Using an Experience Canvas to Determine Your Next Feature
Written by Stevie Huval and Dassi Shusterman
Whether you’re a Jack-of-all-trades wearing multiple hats at a lean tech company, a product-focused developer, or a dedicated product manager at a large software outfit, you’ve probably run into the question: What should we build next?
According to Forbes,
25 percent of technology projects fail outright; 20 to 25 percent don’t show any return on investment, and as much as 50 percent need massive reworking by the time they’re finished.
This is often due to a poorly defined outcome, lack of accountability, and focus on solving the wrong problem. Many teams succumb to the temptation of building what their biggest customer asks for, what the CEO wants, or what the loudest person in the room thinks is important, without taking the time to consider the bigger picture or digging deeper into users’ needs.
Building new features takes research, resources, and time — in other words: money. Given constraints, how can you be sure you’re building the right thing, for the right audience, with the right urgency?
As a Product Manager and Product Designer at BigCommerce, it is our job to make sound product investment and user experience decisions. To do so, we apply a set of tools and techniques to ensure we are solving the right problems and measuring the right outcomes. Today we want to introduce you one of our favorite “plays,” the Experience Canvas, that will enable your team to level set on goals and outcomes, design the best user experience, and allow you to enter the development cycle with clarity and confidence.
What is an Experience Canvas?
A canvas is just a one-page visual chart meant to distill a concept down to its key components and provide an organized, concise reference for its users.
An Experience Canvas is a chart and framework that helps the team clarify the problem they are trying to solve, the customer they are solving it for, and what success looks like.
Introduced by Atlassian, the Experience Canvas is an adaptation of the Lean Canvas, created by Ash Maurya, who adapted it from the Business Model Canvas, developed by Alex Osterwalder.
The Business Model Canvas has the broadest target — it applies to both new and existing businesses, and will lay out the building blocks of the business itself and anticipated revenue.
The Lean Canvas is more specific to startups and entrepreneurs — it focuses on helping clarify the problems you are looking to solve, proposed solutions, and cost plus revenue.
If the Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas focus on the business strategy as a whole, the Experience Canvas takes the best of the Lean Canvas, and focuses in on defining, at a high level, exactly what problem you want to solve in the market and how you may solve it. The Experience Canvas is used to make sure any work is user-centered, technically sound, and makes sense for the business.
When used properly, it will help teams to:
- Develop a shared understanding of what problem they are trying to solve
- Identify the value and metrics for a project
- Level set on goals, outcomes and user experience
- Bridge communication across disparate teams and stakeholders
How does this fit in with Design Thinking?
First described by Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon, the Interaction Design Foundation characterizes Design Thinking as:
…an iterative process used to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.
The steps involved in Design Thinking include:
- Empathize — with your users
- Define — your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
- Ideate — challenge assumptions and create ideas for innovative solutions
- Prototype — to start creating solutions
- Test — solutions
During each of these steps, product teams run “plays” to accomplish their goals at each stage. At BigCommerce, the Experience Canvas is a play that we like to run as a workshop during the Define step, after we’ve gathered lots of information about our users. When you are ready to define the problem, you are ready to run an Experience Canvas workshop.
How We Use Experience Canvas at BigCommerce
Here at BigCommerce, long before we started to define users’ problems and needs around a specific feature, we established our broad strategic goals as a company. Plays like the Business Model Canvas or the Lean Canvas are useful at this high-level-strategy stage. We then organized R&D teams around those goals, with each team led by the triad of Product Management, Product Design, and Engineering Management.
As our team starts the discovery phase for a new feature or product, we first familiarize ourselves with the users we’ll be focusing on. As we learn, we keep a running a list of problems those users are facing — an early pass at defining problems we want to solve. Once we have a good sense that a certain problem represents an area of opportunity within the market, along with empathy and understanding for the target user, we are ready to dig in and run an Experience Canvas workshop to flesh out potential solutions.
Planning a Great Experience Canvas Workshop
Invite the Right People
The most fruitful workshops we’ve had engage not only the core product team, including Product Management, Design, and Engineering, but also people who have varied backgrounds and no preconceived notions about the solution. We’ve run Experience Canvas workshops with as few as two people and as many as 10.
Tip: Ensure your participant list doesn’t heavily represent one department over another. For example, rather than having four engineers attend, consider inviting one or two engineers and making space for stakeholders from Marketing, Sales, and Support instead.
The right facilitator can vary. Facilitators establish the workshop structure and outcomes, run the workshop, and manage team engagement. At BigCommerce, Product Designers or Product Managers usually facilitate, but running a workshop is a two-person job — make sure you engage help ahead of time. Involve participants from Engineering or Project Management as key contributors. If you can get facilitator from outside the team, who has done this kind of thing before, the core team can focus more on problem-solving.
Plan the Logistics
If you can, ensure participants commit to being together in person — it’s much more effective, and your team will reap the rewards for the duration of the project. If you’ve got the budget, it’s well worth it to get everyone together and go offsite. Breaking the routine by being outside of the office will help people participate more fully.
If your team must be remote, you can use a virtual whiteboard, like Realtime Board or Mural.co to document your workshop outputs across offices in real time.
Workshops can be as short as several hours to several days. Schedule the time allocated based on what you expect to cover and the outcomes you hope to achieve.
Plan your agenda, your canvas and invite your participants. Prepare Post-It notes, Sharpies, whiteboards, whiteboard markers, and butcher paper if needed. Bring A4 paper for sketching.
