This post is part of blogging a new publication “Opportunity Mapping: A Working through Screens Sketchbook.”

Three opening thoughts that will kick off the sketchbook:

Research has become a new normal for designing powerful, engaging, and productive technologies. It’s generally accepted that researching users, systems, activities, behaviors, motivations, and attitudes can help technologists of all stripes build empathy for design problems. But how can teams better examine, distill, and communicate what they learn so that they generate more compelling design ideas — ideas that can make a real difference in peoples’ working lives?

“…solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“We are not starting from scratch here. Many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times. Physicists have illustrated quarks. Biologists have mapped the genome. Doctors have found ways to represent immune systems in the body. Network designers have mapped communication flows in buildings. Managers have charted the locations of expertise in their organizations. Our world is filled with representations of invisible or complex phenomena… So the design challenge… [is] how to deploy new representations in such a way that they influence wider groups of people.”
Jon Thackara, In the Bubble

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

@J_Burghardt

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.

Teams designing tools for the knowledge workplace commonly research how users work

Today, most product teams creating tools for knowledge work understand that they can benefit from connecting with the workers that they are striving to design for.

Researching user needs has become a conventional part of the application design process, providing inspiration that can fuel innovative systems.

While breakthroughs may come from purely technological developments, insights into user needs and behavior can uncover opportunities to advance workplace systems in powerful, engaging, and productive ways.

The communication of design research outputs has room for improvement

The wall of post it notes has become a typical symbol of design research and sense making, showing how a product team’s design brief can inductively emerge from a collection of disordered ideas.

It turns out that the core team that makes sense of this data does most of the learning. Communicating deep insights beyond the ordered wall of paper particles can be difficult. Many important ideas remain in a small group of people, essentially shelved or forgotten.

Researchers and designers could benefit from exploring new ways of communicating their early, formative learnings, with the goal of making more lasting and traceable impacts in their organizations.

There are ongoing opportunities for transformative design in knowledge work applications

The problem of communicating a range of insights from the field is often a major obstacle for organizations that design tools for the knowledge workplace. The connective tissue between a product team’s learnings and resulting design outcomes can be tenuous.

Knowledge workers’ practices can be difficult for product teams to understand. Outsiders can find it difficult to meaningfully critique the systems supporting specialized jobs until they have built real empathy for the work.

For a knowledge worker, thoughtful function can be truly beautiful. However, teams envisioning workplace interactions often overlook or under-communicate key opportunities to make a transformative impact with design.

Designing the design problem can lead to new visual languages

How could new forms of visual communication help product teams to understand and evolve workplace systems, highlighting where to invest effort in order maximize value and meet user goals?

How could thoughtful information design allow teams to move past post-it note particles of information to more systemic frameworks for design ideation, pushing the boundaries of what’s considered core for workplace user experiences?

How might these frameworks become distilled throughout the design research process so that they communicate a strategic point of view, accelerating innovation for knowledge work?

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.

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

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