ux

Volume 2 of Journey Mapping Icons out now!

04/09/2024 by Ben Crothers

I’ve just released a second volume of journey mapping sketched icons, containing 120 more icons. All images are in 300dpi PNG format, with transparent backgrounds, available for you to use in any way you like.

You’ll find some additions to existing categories found in the Volume 1 set of icons, including expressions, people, devices, technology, and buildings:

You’ll also find icons for some new categories, like weather, artificial intelligence, and digital lifestyle:

Who are these icons for?

This set is for anyone who likes to use drawing and visualisation in their work, to help themselves and others think better and communicate better when it comes to explaining problems and plans, and generating ideas and solutions. This includes:

Designers and Researchers – User Experience (UX) Designers, Visual Designers, User Interface Designers, Service Designers, Product Researchers
Product Managers, including Product Owners and Feature Leads
Project Managers, including Scrum Masters, Program Managers and Studio Coordinators
Marketing Managers, Community Managers, PR and Communications Managers

The icons not only come in handy for UX design (e.g. journey maps, user flows, task flows, storyboards), but also for business communication and generally spicing up any presentation slides.

You can use these PNG files in your favourite design software (Figma, Canva, Photoshop, Illustrator), presentation software (PowerPoint, Keynote), or even in online collaboration spaces like Miro and Mural.

Go check out the Journey Mapping Icons Volume 2

How to construct a great story

31/05/2023 by Ben Crothers

As I’ve written about before (and in my Presto Sketching book!), storyboards give you great bang for buck when you want clarity and direction in any project, especially for product and service design. Here’s how to construct the most essential ingredient: the story itself.

Storyboards can guide you and your team from problem to solution to experience to execution. They serve as explainers for an existing experience (e.g. a customer experiencing a problem), or as prototypes for a future experience (a customer achieving their goal using a solution). And by ‘drawing it out’, you can spot gaps in your thinking, and invite more effective feedback from team members and stakeholders alike.

A hand-drawn image showing how ideas can flow between people with storyboards — *Storyboards are great for clarifying and refining problems, solutions and envisioned experiences as a team*

Get your story straight

Whether you’ve never drawn a storyboard before, or you’re a seasoned veteran, it can be daunting to put pen to paper, let alone show your storyboards to others!

Never fear.

The most fundamental element of a successful storyboard is not the actual drawing. It’s the story itself. I’ve seen storyboards that weren’t that useful, even though they were sketched by people who are ‘good at drawing’, because the story didn’t make sense.

It’s the story that joins all the frames together. It’s the story makes your audience care. It’s the story that feeds their curiosity, sparks imagination, and keeps them reading to find out what happens next.

Don’t go on the Hero’s Journey

As a designer, I was taught the Hero’s Journey story format, the Monomyth by author Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. On one level, it’s easy to see how you can use it as a way to tell your customers’ stories: by casting your customer as the hero, you can then illustrate a challenge they’re up against, and your solution as the Helper or Mentor.

Even when I first tried to apply it, I found it problematic. For a start, the way of using it I just described ignores most of what’s actually on the Hero’s Journey, including the whole point of it: the Hero returns not only conquering whatever Enemy needed conquering, but a transformed version of themselves. That’s what makes so many stories so endearing. Plus, do we really want our customers to go through the Abyss, and Atone for their mistakes…?

The diagram of The Hero's Journey, but annotated to show how it does not work well for UX journeys

And that’s only the start of it. It’s been rightfully claimed that when Joseph Campbell combed through the stories of all ages and cultures to derive a single Monomyth, he basically cherry-picked what already fit the prevailing cultural narrative of the ‘rugged individualist’. In this way, what he did was falsely reductive and colonialist.

Also: is conquering enemies – even metaphorical ones – the only way to resolve things? What about collective experiences, rather than individual ones?

If you want to pen the next Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, go for it. But I think our customers’ and communities’ stories deserve better.

The Freytag story arc

There’s no doubt that stories of challenge and achievement have a huge pull on us, and it’d be rude if I didn’t mention the arc from Gustav Freytag’s book Technique of the Drama. Freytag rationalised stories into 5 acts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action (or final suspense and resolution), and denouement (conclusion).

