The map activity is a crucial step in understanding your user or customer. The version I present here is my modification of the map activity described in Google Ventures' Design Sprint book. The map addresses the Main Characters, Key Steps, and Optimistic Outcomes in your customer/user story. You'll use learnings from your customer persona(s) to start with your customer's needs to map out the journey your customer will undertake to realize your brilliant solution. The assumptions you made about demographics and behaviors are important to the map because they suggest the primary ways your customer might learn about, evaluate, and ultimately buy your solution. You want to be as fluent as you can with the ideas under each category so you have more insights into what your most crucial assumptions are. You will want to test those assumptions early so you don't waste resources building something nobody wants or wasting the wrong people's time.
What else? Your map should grow as you consider adding different customer personas (i.e., different types of people who might want your value proposition) and different ways your customers might find out about, evaluate, and buy your product. A side benefit from doing this is that you might be able to incorporate the discovery or delivery method into your value proposition.
Upon completing this module you should know how to:
conduct a map activity for a design sprint.
identify the components of "actors" (aka "key characters"), "key steps," and the "optimistic goal" you want your key character (user, customer) to realize from moving through your the key steps of your map.
identify most potential problems associated with the entries on your map (for example, if a customer has to remember her password, a potential problem might be "customer forgets password")
explain how How Might We? questions are derived from "potential problems" associated with any entry on the map (following the previous bullet, the potential problem of a customer forgetting her password is transformed into the HMW question "How might we help the customer remember or recover her password?")
use the map to identify key players, steps, and goals that are assumptions you need to test first.
Use a white board or large piece of paper (like poster board) with sticky-notes and Sharpie markers (see materials below).
Identify the components of "key characters" (aka the "actors" of your problem situation), "key steps," and the "optimistic goal" you want your key character (user, customer) to realize from moving through your the key steps of your map. Write those three headings across the top of the poster board: Key characters at the far left, Key steps in the middle, and Optimistic goal at the far right.
Complete the Key Character portion by starting with your customer persona attributes. List that customer, those persona attributes, and anything else that's relevant to the person having the problem or the context she is in.
Complete the Optimistic Goal next by listing what the customer has used to solve the problem, where the customer is, what the features and benefits of the solution are, and what the customer otherwise experiences as a result of using your great solution. Focus specifically on the gains your customer makes by using your product or service.
Complete the Key Steps: list sequentially the different steps the customer must follow from first experiencing the problem, looking for a solution, somehow finding out about your solution, and acquiring it, and using it. The point of elaborating the Key Steps is to allow you to visualize the different activities and behaviors that must happen in order for your customer to find your value proposition (solution), try it out, and enjoy its features and benefits. Do they go online? Do they need to go to Target? Do they google for solutions to their problems? Is there a poster in a senior citizen home? etc... Using sticky notes really pays off when you realize that you need to reverse the order of steps you already mapped and need to move them around.
Note: for the three different areas of the map, be as fluent as you can with your ideas and sticky notes. You are using the map to think through and visualize as much of the process from customer problem to solution as you can.
Take a high-quality digital image of your map and submit it through this google form.
Stacks of sticky notes
Pens and Sharpie markers
Whiteboard, poster board, or large blank background ("canvas" in the parlance of today...)
Whiteboard markers if you're using a whiteboard
Camera to take high-resolution digital image (e.g., iPhone)
You will create a map in class with your new venture team.
Win, J. 2017. 2-Hour Sprint for Busy Stakeholders. Medium.com, 6/4/2017. Accessed August 24, 2020.