Mapping the Client Experience
Goal
Create an experience map to better understand the experience of being a client at Fresh Tilled Soil, and identify pain points as areas for intervention.
Background
Fresh Tilled Soil is a user experience design and product strategy agency that aims to provide white-glove client engagements. While employed there during the summer of 2014, I was asked to create a map of the Fresh Tilled Soil client experience to identify ways we could better meet that goal.
Relevant Skills
- User Interviews
- Field Observation
- Experience Mapping
- Pain Point Identification
Research
While experience maps are often employed as a means to an end, Fresh Tilled Soil wanted theirs as an end in and of itself. To achieve this, I conducted extensive research to uncover the full scope of the client experience. I reached out to over a dozen former clients and conducted phone interviews to learn more about their experiences working with Fresh Tilled Soil. Paying attention to their role within a client team, I tried to gain insight into the goals of their engagements, both large and small, as well as what they were seeing, hearing, doing, thinking, and feeling at each step of the process. Client interviews were supplemented with observational research with current clients. I watched clients walk into the office every day and sat in on meetings at all steps of an engagement.
Connecting the dots
As this research was going to be conducted over a period of weeks, I did not have the opportunity to observe multiple client engagements from start to finish. I needed to generate a thorough understanding of the client experience without observing any one client go through the entire process. To help address this, I relied on a combination of interviews with past clients, conversations with other Fresh Tilled Soil employees, and observations of each of the current clients at the time. I used all of these sources to try and draw a complete picture of the client experience. The data was multitudinous and imperfect, but having qualitative data across these three sources helped me tie the disparate parts of the experience into a coherent whole.
Beginning to make sense of the chaos.
Out of the notebook, onto the whiteboard
All of this research presented me with a tremendous amount of data that I then worked to form into a coherent experience map. To do this, I converted my notes and observations into bite-sized pieces of the experience and roughly laid them out into a chronology of a client engagement.
Insights and outputs
After many hours collating all of the raw data, I organized the client experience into five broad stages: Pre-engagement, Sales, Kickoff, Project, and Handoff/Post-Project. To make the experience map more consumable than two gigantic sticky-note-covered whiteboards, I produced a condensed digital version that we printed out in large format for group discussion. Working with other members of the Fresh Tilled Soil team, we identified a number of specific pain points in the client experience that were made transparent by the experience map. We held additional brainstorming sessions to begin designing interventions to resolve each of these.
A living document for understanding and improving the client experience.
Results
The experience map continues to be used and updated by Fresh Tilled Soil to understand the client experience and identify and resolve extant pain points. In a follow-up project, I used the experience map to identify a discrete problem and come up with a solution to resolve it.