This might work well for the story you want to tell, but it always still fell short for me. Being mad keen on storyboarding my entire design career, and wanting to find a repeatable successful story framework that worked for me, my team, and other design teams, I extracted the best of what I could from these two and made my own narrative structure:

The Presto Sketching story structure

This story structure is purpose-built for product and service teams, but also works for change management projects as well, where you need to show an experience that involves either a problem with a negative impact, or a solution with a positive benefit.

And it goes thus:

A diagram showing the Presto Sketching 6-step story structure

I’ve done a screenshot of these stickies in Miro, to show that you can construct your story using words and simple sticky notes, whether real sticky notes, or digital. Let’s take a look:

CONTEXT – Set the scene. Who is the story about? Where is this character or protagonist? Why are they there, or what is their goal? This helps your audience to know exactly what’s going on.
TRIGGER – Show the motivation. What is the unmet need or problem? Without this, it’ll be hard for your audience to care about what’s going on.
SEARCH – Wind up your character, and let them go. What does your character do first (and do next), to try to solve their unmet need or problem?
KEY – Show what’s new. What’s the main feature or change that unlocks success from here on in?
ACTION – Let your character go again. What do they do next, that involves the feature or change that they have found?

At this point, your story structure will be different depending on what you intend to show:

WIN – Show the achievement. What’s the end-game, or benefit? How does your character achieve their goal? OR
LOSS – Show the frustration. What’s the negative impact? What is your character left with?

How to use this Presto Sketching story structure

You can use this structure as a way to synthesise and translate the various elements you have into a visual story that your audience can read and act on, based on the 6 ‘stages’ listed above.

Step 1: Set your goal

Decide what the goal of your story is going to be. This includes:

What is the main point you want to make with your story (and then storyboard)? Is it to explain a situation that needs attention/fixing? Is it to show a new idea in action?
Who is your main audience? What is their perspective on the subject of this story? How close or distant are they to the subject matter? What’s in it for them?
What action do you want them to take? As pleasant as it will be for people to read your story/storyboard, there needs to be a clear point to it. Do you need to raise awareness? Clarify and educate? Get them to empathise? If so, why? Do they need to make a decision of some sort?

Example:

Some how-to details on the Presto Sketching story structure

Step 2: Gather your material

You’ll probably need some material to translate into your story. This could include:

Customer interviews, survey responses, customer quotes, personas/archetypes, and other authentic user research and analysis
Product/service usage data
Existing journey maps and service blueprints
Existing or new ideas for user interfaces, processes, other other aspects of the experience or change you area designing
Existing or new product/service ideas, and ideas for how your customers/employees will use them

Step 3: Get 6 sticky notes

Whether you use physical or digital sticky notes is up to you. Both are quick and cheap to use.

Step 4: Get writing

Label each of the 6 sticky notes with the stage names above (including whether you choose WIN or LOSS). Then, try to write a succinct sentence describing each stage. Note: one stage doesn’t have to equal one scene in your storyboard; it might end up being one frame or several frames. That doesn’t matter right now.

Example:

Set yourself up for storyboarding success

Congratulations! Now you have the bones of your story. You have a sound, logical structure that has a beginning, middle and end, and that unites the various essential elements into a coherent whole.

From here, you’re ready to draw your storyboard. This can take several forms – office paper, large long gallery-style sheet of paper, PowerPoint slides, Miro canvas, you name it – but now you have a story that you can tell, and you can adapt to any of these media.

…and drawing the storyboard will be the subject of another blog post. 😉

So, what do you think of this structure? Try it out. I’m interested to know how it works for you, and how you might adapt it for your team and your project.

Why your project needs storyboarding

31/05/2023 by Ben Crothers

There’s that fantastic time in any product or service design project where an idea is just starting to take shape, and spread its wings. Will it be The Next Big Thing? Will it be able to stand up to the barrage of oncoming questions, like: will it resonate with your target audience? How will it work? Is it even feasible?

That’s where storyboards are your friend, and the best way to help your idea spread those wings, and be ready for those questions.

Storyboards are sets of frames with pictures and narrative text, organised as a sequence to be read as a story. They’re very useful for when an idea is too hard or conceptual or expensive to prototype. You can sketch out your idea using a sequence of simple pictures arranged like a comic, to show the context of that idea: who is experiencing the idea, what they do, how they do it, when they do it, and why.

