Influenced by David Armano’s original posting about user experience building blocks, I re-drew an earlier slide about the mobile experience ‘narrative’ to create a more in-depth diagram in the ‘Armano signature style.’

If you design mobile services, you will often find yourself in the ‘ideation’ stage of the process, which is somewhere between bright-spark moment, having a hunch about a customer need and deciding to write down some formal requirements. A common mistake is to swim around in this phase without much direction, getting swept along by a particular bias or enthusiasm for the idea. It is interesting to observe that this ideation phase seems vitally important yet is often poorly defined, notwithstanding that good downstream project execution is essential. We shan’t get into the wisdom of the pragmatists view that ideas are easy and that it’s all in the execution. Good ideas are never easy.

What matters during the ideation stage is to think about the user experience as early as possible, meaning that it must be an integral part of the ideation process. Having found that such processes are often lacking, I recently developed a methodology for the entire ideation phase, one that I shall be sharing in a workshop and training session next week with a major UK carrier. It is an area where I can add value and where there is clearly a need. The downstream process of formal requirements and onwards is more widely documented, although the desire to achieve agility in this process remains elusive to all but the tiniest Web 2.0 back bedroom programmer and I feel the need to fix this problem at some point. However, ideation is my bread and butter, so I’m sticking to that domain for now.

The diagram below is one of the visual checklists for thinking about the mobile experience. It is not comprehensive, nor exhaustive. It should be read from left to right in terms of thinking about each part of the UX, as the leftmost pillars are related to the earlier aspects of the UX life cycle, such as service discovery. A key aspect of the language here is the use of the first person - ‘I’ - which I advocate generally for ALL documents relating to the specification of a digital product (or any other I guess). The standard use of the term ‘user’ reminds me of Orwell’s complaint about the passive voice. Writing in the first person forces us to put ourselves into the user’s shoes from the outset, which is clearly important. It also forces us to think about who ‘I’ is, which means that we start to think of personas from the outset too (which I cover in another part of the methodology).

Note that this diagram is aimed at operators, so the foundations are laid out accordingly. Unlike David’s diagrams, I don’t include the brand, business and customers as foundations. These are dealt with elsewhere in the overall methodology. In fact, in terms of brand, what I get the users of the methodology to think about are ‘experience values,’ and then mapping these to tangible business goals in order to frame the ideation phase to begin with. In other words, if the ideas aren’t meeting the basic values and goals, then we don’t get to this diagram in the first place.

Experience values aren’t some jazzy marketing BS, or another way of talking about mission statements and all the other stuff I see plastered on corporate walls and duly ignored. ‘Connecting people,’ might be a marketing tag line for brand X, but what I get people to think about is how to quantify what we mean by ‘connecting’ and how we could map the meaning to a set of business goals. Without defining these key values and mapping them to business goals, such ‘marketing aspirations’ get lost in a fog of corporate vapour that floats around the heads of the management team and duly appears as buzzwords in all the company PR. When pressed for a substantive explanation by any of the workers on the shop floor…well…I’m sure you know where that story goes.

The key to using the diagram is to answer the questions or complete the sentences in a brainstorm setting that in some way achieves the ‘friendly conflict’ of Debono’s Six Thinking Hats, which means that each answer and completed sentence must be advocated and challenged by different members of the ideation team. As I said, the questions and sentences are not exhaustive. The headings, such as Discovery and Unboxing can and should be used as prompts in their own right. The questions are just primers.

Feel free to use the diagram in your classes, meetings and slides, so long as you keep my copyright notice (please).

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