Running an Experience Canvas Workshop
Plan to spend a minimum of 90 minutes building out your canvas. Dedicate a set amount of time to each section, depending on what you’ll cover. You may need significantly more time if you expect a lot of discussions or there are many people in the room. Adjust your times accordingly but timebox ruthlessly so that you stay on schedule.
Tip: For this workshop, it is better to discuss every single canvas topic for at least a short length of time, rather than discuss only a few topics in great detail. Time box so you can get through everything — afterwards, if you feel a deeper discussion is still warranted, you can schedule additional time with participants.
As you tackle a section, give the team 5–10 minutes to write down their thoughts on Post-It notes, group the notes, discuss, and vote or verbally decide on the best ideas.
Setting the stage (5–10 mins)
Kickoff with a social contract, to set good team dynamics during the workshop.
This might look like the following:
- No spectators, only participants
- No laptops or phones — helps with full participation of everyone in the room (The exception here is if you’re running a session with remote participants — more on this below)
- Yes, and… — lets people know that all ideas can be explored, and when someone has an idea, add on to it rather than shooting it down
- Stay on schedule — assign a timekeeper
- Parking lot — if conversations run off topic put it in the parking lot
- Document — get a volunteer to take photos for your blog post later!
- Whatever else the team decides…
Tip: Whether you’re running a remote or onsite session, make sure no one person is acting as “scribe”. Either using Post-It notes or a virtual whiteboard, each participant should be responsible for writing out their own ideas and adding them to the board. This ensures all thoughts are captured and all participation is active.
Building the canvas (90 minutes)
Download Experience Canvas template here. Using a whiteboard or a blank wall, work through each section below by having each participant write down their ideas on Post-It notes (one idea per note) then sticking it to the whiteboard. Idea generation should be timeboxed to 5–10 minutes to allow plenty of time for synthesis, discussion, and ranking.
After you’ve collected ideas, as a group you can rearrange the Post-Its to group ‘like’ ideas, and select which ones are the best and should actually be documented in the Canvas.
- Problems
If you’ve done your homework and compiled enough research to understand the problem you can define it. If not, you can have experts present their perspectives as part of this session prior to defining the problem. If you can define the problem without including the solution, you’ll have more freedom to explore solutions widely later.
Problem = User obstacle + User need
2. Values
Once you’ve launched, how will what you’ve built benefit the business and your users? Will it increase revenues, increase sales, reduce the time the user spends in your system, reduce support calls? Define the values and rank them in order of importance.
3. Target users
Talk about who your target users are. Identify who is having this problem, what motivates them, and what they are trying to accomplish. You may have a primary and secondary group of users. Characterize them and decide who is most important. This will help you prioritize what you build later.
4. Solutions / Ideas
Once the team has mapped out the problem, value, target users, they can start to brainstorm solutions. Any idea here goes. This should be fun and creative. Say “yes, and…” to all of them, then group and vote. Favorites will bubble to the top.
5. MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Think through the smallest, easiest version of your idea that your team can launch which will prove out your hypothesis. It may bring a small selection of the benefits you want to market, or address the most important subset of your users.
6. Success metrics
Define success metrics that can truly be measured. Make sure the team is comfortable measuring success with these metrics. Refer back to the values you came up with earlier. Imagine what it will be like a few months after you launch your product — what would you want your success to look like?
7. End-to-end journey
Tell an end to end story from the point of view of the customer that provides an ideal scenario. Consider the problems solved, the solution applied and value achieved. Capture key scenarios as role play, sketches or user flows that make sense to the team.
8. Teams
Identify who needs to be involved to make this project successful, including contributors from the core and extended teams. Depending on what you are doing, you might need to engage engineers on another team that extends beyond the people in the room.
9. Stakeholders
Identify who internally needs to be involved, who actually has a say and needs to be informed about the decisions made using the canvas.
10. Parking lot
This is an area that you can add as you go. Anytime someone goes off tangent, write down their idea, add it to the parking lot, and bring them back to the topic at hand.
11. Go to market
Once your product is ready, how will you make it available to your audience? Will you need a beta rollout, help pages, marketing, landing pages, a big PR announcement?
12. Actions
Make sure you assign tasks to people in the room and assign dates. Now that you have defined your product, your team has work to do.
Wrapping up (10 minutes)
Leave some time at the end to review and assign any action items that have come up. Next steps will likely include building a prototype, documenting the canvas, and collecting feedback from stakeholders. You might need to schedule more follow up time to tie up loose ends. Make sure to take lots of photos of your work.
Documentation & Next Steps
Once the workshop draws to a close, document the canvas in an easy to find place and share it with the team and your stakeholders. We use Confluence to house all of our canvases but a Google Doc or other shared resource would work well too.
Now that you’ve completed the workshop, you have the foundation for executing on your vision. You have a set of guidelines and a touchstone for making decisions. The canvas outputs may change as you learn more, but that’s ok. You can modify your assumptions and update learnings on your canvas.
Conclusion
The Experience Canvas is a tool that helps teams focus on solving the right problems, with team vetted solutions, while keeping teams engaged and stakeholders involved. We hope that using this play will help you and your teams improve your chances of launching products that meet your goals and address your users’ problems head-on.
Like the Experience Canvas itself, we are learning from the product development process at every step — since every project and every team is different, sometimes certain things work better than others. If you’re game for making this a two-way conversation, let us know when you use the Experience Canvas play or something similar in your own work!
Stevie Huval, Product Manager, tweet @steviehuval
Dassi Shusterman, Product Design Manager, tweet @dassi