Why storyboarding is so effective for any team project

As far as design asset bang for buck goes, it’s hard to go past storyboards. They not only capture and communicate an experience so fast and so well, they also double as a prototyping tool; the act of drawing a storyboard helps you to understand and test your own ideas.

Storyboards came from the world of film. They bring the various elements of the craft of cinema – such as script, characters, location, and of course the plot – to life in a unified way that others can start to see how it all comes together.

An example of a storyboard I drew to bring an early mobile experience to life — A storyboard I drew to bring an early mobile experience to life

Storyboards are an important way to visualise stories involved in user experience design:

Illustrating an existing experience, often showing a particular problem in the experience, and its negative impact on people
Illustrating an envisioned experience, showing a solution and the benefits of that solution
Showing state differences in products and services where interface designs wouldn’t be enough, such as showing differences based on different times of the day, different locations, or different personas/archetypes

They are also very handy when it comes to envisioning, prototyping and planning other kinds of experiences, like:

Change management envisioning and roll-outs
E-learning content and training videos
Explainer videos and promotion videos
Games
Video advertisements

What storyboards are not

Here’s how storyboards differ from other assets created in the world of product and service design:

Journey maps – journey maps offer a schematic view of an experience from a single user’s perspective, showing how a string of actions leads (or in some cases doesn’t lead) to a goal, and often how that journey feels. Journey maps are useful for visually summarising many different aspects of an experience – such as pain points, opportunities, sentiment – as a single map, in a way that just wouldn’t fit on a storyboard.

Service blueprints – service blueprints are similar to journey maps, but usually replace indications of how the journey feels, with much more information about what the journey includes from a system perspective, covering all user types. This means that what happens behind the scenes (or off-stage) is visually captured as well as what happens from the user’s perspective (on-stage). This can include internal teams, processes and systems, such as customer support resources and approval processes.

User flows – user flows are a schematic view of the experience from a task perspective. They typically show a flowchart of the sequence of actions and decision points linked together, usually outside of time. They capture what happens, rather than how, or how long.

Screenflows – screenflows and user flows are often interchangeable, but screenflows show the experience from the interface perspective. They tend to be sets of simplified screen designs or wireframes. They are useful for understanding how a given task/s is/are achieved across various screens and interface elements on a website, application, or other product, rather than who is doing the actions, or when.

What makes a great storyboard for your project?

Storyboards are best used as instruments of process, not product. In other words, they are best used to stimulate discussion, not seek approval. They are best used as prototypes, sketches only, made to inform others and get feedback about how an idea works, rather than being a fully-formed aesthetically-pleasing product about what the idea is.

A photo of a team at Pixar discussing a movie, surrounded by storyboards — *Director Pete Docter during a meeting for Pixar’s Inside Out. Note the various storyboards around.*

Storyboards should focus on being:

Quick – they take hours – rather than days or weeks – to create

An example of a simple but effective storyboard — *This is a simple storyboard from a team at BBC. Note how rough and ready it is, and yet conveys the story it needs to.*

Cheap – they are created using simple tools like pencil, sticky notes and paper, possibly some pre-made templated elements (rather than needing sophisticated software and training), before needing to spend any great amounts of money.

Another example of a simple storyboard — *A simple storyboard by Bryant Hodson*

Evocative – they should capture your audience’s attention, and help anchor discussion to how to improve the experience, not how to make the solution. In a now-famous move, Airbnb hired Pixar animator Nick Sung to bring specific moments in their customers’ experiences to life (code-named “Snow White”), and posted them around the organisation’s office walls.

An example of a storyboard used in UX strategy at Airbnb — *A single frame and a look at some of the other storyboard frames from Nick Sung, for Airbnb*

Unifying – storyboards are great at giving everyone – from designers to developers to customer support agents to managers – a common language to use, to discuss and improve customer experiences or employee experiences.

An example storyboard with added UX details under each panel — *A storyboard for a fictitious startup called You’re In, by Jordan Husney. Notice how you can arrange other information (in this case potential projects to prioritise) under each frame.*

Minimal – they should focus on the essence of what needs to be communicated and validated. This includes the level of detail and draughtsmanship finesse; when it comes to communicating the idea of a house, a simple blocky rendering of a house is the same as a professionally-drawn house, or a computer-generated image of a house. In cases like these, simple drawings are usually better, because extraneous distracting details can be omitted, e.g. age and style, size, materials.

