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 each of these points, 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.

Front Matter

• Opening thoughts: Accelerating innovation for specialized work
• Opening thoughts: More systemic frameworks for design ideation
• Table of Contents (this post)
• Preface

Common Sense Making Challenges in Product Teams

• Challenge – Laying a foundation of shared understanding about current user experiences
• Challenge – Thinking through common opportunities to improve knowledge work
• Challenge – Representing problems before jumping into design solutions
• Challenge – Choosing where to focus design attention in complex systems

Why Opportunity Mapping

• Opportunity maps are a way to thoughtfully bridge UX data and conceptual design
• Opportunity maps focus a product team’s design efforts
• Opportunity maps do not cover the full range of an eventual solution
• Opportunity maps can have four different levels of focus
• Opportunity maps offer a general approach, not a concrete process
• Opportunity maps can be built from 100 “Working through Screens” ideas

1. Identification

• Identification – Collaboratively identifying a broad range of potential design opportunities
• Identification – Medical system example
• Identification – Clinical research system example
• Identification – Architectural system example
• Identification – Financial trading system example

2. Consolidation

• Consolidation – Distilling identified opportunities into consolidated maps
• Consolidation – Medical system example
• Consolidation – Clinical research system example
• Consolidation – Architectural system example
• Consolidation – Financial trading system example

3. Selection

• Selection – Selecting targeted opportunities and mapping the meaning of those choices
• Selection – Medical system example
• Selection – Clinical research system example
• Selection – Architectural system example
• Selection – Financial trading system example

4. Communication

• Communication – Distilling selected opportunity focus and direction for product team audience
• Communication – Medical system example
• Communication – Clinical research system example
• Communication – Architectural system example
• Communication – Financial trading system example

Closing Matter

• Using opportunity maps throughout the product development lifecycle
• Bibliography and further reading
• About the author + Flashbulb Interaction, Inc.

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

A: Ideas for advancing user experience in the evolving knowledge workplace.

More specifically, I will be using this space to iteratively write the next two titles in Flashbulb Interaction’s “Application Concepting Series” of publications:

• “Opportunity Mapping: A Working through Screens Sketchbook”
• “Application Snapshots: A Working through Screens Sketchbook”

By iteratively blogging draft content for these publications, I hope to gather feedback from readers like you.

As the titles suggest, each of these publications will be extensions of Flashbulb Interaction’s first book, “Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work.”  These two new volumes will showcase a variety of ways that product teams might apply the 100 envisioning ideas to early, strategic phases of application definition and design.

Since “Working through Screens” was an intensive writing project, these next two volumes are going to focus more on visuals – on showing instead of telling. In keeping with the “sketchbook” idea, these projects will also be shorter and more open in format.  In general, both publications will be made up of a series of discrete “sketches,” with each idea presented in a two page “illustration and explanation” spread.  Since each spread of content will be self contained, my hope is that these new works will be especially well suited to being drafted as blog posts, right here at www.ApplicationConcepting.com.

When this blog is eventually full of content, and the two “Working through Screens Sketchbooks” have come together from the sum of all the parts, the plan is to make each publication available as free .pdf files and as print on demand books.

Sound interesting?  Have ideas that you would like to share about compelling new ways to visualize user experience opportunities?  Or maybe you have some thoughts on how “Working through Screens” ideas could be illustrated through example “snapshot” sketches?  Your input would be greatly appreciated! Please comment on this post, tweet @J_Burghardt or send an email to jburghardt@flashbulbinteraction.com