What is our Approach to Research?

Sustainable designs

People alive today did not have ancestors who survived an event, they survived every event. Every climate change, every war, every pandemic, every predator, every opportunity to leave nothing but footprints. They survived because they had good luck, good genes, and good ideas. They had ideas that worked today, and addressed their immediate problem, then kept on working for the problems of tomorrow too. They had ideas and practices that were sustainable.

Part of having sustainable designs for our products and services is our ability to anticipate the kinds of things that might go wrong, so that we are ready to respond when we see them, and ideally so that we can design the problem out in the first place. Our approach to anticipation is building a shared understanding though mapping.

Experience Maps

Exploring the human behaviour context of our product, through the mapping the actions, thoughts, and emotions associated with the experience we want to support, can help explore product ideas and identify parts of the experience that are not currently addressed without anchoring ourselves to any particular design.

Customer Journey Maps

When our understanding has matured enough to know the customer touchpoints where we want to interact with them, a customer experience map can help feed the design and start to focus on the customer and business actions that specific segments of the user population will need.

Service Blueprints

Once a service has developed sufficiently to be deployed, a service blueprint can be a useful planning tool for understanding what needs to happen within the business to deliver the customer experience we want them to have. By mapping customer touchpoints and their front-stage and back-stage actions and dependencies, missing or misaligned processes can be identified and upstream factors understood.

User Jeopardy Maps

Starting from any of these common forms of journey mapping, problems can be anticipated by thinking about the goals we are aiming to meet and how the properties associated with them might be lost or compromised. This is the basis of user jeopardy analysis. The analysis can be as abstract or as concrete as the maturity of the design allows. The more detail you know, the more specific your anticipation can be.