Design Thinking: Journey Map Identifies Opportunities for Additional Useful Metrics
I had the privilege of participating in a Design Thinking class with workshops, hosted by Web Age Solutions, taught by Nick Kramer and Caleb Ulffers during March. Design Thinking provides some new refinements, along with familiar themes, that help distinguish it from older design approaches. I’d like to share some things I learned because I think they can help you to capture additional data, to improve your understanding of your business.
The Journey Map, in particular, is the most promising Design Thinking innovation for Data practitioners. Designed to create a better product and experience for customers and for employees, the Journey Map is the result of a very disciplined and rigorous process. It’s an attempt to plumb the thoughts and feelings of everyone involved at each step in the business process. Customers, employees, vendors, all are subjects for this review. Indeed, there are several types of customers and employees and vendors, and each persona is given time for its own review in this process of the Journey Map. This Journey Map may go several levels deep on both sides of the table. The diagrams are detailed, and drive toward a deep understanding of what happens and what might be improved to create a better experience for all parties. Although the Journey Map is a result of this design process to create or improve a product or service, it can also be used as a map for data practitioners that shows where and what to measure for continuous improvement – for customers, vendors, and employees.
“What?”, “How?”, and “Why?” questions are used in the interview process that leads up to the Journey Map. Digging deeper provides additional understanding. Understanding the “Why?” leads to understanding the emotions involved, and sometimes those can be tricky to measure. Fortunately, the widespread use of emoji provides to us a lingua franca, and a range of smiley faces and frowny faces can be used to intuitively rate interactions. Behind the scenes, the emoji can be converted into numeric values on a scale, providing a means for analysis.
In Summary: Design Thinking has the overall goal of improving the usefulness and the experience of a product and/or service, for everyone involved. The Journey Map is a critical deliverable in that effort. For the Data practitioner, the Journey Map is a new tool that identifies opportunities for instrumentation to provide data for ongoing analysis and improvement.
About Bernie O’Connor:
Bernie O’Connor is a Director of IT whose other roles included Application Developer, Development Manager, DBA, DBA Manager, Technical Architecture, BI/DW/Analytics, Pricing Analytics, Computer OPS, System Programmers and Admins, Web Services, M&A and Divestitures. Bernie is a member of the IDUG Speaker Hall of Fame, and served as IDUG North America Conference Chair (2005 – Denver), IDUG Board Member (2004-2009), and IDUG President (2007-2008). Bernie is active in the Midwest Db2 Users Group (mwdug.org), and with the Evanta CDO conference. Bernie taught at De Paul University’s Institute for Professional Development, and has been the Senior Technical Advisor for an Educational Software startup. Bernie’s industry experience includes Insurance, Banking, Publishing, Manufacturing and Distribution. Bernie is an IBM Champion.
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