The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision

By Jared M. Spool Apr 23, 2009

The team was happy to be together. Forty-six folks from eight different offices, traveling from all over the world, had come together for their annual meeting.

They were excited to be there. It was good to see faces of people who were often just an email address or voice on a conference call. It was nice to reflect on all the great things they'd accomplished.

Over the past 3 years, the team worked diligently on server reliability, eliminating dead links, and consistent navigation and branding across all 200 of the sub-sites. They'd installed a new enterprise-wide content management system, a better process for editorial work, and new application tools to help their franchise owners sell more high-margin products. By all measures, the web site had become a critical element in their multi-national business.

Yet, there was still an unsettled tone amongst the group. Given all the progress they'd made, they felt they still had a long way to go. They weren't sure what the next step was.

Overcoming Lip Service to Users

"Users are our first priority," is the executive team’s battle cry. Yet, when the priorities came down from above, they seemed to focus on business unit needs and technology solutions. Somewhere, in all those priorities, the first priority got lost.

It wasn’t that the team wanted to ignore the users. It’s just the demands of the business units they served and the constraints from IT made serving the users take a back seat. In the day-to-day hustle-and-bustle, the long-term perspective gets lost.

When the long-term perspective vanishes, it becomes difficult to feel like you’ve made any significant progress. Sure, you’ll have checked many items off the ever-growing to-do list, but have you really improved how the business serves its customers?

To solve this, many teams are turning to an old tool: creating an experience vision.

The Flag in the Sand

When you create an experience vision, you try to picture mentally what the experience of using your design will be like at some point in the future. As we conduct our research exploring best practices for experience design, we’ve discovered that nearly every successful team has actively created an experience vision that they frequently refer to. Often their visions are for experiences five or ten years in the future.

These visions act like a flag stuck into the sand somewhere on the horizon. The team can clearly see the flag, yet it’s far enough away that they won’t reach it any time soon. Because the flag is clearly visible, the team knows if every step they take brings them closer or farther away. If the flag weren’t visible, the team wouldn’t know and could wander off in an undesirable direction.

Having a clear vision helps the team understand if changes are moving them in the right direction or not. Occasionally, due to pressing business needs, a design change is going to move the team away from the vision. However, if everyone understands the vision, they’ll know when this is happening and can act to correct it. More often, choices are available and the team can choose the option which best serves the experience vision.

The experience visions of the successful teams all have the following qualities:

They are research-based
They focus on the users’ experience
They are shared across the entire team

Step 1: Focus on Research

A few of the organizations we’ve studied have one or two people at the top of the organization that just know what the vision should be. One company that immediately comes to mind is Apple, who has Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive as their visionaries. Apple’s success with the new generation of Macs and the iPod (and possibly the iPhone) comes directly from the visions that Steve and Jonathan have handed down.

However, most organizations don’t have a visionary at the top of the organization. These organizations need to get their inspiration from someplace else.

When no visionary is present, most teams find their inspiration from in-depth research of latent user needs and desires. Latent needs are things users can’t elaborate on their own, because they don’t know what’s possible. For example, few people would’ve told researchers they wanted home-delivered DVDs. However, through careful research, the team at Netflix saw how miserable many people were with the video store experience and created a solution that would catapult their business to the head of video rental industry.