As author Scott McCloud says, they focus on amplification through simplification.

What you need to create a storyboard

I’ll get into how to draw storyboards in another post, but for now, it’s good to know that you need the following elements to set yourself – and the idea that you want to communicate – up for success:

A user type – Who is your main character?
A goal – Why is the character doing what they’re doing?
An audience – Who will read this storyboard, and what do you want from them? Are you wanting to persuade them about fixing a particular problem? Or for them to provide feedback on a particular solution? Or to empathise with customers in a particular way?
A story – All of these elements come together and are brought to life through the story itself, or a sequence of events that is usually meant to engage your audience’s head (how does it relate to their knowledge and experience), heart (what does it mean to them) and hands (what do you want them to do).

That last element – crafting your story – is the subject of another post too.

Mapping your user’s day with the User Clock Sketch

28/06/2019 by Ben Crothers

See your user’s experience of their day through their eyes with the User Clock Sketch.

The power of mapping user experiences

Are you involved in making products and services for customers and communities? If so, you’ll know how important it is to make sure your offering matches what they need. A standard way of connecting user research to making products and services is to visually map out the journeys that they go through, using techniques like journey mapping, user story mapping, and service blueprinting.

The synthesis stage in the Double Diamond of design, showing where journey mapping usually happens

These visual tools are really effective. They’re a great way to – quite literally – get people from various parts of the business ‘on the same page’. They help everyone to see where the pain points are in a user journey, and where opportunities might be, too. Often more importantly, they help everyone to get a shared understanding of how all the various individual parts (from their perspective) relate as a whole, according to a common reference point. The user’s perspective.

A user journey map (or customer journey map), for example, is more than just boxes and arrows. It can show what a particular persona/user type is doing (tasks), thinking (expectations, decisions) and feeling, as they use one or more of your products and services. This is a bit different to user story maps and Indi Young’s mental model diagrams, which are usually independent of your product.

User journey mapping is versatile

User journey maps, and the act of mapping as a team, can be applied in different ways. You can map out existing experiences, along with pain points, workarounds that the user type is doing, and opportunities for improvement. You can also map out envisioned experiences, where you have redesigned the experience to fix those pain points and take hold of those opportunities. In fact, an envisioned user journey map is like a new prototype, to show all the benefits of the new experience before going ahead and building anything.

Limitations with some mapping

As great as these patterns are, though, the way the information is arranged is still often according to your particular product or service. This means that there are some limitations:

Hard to scope – It’s sometimes hard to know where the journey map should start and stop, and can seem somewhat contrived
Susceptible to bias – The nature of scoping a map to show a particular type of user achieving a particular goal in a particular ‘happy’ scenario means we’re making lots of decisions to keep it convenient for us to map. This can open the door to unconscious bias.
They don’t take external factors into account – It’s usually too hard to visualise all the other factors contributing to that journey (e.g. other products and services that the user type interacts with), to achieve the user type’s goal you are focused on
Branching, cycles, multi-tasking, oh my! – Some journeys just aren’t linear (i.e. this action then that action then the next action and stop), or there may be multiple tasks going on at the same time. This can sometimes be excruciating to try to map!

Try adding the User Clock Sketch to visualise the ‘customer journey’

I remember trying to do journey mapping for some scenarios where people use Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki/documentation software. It got super-complicated really quickly, because people tend not to just do one linear this-then-that task. Instead, people tend to read several pages in different web browser tabs, search for some page in some other tab, and edit another page in yet another tab… all for different tasks and different goals! And then the following day, they do it all over again! Agh!

So, I asked: “What if we changed the perspective we’re taking, from Confluence’s point-of-view to the user’s point-of-view? What if we mapped a day in the life of the user type we are focused on (in that case it was project managers), to see what that looked like?”

And that’s how the User Clock Sketch was born. And it looks like this:

The User Clock Sketch – mapping an experience around the face of a ‘clock’

This is particularly useful for journeys that are pretty much the same, day after day (ergh, that sounds so depressing, but it’s not meant to!). It maps the actions of a particular user type from the point where they wake up in the morning, to the point where they go to sleep. Rather than getting into the nitty gritty of each task they do, it groups actions according to significant chunks of the day that matter to them, according to their context. AND it quite literally puts the ‘user at the centre’ of the picture, how good’s that? 😉

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Draw your user type in the centre of a big circle

Whether you’re using one sheet of paper or a large whiteboard, draw a large circle, and then draw a simple figure in the centre. You can label the figure as a role, persona, or whatever way you are identifying that particular user type.

