When working on large complex projects where teams sometimes ‘lose sight of the forest because the trees are in the way’ I’ve found it necessary to capture the big picture. Known as Experience Modeling, presenting a more systemic map of the expected user experience opens the door for innovation and more holistic solutions. With research presented in this way the team can move on to create the initial vision for the UI architecture, workflows and interactions. The Experience Models become guides the team can refer to when they’re down in the weeds doing the hard work, allowing them to prioritise functionality against the schedule that better meets large workflows.

These models become essential when there are interdependent projects or teams addressing similar user needs, a UX model can highlight whitespace and/or overlap by giving senior management and other teams quick insight to the project’s intent, helping to align teams and avoiding friction before it happens.

The big picture

One of the drawbacks with traditional research gathering is that important information is disseminated over pages or even different documents. While a single map that introduces the use cases, personas, product vision, functional relationships, etc is inherently too high level to contain actionable details, it has two major advantages. First, it’s a good way to present vision to senior stakeholders, in a single diagram you can present intent and strategy in a short time frame. Secondly, once the team has moved on to requirements gathering and beyond this is a nice reference point to keep focus and avoid feature creep.
I usually print the map above on a plotter as well as produce a paginated version to aid readability on smaller screens.

Experience Prototypes

Asking your users what they want is not always the best way to understand what they need. Sometimes it’s better to envision the solution first. When a project needs both storyboards to explain the context of use and mockups to demonstrate interaction I combine them both in to a single narrative. These artifacts work best on long term large scale projects, I’ve only recently started to employ them and as such do not have work available for the public domain. However, here’s a quick demonstration of how I take storyboard sketches and animated them, it’s the same process for animating mockups and the two are edited together in to a single video the tells the story of user needs and then shows the viewer a conceptual solution, in under 5 minutes.