Storyboarding to Bring your Journey Maps to Life

I just got back from facilitating a two day workshop to help an international bank, JMMB, innovate its’ auto loan application process for millennials. The goal, creating an auto loan application experience aligned with its overall brand strategy and four CX experience pillars of: (1) In their best interest;  (2) Easy; (3) Enjoyable;  and (4) Empowering.

Start with Emotional Context of Journey Map and Unmet Needs

We had previously built out a Current State Journey Map and therefore had a good understanding of the different stages in the journey and the emotional context at each stage in the journey - what our millennial customer was doing, thinking, and feeling.

We understood where our millennial customers needs were not being met. Where we were wasting his time, making it harder than it had to be, not leveraging information we already knew about him, not providing him with the information he needed when he needed it, and making it difficult for him to accomplish his specific goal or objective.

We were ready to begin to tell the story regarding how we might improve the overall auto loan application process for our millennial customer. So we used Storyboarding to help us.

3 S's Storyboarding Framework

We applied a Storyboarding framework which I learned several years back at the Stanford.d.School (school of design thinking). It is a simple, but, powerful storyboarding framework for ideating around improving customer experience for products and/or services.

The storyboarding framework is based upon the 3 S’s:

• Setting - every story has a setting or environment that it takes place in; an experience context.

• Sequence of Actions - every story is made up of a sequence of activities or illustrated tasks.

• Satisfaction - every story has a motivation, end result, and a need that is satisfied.

Storyboarding is a powerful technique for ideation and integrating the best ideas from within a cross-functional group to address unmet needs for a targeted customer segment. It is best when performed in groups of five to six people each solving for a specific set of pain points within a selected sub-journey from within the overall customer journey.

Stories have an Audience

Stories are a proven method of communication. By their very nature, they are told with a targeted audience in mind. That audience might be a stakeholder group that you need to align, a targeted set of end-users for your product or service, or other designers whom you wish to engage in building a new product or service. Stories should be told with a specific audience in mind.

Stories have a Purpose

Good stories have a purpose. They are told for a reason. There are many benefits associated with storytelling including:

• Give insight into people who are not like us

• Share out initial design concepts and get input and feedback

• Spark new design concepts and encourage innovation

• Think through how someone might interact with a product or service

• Test out ideas and inform your next iteration

Stories should be Brief and to the point, but, Memorable

When telling your story, it is important to keep it brief and too the point. You must find the right level of detail and length. Boring or un-engaging or unrealistic and you lose your audience. Too long and you lose your audience. Too simplistic or short and you aren’t able to engage your audience. I have found that telling a story in six to eight scenes is a good target for a well told story. And be sure to make it “memorable” - evoking empathy with the customer whom you are solving for in your story.

Stories can help bridge the gaps between your Current State and Ideal State Journey Maps

Your Current State and Ideal State Journey Maps will serve as bookends each helping set the context for your storyboarding exercise from a unique and different perspective:

Current State Journey Map  - help identify opportunities for improving the customer journey, align stakeholders on customer pain points and what is most important to the targeted customer.

Ideal State Journey Map - help articulate a desired outcome, a new or improved experience that addresses latent or unmet needs of your targeted customer, align stakeholders on where you are headed (desired end state experience).

So, the next time you are stuck, not knowing how to bring your journey map to life. Not knowing how to take action on the insights you’ve gained around your targeted customers.  Consider using storyboarding as a proven method and technique for co-creating new and improved customer experiences in rapid time frames.

Feel free to reach out to me directly to learn more about using Storyboarding to help bring your Journey Maps to life.