Step 2: Draw a line up to the ‘12’ position

Draw a vertical line from the user type up to where the ‘12’ would normally go on a clock. This is the point where your user type wakes up.

Step 3: Section the ‘clock’ into significant sections

I tend to draw a line radiating up from the centre to about the ‘9’ position, to show the time where the user type would be asleep. After you’ve done that, draw radiating lines around the face of your ‘clock’. Each line will separate a particular ‘stage of the day’ that matters to that user type and their role. If it’s an office worker, it’ll tend to include commuting time and a lunch time. It might be important that you include small but significant moments, like a daily stand-up with the team, or an important meeting with executives.

Label each of the slices of the clock. Dress up the labels with some simple drawings that show real things going on: the type(s) of devices being used, their location and environment, and other significant factors.

Step 4: Overlay your product’s/service’s context

Notice that so far you haven’t included your product or service at all; this has been all about them and their goal, their tasks, their job, and so on. Now, you can grab a different colour, go back over the ‘clock’, and add in significant information according to your product/service context.

This might include particular product tasks that the user type needs to get done using your product at that particular time of the day. Or it might include specific features that get used a lot at specific times, or specific parts of your service that get hammered more than others.

Step 5: Explore, explain, enrich

Now is the point where you can start to ‘see’ your product being used in a new ‘re-framed’ way. Either individually or as a group, you can explore the ‘clock’ you have drawn as a map of time, to provoke more insightful questions and enrich your understanding of your users.

I’ve seen this visual pattern come in handy for anyone in a multi-disciplinary team, but as a start:

Researchers can share insights from research and tell a story according to this ‘day in the life of’ picture, so that others can relate to it from the user type’s point of view more easily, and empathise more easily
Product managers can gain a deeper sense of what features the user type depends on more often and why (and if there are gaps), and where the moments of greatest value to the user are, so that you can align strategy, plans and roadmaps to real value metrics
Designers and content writers can make connections from feature usage (or lack of a feature) to importance and urgency, from a user point-of view, so that you can prioritise where you want to spend the most creative energy

Adapting the User Clock Sketch

Every time I demonstrate this sketch to others, there always seem to be more uses for it… which is a good sign! Since the pattern relies on a journey being cyclical, it can come in handy in a way that a strictly linear map might not. You can also change the ‘resolution’ of the time, too. It could show a typical week for a user type, or a financial year, or for as long as it takes to order a meal and have it delivered… it’s up to you and your context. Here are a couple of variations:

Two User Clock Sketch usage alternatives

Enrich the way you ‘see’ your customers

What I’m really getting at here is this: we have to see our customers as real people, not just consumers of our products. We have to see the world through their eyes, not just through the eyes of our products. And we have to use multiple various ‘frames’ on how we see them, by visualising them and describing them in different ways, and not just reducing them to conceptual abstractions using one familiar pattern or the other.

According to Capgemini research (back in 2017, at least), 75 percent of companies considered themselves to be customer-centric, but only a measly 30 percent of customers agreed. I suspect this gap is because a lot of companies mentally and physically engage with customers on a pretty superficial level, and view them as replaceable parts of the whole (as seen on a chart), rather than as individuals with genuine goals and needs to fulfil.

But I’m hoping that using patterns like the User Clock Sketch (along with other mapping tools) can help this! By changing up the way we visualise customers, I think we can inoculate ourselves against this superficial kind of thinking, and enrich our mental models of our customers and users.

This will not only improve the quality of what we offer our customers, but will ultimately make our own businesses more successful.

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Better visual brainstorming with the Concept Canvas

27/01/2019 by Ben Crothers

Making big decisions about which idea or option to invest in amongst a group is really hard. Using the Concept Canvas to visually compare apples to apples makes it a bit easier (includes free PDF).

I was in a brainstorming session from hell once. I was part of a team to help a telecommunications company redesign several of its systems into a seamless customer experience. The stakes were high, and the salaries in the room were pretty high too. The facilitator (a project manager from another agency) started us off by describing the state of the existing systems. Then with whiteboard marker in hand, asked us for ideas.

My heart sank.

