ORCHESTRATING EXPERIENCES
COLLABORATIVE DESIGN FOR COMPLEXITY
Chris Risdon
Patrick Quattlebaum
Orchestrating Experiences
Collaborative Design for Complexity
By Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
540 President Street
Brooklyn, New York
11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com
Please send errors to: rosenfeldmedia.com
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Managing Editor: Marta Justak
Illustrator: Nick Madden
Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster
Cover and Interior Design: The Heads of State
Indexer: Marilyn Augst
Proofreader: Sue Boshers
© 2018 Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-933820-73-X
ISBN 13: 978-1-933820-73-6
LCCN: 2018930392
Printed and bound in the United States of America
CHRIS
To my love Kathy and beautiful daughter Lucy for being amazing, supportive, loving, and making me a better person.
PATRICK
To my amazing partner in crime Katie for her love, support, and patience.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is written by designers, but it is for anyone who wants to make a greater impact in envisioning and making products and services in complex environments. Complex, in this case, refers to customer experiences with many moving parts—multiple channels, many touchpoints, and numerous contexts—and the departmentalized, fragmented organizations attempting to deliver them. Sound familiar? If so, you will likely identify with one of the following cohorts we had in mind when writing this book:
• Practitioners of all stripes: You define strategies for customer experiences, services, products, marketing, or technology. You design physical things, digital touchpoints, processes, communications, or systems. You deliver the objects, interfaces, platforms, or intangible interactions that enable value creation. Or you help manage all of these activities. In these pages, you’ll find new approaches that expand your toolkit and facilitate others through a more collaborative design process.
• Leaders and emerging leaders: You work in cross-functional programs trying to create products and services that enable impactful experiences at scale. The common set of terms, models, and methods introduced here will increase your ability to help others engage in making the future together.
• Executives: You want differentiated, customer-centered experiences while defining focused strategies and leaner operations. The concepts we present will help you foster cross-functional collaboration, build customer empathy, and activate more effective customer journeys.
Regardless of your role, this book will equip you and your colleagues to design for better experiences, together. Bringing consistency and continuity to end-to-end experiences requires new concepts and methods. Creating broad empathy means helping your colleagues truly connect with your customers. Leaping from insights to vision to action necessitates increased facilitation and collaboration.
What’s in This Book?
This book is organized into three parts, charting your course from embracing core concepts to orchestrating experiences.
Part I, “A Common Foundation,” explores key concepts—channels, touchpoints, ecosystems, and journeys—related to understanding and improving the experience architecture of product and services. It argues for creating more consistency in how these terms are used in your organization and gives you tools to begin to do just that.
Part II, “Insights and Possibilities,” outlines how to facilitate a cross-functional team through the process of better understanding customer needs and identifying opportunities for improving and reimagining end-to-end experiences.
Part III, “Vision and Action,” explains how to generate ideas collaboratively and craft a vision that unites stakeholders and inspires action. It also shares techniques for carrying your intent into touchpoint design and moving your organization to orchestrate experiences more intentionally.
NOTE
Cross-functional collaboration is critical to improving or reimagining end-to-end experiences. For this reason, this book also contains several workshop examples designed to help engage the right people at the right time to envision orchestrated products and service experiences.
What Comes with This Book?
You’ll find the book’s companion website here (
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Do I have to do all these things in this book to orchestrate experiences successfully?
We cover many frameworks and tools, but you will likely gravitate to approaches that meet your unique needs. For example, you may find ecosystem mapping (Chapter 3) and storyboarding (Chapters 8 and 9) help you get the job done, while touchpoint inventories (Chapter 2) or improvisation (Chapter 8) don’t resonate in your culture. The key: try out different approaches and build the toolkit that works for you.
Isn’t this just a lot of deliverables?
No! Working collaboratively with your colleagues is critical to orchestrating experiences. It takes effort and skill. What you do make—such as experience maps (Chapter 5), experience principles (Chapter 6), and