ping me if you have a question i'm usually easy to find um and yeah thank you tarik good to see you uh not just on linkedin um so uh so again we did a little bit of guessing today we did a little bit of role playing today but try this at your job and try to dig up as much real evidence and numbers as you can what does it cost because HR couldn't fill that job as fast as they thought or as well as they thought talk to some of the hiring managers have you ever hired someone who you didn't even think was good enough for the job what did it mean later what kind of money did we did we waste or lose so these are some things that we can be talking about and I think this will help us get more buy-in so where's the Q&A I don't even see it uh thank you debbie thank you so much for the presentation uh and for a very engaging exercise here i believe i'm frozen some kind of just give me a second yeah i know now i'm not frozen anymore so once again thank you so much the exercise was like super engaging uh and super interesting actually to me as not as a non-expert in customer experience So we have a couple of minutes for like some questions. So if you're ready to stay for another like 10, 15 minutes, so. Yeah, absolutely happy to stay. My next thing's in a half hour. You're going to have to throw me out. Thanks. And for those of you who still want to ask a question, you have a super perfect time for that. And while you're typing your questions, I would like to remind that if you're curious about how impact mapping can drive meaningful results for your business, book an intro 30-minute call with our team via the link in the chat. You can see it right now, probably. Let us show you how our solution can help you achieve your goals and empower you to create impactful strategies. And let's move to the questions. If any of you have typed anything in the chat while I was saying that. We actually have a couple of questions. Well, I didn't mean the recording, to be honest. But yes, we can. You will get the recording after the event is over. We have two questions as of now. And I believe we will probably have. some more so the question is the first question is from matia uh how does it i believe your impact map uh differ from an assumption map Um, gosh, I have not seen an assumption map. Let me Google that quickly. There's so many maps out there and they're all like copies of each other. Let's see an assumption map says important and unimportant known and unknown. So I think ultimately you have to find the right tools for your team. If the team responds well to an assumption map, I'm not going to tell you stop using an assumption map. Um, if the team, uh, puts their assumptions on there like the quadrant that I did which again is slightly different than the assumption map it's slightly different from the fog exercise these things have similarities and differences so because for me I'm trying to capture all of the assumptions and I'm assuming they're all assumptions it looks like the assumption map assumes that some of these are known and I want to assume that even what we think we know might not be true either because it it sucks and it's false or because it's outdated so I don't want to assume anything is known that's where what I'm doing is a little bit different than the assumption map and it looks like the assumption map also has some sort of scale for important and unimportant and I think that's a one-way ticket to making people in the room unhappy because I know if I were to put a bunch of stickies on a board and a facilitator slid them all over to unimportant I would be I would probably have some middle fingers up in my head you know you know the wonderful American middle finger I'd be like unimportant you know how dare you you know I I think what I'm talking about here is important so I think we have to be careful of things that come across as uh judgmental and things that accidentally belittle the people in the room like telling them what they've put on the board is unimportant um and I think that an assumption map with uh an area for something that's known is a one-way ticket to what tarik said earlier which is we're good enough we know this right look they're all knowns we know this you know and i i would rather treat the whole board as if it's it's an unknown yeah i love that anna lucia says imagine sliding your boss's sticky note into unimportant oh i'd love to do that so So I would have to say, even now that I've seen the assumption board, I probably wouldn't use it. It probably doesn't match my style. If you're finding success with it, that's great. Um, but I would say, consider the quadrant exercise that I've shown you today and maybe try that and see if it's better. We're same. Thank you, Debbie. Uh, and, um, another question that we have is from EJ, uh, the question. is here. Let's say a researcher or someone with relevant data has answers that address the issue or problem. Where does that go on the grid? Yes, and I actually saw that one come into the chat room and I answered it while I was talking before. And so in short, my suggestion was to not put that stuff up on the board because that's just going to muddy everything. The board is best when it's guesses, assumptions. I wish I knew this. Why don't I know this? What if we knew this? This might be out. This is an old survey. We thought we knew this. If you start filling it with, but wait, I know this. whoa hold on so I think it's a bit of a distraction and like I said usually there's a to me let's do a second pass where we take a look later on after the exercise is over what's on the board and do a lot of digging dig through previous research dig through data and analytics talk to customer support talk to sales talk to other people answer as many of the questions as you can internally and from previous research report back to everybody hey everybody we were able to answer a third of the questions on the board and here's our plan for the research we're going to spin up so that we can answer the rest of them so i would say don't add it to the board wait until you're giving people a kind of a preliminary reply and say okay we we looked into it and we have this reliable data that we can share with you the rest of it was unfortunately outdated or unreliable like I've seen companies this is just me talking right now I've seen companies base multi-million dollar projects on three interviews they did a year ago I'm gonna say that's probably not the best data that's too few interviews for a project this important so i'm going to make sure to say you know we thought we had this data because we did these interviews but now that i've taken a look at these interviews there were only three the questions are a little strange this appears to be unreliable data thank you thanks Thank you, Debbie. And you started out by saying, hey, of course, we do care about business goals, yet still. So how do you recommend balancing the user needs and the business goals when creating an impact map? Are there any specific