I have been thinking though a series of posts that will culminate in another book, “Opportunity Mapping: A Working through Screens Sketchbook.” As mentioned in an earlier post, this will be one of two “sketchbooks” that will show ways to bring “Working through Screens” 100 envisioning ideas to life.

The motivation for this new work is in the opening thoughts of “Working through Screens.”

• “Product teams creating computing tools for specialized workers struggle to understand what is needed and to successfully satisfy a myriad of constraints.”
• “Targeted improvements in the design of these tools can have large impacts on workers’ experiences. Visionary design can advance entire fields and industries.”
• “Dive into the specific cognitive challenges of knowledge workers’ practices in order to uncover new sources of product meaning and value.”
• “Keep asking questions until you uncover driving factors that resonate. Create visual models of them. Focus your team on these shared kernels of understanding and insight. Lay the groundwork for inspiration.”
• “Set higher goals for users’ experiences.”

If valuable application design action starts with the recognition of an opportunity, then this thread of posts will focus on presenting some ideas of how product teams might develop shared understandings of where to focus their limited design attention.

How can teams move beyond top ten lists of “breakdowns” to improve workplace user experiences in transformative ways? What maps of design opportunities could push the boundaries of what might be considered core to application user experiences?

“Opportunity Mapping” will provide an organizing point of view and plenty of highly visual examples to answer these questions.

The plan is to create posts for these categories, and then pull them together at some point into a single Application Concepting Series volume (print on demand or free .pdf). I’m sure that I will be editing this rough Table of Contents along the way, and I will also link out to completed posts as this project rolls along.

Opening Thoughts

Table of Contents (this post)

Preface

Why Opportunity Mapping?
• Teams designing tools for the knowledge workplace commonly research how users work
• The communication of design research outputs has room for improvement
• There are ongoing opportunities for transformative design in knowledge work applications
• Designing the design problem could lead to new visual languages

Characterizing Opportunity Maps
• Opportunity maps are a way to thoughtfully bridge UX data and conceptual design
• Opportunity maps focus a product team’s design efforts
• Opportunity maps can range from exploratory views to distilled stories
• Opportunity maps can be built from 100 “Working through Screens” ideas
• Opportunity maps can fit into any system envisioning process

Example Opportunity Maps
• Four Types of Knowledge Work in Example Maps
• Index of 20 posts to be added here as they are completed

References

Sound interesting? Have ideas that you would like to share about compelling new ways to visualize user experience opportunities? Your input would be greatly appreciated! Please comment on this post, tweet @J_Burghardt or send an email to jburghardt@flashbulbinteraction.com