I love brainstorming, I really do. I know some people will gnash their teeth and tell you that brainstorming never works, but it can and does work really well, if you ask the right questions, and have just a bit of structure. But alas, we didn’t have the right questions or structure in that session. And the only thing I remember that vaguely sounded like an idea that was written on the whiteboard was QR codes.

That was it, really. QR codes.

The problem with picking out one idea from many… will everyone else understand what it is and why?

I’m sure it made perfect sense to the regional manager that kept clanking on about it, but that’s all we had by the end of the session. I remember thinking that QR codes weren’t connected to the problem we were there to solve (nor to the customers and their situations) at all.

The problem with ideas

Ideas are awesome. An idea can be as vague and unrelated to anything as — yes — QR codes, or as grand and bold as democracy itself. A great idea can come from anywhere as they say, and the more ideas we have, the more chance we have of striking the right idea that will become the right solution.

But as great as ideas are, they can wither and die a premature death if others can’t ‘get it’ the way you do. An idea might seem clear and actionable to you, but it’s usually very tricky for everyone else to ‘see’ what you ‘see’ in your head. How is it connected to the original challenge? How does it work? What’s the risk? What’s in it for me?

Stakeholders may not understand your idea (let alone get onboard), but framing it as a concept helps!

Ideas usually need to be combined and refined into concepts. A concepts is what links one or more ideas into a structured actionable solution. It contains a lot more information that fleshes things out in such a way that you and a team could then execute on it. If you only ever go as far as generating ideas, it can be hard trying to refine and combine them, and it gets really hard to then make any decisions based on them, such as comparing one over another, or estimating how long it might take to make, or which market to take that idea into.

Refine and combine your ideas into concepts

The Concept Canvas

That’s where the Concept Canvas comes in. The Concept Canvas gives you and your team a way to add enough structure to your ideas, so that you can evaluate them more confidently. Like all canvases used in design and business strategy, you can draw it up on a whiteboard for a group to use, or draw it on single sheets of paper for individuals to use. And it looks like this:

The Presto Sketching Concept Canvas: This is an easy template to use to turn several vague ideas into a consistently structured set that you can then compare for value, risk, or any other factor you need

(By the way, you can also read about this canvas in Presto Sketching, the book).

Here’s a free PDF of the Concept Canvas for you to download and use yourself. 🙂

The Concept Canvas helps you to keep a ‘line of sight’ from the original problem you’re trying to solve and/or value proposition, to the solution you set up, through to the shipped product, service or process.

How to use the Concept Canvas

For the purposes of explanation, let’s assume you’re doing some sort of brainstorming session with a group to generate ideas on how to solve a particular problem, or meet a certain customer need.

Start your session with a clear problem statement or design challenge that the group must tackle.

Example: “We believe that people under 25 want to invest in property, but id it too expensive to even begin. We can help them by selling them small pieces of existing properties and then giving them the proportional share of any net rental income. We’ll know we’re right when first-time buyers of one piece return to buy more pieces.”

Ask everyone to individually come up with as many ideas as possible, on any particular aspect of this challenge. Wild and random; boring and expected; big, little… it doesn’t matter. Help get them started with more focused creative “How…?” questions, like these:

How can we attract prospective customers who have never considered this as a service?
How can we encourage existing customers to buy more pieces?
How do existing customers sell their pieces?

Now, of course people will (hopefully) come up with all sorts of ideas early on, and it’s great to capture those as phrases on sticky notes, whiteboard scrawls and sketches on paper. But watch out for ideas that are just one word. For example, I can just imagine my QR Code Guy blurting out “Referrals!” If this does happen, ask the person to add a bit more detail according to the “How…?” question, the audience and its goal.

Ask everyone to refine and combine all those ‘small’ ideas into their strongest three ideas, and fill in a Concept Canvas (above) to flesh out each of those ideas into a more realised concept.