techniques or strategies to ensure that both aspects are adequately represented? Yeah, that's why I designed my Delta CX impact map, because it's the only one I've seen that has room for both. The other ones just seem to have a place for what the business wants and how we're going to... punch people until they do what we want. But My Impact Map starts with what users need and then it shows how the business is also suffering because the users are suffering. So I think My Impact Map is going to be a better way to go to create that balance because we're really saying, hey, this is where the connection and the synergy is. people are having this problem and that's creating these business problems solve the customer problem and we've solved the business problem we solve them together so i would say we uh help balance that by remembering that the the business wants and i have a graphic i always put up on my show but you know the business wants more customers happy customers customers who will stay. That means money, growth, etc. We get it. Maybe there are some specific KPIs we're expected to try to meet, but in general, this is what the business wants. Fine, we get it. But what does the customer want? And how can we find ways to give the customer the things that they need, whether or not they want it, or they know they want it, give them what they need, and then show That's what we have to show. That's the true value of CX and UX and design and whatever is we were able to do something great for the customers and ta-da, it created these other things that the business wanted. Money made, money saved, time saved, whatever it is, but it's always money. Just comes back to money. We can pretend it's time, but time is money. And so I think the balance comes from showing that customer-centric or user-focused projects, make the business money, save the business money, whether that's in, wow, engineering didn't have to redo it, engineering didn't have to spend a month redoing this garbage. That's money saved. So we have to find more of those opportunities to show where the business makes and saves money because we did something right for the user. Thank you, Debbie. And probably the last question for today. In your experience, what are some common challenges or roadblocks that companies face when trying to go for customer-centricity in their impact mapping process? And how can we overcome those challenges? Yeah, so as I was saying earlier, I feel like most of the impact maps and trees and frameworks and canvases that we use now are not customer centric at all they they don't they're not even asking the question of what do what did we learn that users need what did we observe people doing their stuff and realizing how inefficient they are and thinking that we can do something better for them. No, I keep seeing these maps and trees that are just like, the business wants more money and more users and more growth. So, you know, what can we do? Ah, we'll send people more emails. Hands up, who wants more emails? Emojis up. You know, oh, we'll give them a coupon. Yeah, we all take the coupon and then we unsubscribe. Congratulations. Oh, we'll give them an FAQ. FAQs are content without strategy. I put it on a shirt. You know, congratulations on these weird old-fashioned things that we still think are going to solve our problems, but they're... rarely going to make users happy. I mean, when has a user ever been like, oh my God, they updated the FAQ. This is so awesome. Oh my God. Problem solved. So. I think that a lot of these maps and plans and other things that we see, really the customer is not in the conversation other than how we can push them around. And I want to flip that conversation and say, this is what we've learned customers need. And if it's an assumption and we're not sure where customers need or want or where the opportunity is. do the research even Teresa Torres who I nearly completely disagree with says do the research so you know we've got that in common and then from there we tell you to do very different things but you know it all comes back to do the research um yeah well it comes to the beginning right It all comes back to do the research at the beginning so that we're set up for success and we're not guessing so damn much. We wouldn't be guessing and assuming if we knew. If I tried to buy a birthday present for Veronica, I would have no idea what to get her. I know nothing about her. Zero. You know, she has two plants behind her. I could try to get her a plant. I could get her a plant she's allergic to. I don't know anything about her. I'm guessing. i haven't done my research and so we have to remember that in all areas of our life we try to do research first should we eat at this restaurant let's check the reviews let's see if my friend's gone there we research so many things in our universe and then when it comes to businesses spending millions and millions of euros and dollars and kroners and whatever we go like tarik said his face you know, workplace might say, ah, whatever, we know it, it's good in EFCO. It's unbelievable. That's the biggest problem. It's a big problem and we have to do more. That's why I'm hoping the impact map wakes people up a little bit, opens up some tough conversations. You know, if it opens up a tough conversation at your company, I welcome that. Yes. Well, I was thinking about. uh you thinking what do you want for your birthday no you know i was thinking about tough conversations within the company and you know that's some kind of a difficult thing but the one that should be done actually And that could even be true at UXPression. I know nothing about y'all. I haven't worked there. I haven't interviewed you. I've played around with your system. But, you know, what do I know about you? But internally, you might say, hey, what do our users need? And someone might go, oh, impact maps are cool. Okay, you make impact maps. But was that really what people needed? Was it the way that they needed it? You know, and that's where we say. did we research with people first? And I always want to hope that you have, but I'm just saying, this goes for every company. You might be thinking, what cool thing can we make next? And I would say, try the impact map. Say, what problem can we solve for customers that will also bring the business the positive outcomes it wants or less of the negative outcomes it's having? I think that's the perfect line for for finishing the Q&A session because it leaves us all with something to think about after we leave this event. If you want to see more events like this, make sure to check the upcoming ones at expression.eventbride.com or check the recordings we've got on this channel. Take care and I will see you around.

This was my live workshop for UXPressia on impact mapping, stuff from Continuous Discovery Habits, and how to recognize when we're not customer-centric. We then did an exercise that we can do with our work teams. Try it where you work!

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