Table Of ContentORCHESTRATING EXPERIENCES
COLLABORATIVE DESIGN FOR COMPLEXITY
Chris Risdon
Patrick Quattlebaum
Orchestrating Experiences
Collaborative Design for Complexity
By Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
540 President Street
Brooklyn, New York
11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com
Please send errors to: rosenfeldmedia.com
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Managing Editor: Marta Justak
Illustrator: Nick Madden
Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster
Cover and Interior Design: The Heads of State
Indexer: Marilyn Augst
Proofreader: Sue Boshers
© 2018 Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-933820-73-X
ISBN 13: 978-1-933820-73-6
LCCN: 2018930392
Printed and bound in the United States of America
CHRIS
To my love Kathy and beautiful daughter Lucy for being amazing,
supportive, loving, and making me a better person.
PATRICK
To my amazing partner in crime Katie for her love, support, and patience.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is written by designers, but it is for anyone who wants to make a
greater impact in envisioning and making products and services in complex
environments. Complex, in this case, refers to customer experiences with
many moving parts—multiple channels, many touchpoints, and numerous
contexts—and the departmentalized, fragmented organizations attempting
to deliver them. Sound familiar? If so, you will likely identify with one of the
following cohorts we had in mind when writing this book:
• Practitioners of all stripes: You define strategies for customer
experiences, services, products, marketing, or technology. You design
physical things, digital touchpoints, processes, communications, or
systems. You deliver the objects, interfaces, platforms, or intangible
interactions that enable value creation. Or you help manage all of these
activities. In these pages, you’ll find new approaches that expand your
toolkit and facilitate others through a more collaborative design process.
• Leaders and emerging leaders: You work in cross-functional programs
trying to create products and services that enable impactful experiences at
scale. The common set of terms, models, and methods introduced here
will increase your ability to help others engage in making the future
together.
• Executives: You want differentiated, customer-centered experiences
while defining focused strategies and leaner operations. The concepts we
present will help you foster cross-functional collaboration, build customer
empathy, and activate more effective customer journeys.
Regardless of your role, this book will equip you and your colleagues to
design for better experiences, together. Bringing consistency and continuity
to end-to-end experiences requires new concepts and methods. Creating
broad empathy means helping your colleagues truly connect with your
customers. Leaping from insights to vision to action necessitates increased
facilitation and collaboration.
What’s in This Book?
This book is organized into three parts, charting your course from
embracing core concepts to orchestrating experiences.
Part I, “A Common Foundation,” explores key concepts—channels,
touchpoints, ecosystems, and journeys—related to understanding and
improving the experience architecture of product and services. It argues for
creating more consistency in how these terms are used in your organization
and gives you tools to begin to do just that.
Part II, “Insights and Possibilities,” outlines how to facilitate a cross-
functional team through the process of better understanding customer needs
and identifying opportunities for improving and reimagining end-to-end
experiences.
Part III, “Vision and Action,” explains how to generate ideas collaboratively
and craft a vision that unites stakeholders and inspires action. It also shares
techniques for carrying your intent into touchpoint design and moving your
organization to orchestrate experiences more intentionally.
NOTE
Cross-functional collaboration is critical to improving or reimagining
end-to-end experiences. For this reason, this book also contains
several workshop examples designed to help engage the right people
at the right time to envision orchestrated products and service
experiences.
What Comes with This Book?
You’ll find the book’s companion website here (
rosenfeldmedia.com/books/orchestrating-experiences). The book’s diagrams
and other illustrations are available under a Creative Commons license
(when possible) for you to download and include in your own presentations.
You can find these on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Do I have to do all these things in this book to
orchestrate experiences successfully?
We cover many frameworks and tools, but you will likely gravitate to
approaches that meet your unique needs. For example, you may find
ecosystem mapping (Chapter 3) and storyboarding (Chapters 8 and 9) help
you get the job done, while touchpoint inventories (Chapter 2) or
improvisation (Chapter 8) don’t resonate in your culture. The key: try out
different approaches and build the toolkit that works for you.
Isn’t this just a lot of deliverables?
No! Working collaboratively with your colleagues is critical to orchestrating
experiences. It takes effort and skill. What you do make—such as experience
maps (Chapter 5), experience principles (Chapter 6), and opportunity maps
(Chapter 7)—should be approached as tools to build empathy, inspire ideas,
create alignment, and take action towards the same outcomes.
You didn’t mention [insert tool here]. Does that mean I
shouldn’t use it anymore?
We are constantly adding, dropping, and modifying design methods in our
own toolkits. Those presented in this book have proven to be predictably
effective when designing for complex ecosystems with cross-functional
teams. In some cases, these approaches may displace other things in your
toolkit. We think you will find, however, that most will complement other
methods and tools that you commonly use. We also hope the book inspires
you to find or invent additional approaches to orchestrate experiences better.
Does this take a lot of time?
More complex design problems in large organizations require more time as a
rule. However, you will find that the approaches we cover can be leveraged
when you need to run fast and lean. For example, you can use portions of the
example workshops (Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8) to design small working
sessions. Or you could use the ideation techniques (Chapter 8) within a small
team.
Isn’t this service design? (Or isn’t this just UX design or
customer experience?)
Yes! And no! We’ve intentionally approached this book as a synthesis of best
practices, regardless of tribal affiliation. The service design, user experience,
customer experience, and other communities have contributed to the growth
of the orchestration mindset. And you’ll see us reference these practices and
others (for example, see Chapters 1, 2, 7, and 10). At their heart, what they
all have in common is human-centeredness. We will show you how to put it
all together in action, regardless of whether you feel you’re doing user
experience design, service design, interaction design, or [insert discipline
here].
CONTENTS
How to Use This Book
Frequently Asked Questions
Foreword
Introduction
PART I: A COMMON FOUNDATION
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Channels
From Theory to Reality
Structured by Channels
Channels Don’t Exist in Isolation
Channels Reflect Interactions, Information, and Context
Channels Support the Moment
Changing the Channel-Centric Mindset
Coda
CHAPTER 2
Pinning Down Touchpoints
A Unifying Approach
Two Helpful Frameworks
Identifying Your Touchpoints
Cataloging and Communicating Your Touchpoints
Coda
CHAPTER 2 WORKSHOP
Touchpoint Inventory
Workshop Objectives
Example Pitch to Participants (and Their Managers)
Agenda
Preparing for the Workshop
Running the Workshop
After the Workshop
CHAPTER 3
Exploring Ecosystems
From Business to Experience Ecosystems
Unpacking an Experience Ecosystem
Ecosystem Mapping Tips
Using an Ecosystem Map as a Tool
Other Sensemaking Approaches
Coda
CHAPTER 3 WORKSHOP
Landscape Alignment
Workshop Objectives
Example Pitch to Participants (and Their Managers)