Begin by copying the hypothesis into the Hypothesis section of the canvas.
Write in which particular audience type each idea is suited to in the Audience section (e.g. “Cynical evaluator, Brand new customer, Champion regular customer).
In the Goal section, write what that audience type’s goal is. It should be specific to the audience, and not a business or product goal. This helps everyone to really think hard about connecting their idea properly to the initial challenge.
In the Channels section, write in what channels are involved in the concept. How does the customer actually experience/use this concept? Is it through the existing company website? A new app on her mobile phone? On her laptop at work?
Now, use the main area of the canvas (Experience section) to describe and illustrate what the actual experience is. This could be a bulleted list, a flowchart, a storyboard, a set of wireframes… whatever helps to really bring this concept to life, and add rigour to your group’s thinking.
Finally, put a mark on each of the sliding scales in the Scope Sliders section for how ‘big’ the concept is. Just rough guesses is fine at this stage. You can use the existing sliders (risk, effort, value, resourcing, timing), or replace them with your own factors that would be important to you and your project.

Because everyone is using a common structure, the Concept Canvas now makes it easier for everyone to read and understand everyone else’s concepts. As a way of refining the output of the group, you can get each person to briefly pitch their concepts to everyone, and then them give them all three sticky dots to ‘vote’ on the concepts that they think are the strongest.

What you should now have is a refined ‘gallery’ of Concept Canvases. Even though the contents of each main Experience section might visually vary, you’ve given everyone just enough structure to help you sort through them and start sizing them for risk, effort, value, resourcing, and timing (or any other factors that you might have used).

Give it a try

As with all the canvases and whiteboard patterns that I share, why not download the free PDF of the Concept Canvas and try it yourself? There’s no harm in trying it out on paper yourself first, and then with your team on the whiteboard; I guarantee that visually structuring your ideas as fleshed out concepts will help everyone ‘get’ your ideas a whole lot more.

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Use the Product Box sketch to improve any product or service

10/07/2017 by Ben Crothers

Picture yourself strolling down the aisle of your local supermarket, looking at the various products on the shelves. What catches your eye? What is it about the boxes, packaging and labels that gets that product into your trolley?

Not many of us get to design those boxes and packaging, but imagine if you got to do exactly that for your business, product or service?

Or imagine if you got to design a box for you?

That’s exactly what this Product Box sketch trick is all about. It’s a way to help you think about whatever it is that you’re selling, from a fresh point of view. You use the visual ‘language’ of boxed product design (like a box of cereal) as a way to express your product’s value to customers. And it goes a bit like this:

Decide on what it is that you want to sell. As an example, I’m going to use ‘Project Manager’ (I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about how she’s trying to help her team understand how a project manager can help them).

1. Start the box

Sketch a nice big rectangle. This is going to be the front of your boxed product.

2. Sketch the front of the box

Now it’s time to start getting creative! Write the name of the ‘product’ at the top of the box in nice big letters (in my case it\’s ‘Project Manager’), and sketch whatever your product is. Make sure you leave some area blank for the next step. Note how I\’m keeping my sketching really simple:

3. Add the benefits

Next, think about the benefits of your product. What’s your product going to do for your customers? Why should they care? Write those benefits on the front of the box, too (up to 3 benefits is fine). Try not to agonise over the benefits (or your sketching) too much. Progress is better than perfection at this point!

4. Add the ‘ingredients’

Now, let’s get 3D: draw a bit of a parallelogram on one side of your ‘box’. This is the side of the box where your ‘ingredients’ go. This can be the main features of your product; the sort of things that customers want to check that your product includes, when they’re comparing your product with others. Go ahead and write whatever those ‘ingredients’ are.

5. ‘Open here’

Finish off the box by drawing the top (like you can see below). Add in something about how customers start using your product. Do they just open the box and away they go? Or do you want to add the price?

6. Refine your design

As you sketch this ‘product box’, you may well have more ideas about how to make it better. You might also get into the metaphor of the product box a bit more too, and you might want to riff off product-y things like ‘batteries not included’, or ‘assembly instructions’, and so on. Go ahead and do another sketch, and work in your refinements. Here’s mine:

And there you have it! It’s amazing how often we forget to think about our business, our product, our service — whatever it is — from a customer’s point of view, and the product box is a great metaphor for getting us thinking differently. Here are some ways you can use this Product Box sketch as an activity:

Help you and your team get a shared understanding about what your product/service is now
Help you and your team think in a fresh way about what it could become
Galvanize your team, and get them thinking about their internal value to your organization in a new way
Help you think about yourself. What value do you want to be in the world? Why should people ‘buy’ you?
Sharpen up your resume: what are the benefits to your new employer if they were to give you the job?

So, give the Product Box sketch a go, first by yourself and then with your team. As always, let me know if you try it out, and how it went.