Opportunity maps are a way to thoughtfully bridge UX data and conceptual design

Product teams may find it difficult to make the leap between researching knowledge work and designing concepts to improve it. In many cases, teams move into the spreadsheet mindset too soon, rationalizing and prioritizing individual ideas in disconnected lists.

Top 10 “Breakdowns” and “Painpoints” marked on process diagrams may provide a basis for many important innovations, but they can also leave a whole range of opportunities for improving knowledge work on the table. Where are the opportunities to make complex conclusions clear for users? Where are the delightful flows that surpass workers’ goals in unexpected ways?

Opportunity maps can represent both the “loud” and “quieter” insights from design research, providing a connective brief that communicates pointed and strategic questions for design ideation.

Opportunity maps focus a product team’s design efforts

It’s not easy to understand a complex job or established profession. When teams are scattered, they may reach for the comfort of visualizing detailed, literal design particulars before they finish considering big picture questions about their offering’s direction.

The poet E.E. Cummings said, “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” A design brief of thoughtful questions, based in data, can propel a team forward by narrowing the problem space where they are looking for solutions.

The act of mapping opportunities can help teams to have more strategic conversations about how insights should be distilled and communicated, steering their competing visions in a more cohesive direction.

Opportunity maps can range from exploratory views to distilled stories

These visual tools can fall on a continuum ranging from raw and granular to synthesized and summarized.

On the early side of the continuum, opportunity maps can become a tool for collecting insights that a product team generates when looking at their data through different lenses.

In the middle of the continuum, where the team has worked to generate a range of insights, opportunity maps can showcase selected insights and begin synthesizing opportunities for design ideation.

On the summative end of the continuum, opportunity maps can present distilled, strategic directions for improving users’ experiences, communicating a legible vector for what a knowledge work offering could be.

Opportunity maps can be built from 100 “Working through Screens” ideas

Product teams often fall back on a limited set of contemporary patterns and “at hand” design ideas when identifying insights to propel their computing tools forward.

It’s easy to overlook existing information about the role that computing can play in knowledge work. To push a broader perspective, teams can hold useful concepts next to their research findings, trying them on like different hats, in order to identify new insights.

The 100 application envisioning ideas in “Working through Screens” can be used as lenses to identify potential design opportunities in user experience data. Product teams can use the 100 ideas as a flexible checklist of possible contributions to the knowledge work that they are targeting with their system.

Opportunity maps can fit into any system envisioning process

The toolbox for product teams designing workplace systems is already overflowing with exacting, often prescriptive, methods.

Step-by-step formulas do not guarantee success when creating a design brief, especially when the goal is to support complex, cognitive professions by advancing the design of a product or service.

The visual language on the following pages is intended to broadly inspire, not inscribe a concrete approach. Opportunity maps could be created before, during, or even after conceptual design – whenever a range of opportunities need to be better understood and communicated beyond a small group of researchers and designers.

More to come on this topic, eventually to culminate in a new Application Concepting Series book.

Any and all comments appreciated, or tweet @J_Burghardt.