The power of Experience Vision

Vision and mission are key tenants that rally and drive a collective. Ask any company, and they will proudly talk about their vision, mission, core values, and company culture, and it makes sense. These artifacts should act as an enduring true north with strategy, planning, decision making and creating a healthy company culture.

In my experience, well-intentioned mission and vision statements do not always translate well into strategy, planning, and decision making. I have used experience visions as a powerful tool to bridge the translation gap and make the abstract concrete.

Experience Visions are future-focused, opinionated visual narratives centered around a user’s experience and the job-to-be-done.

Experience visions tell a story about a user achieving a goal. The story is purposefully linear and weaves in and out of a company’s current offering. This is not about capturing all the details, exceptions and sad paths (eg., journey maps and wireflows), it is about envisioning a better outcome for the user.

Experience visions are future-focused on the user’s experience and not on the technology (AI is cool, but only humans experience things…for now), roadmap items or business processes.

Experience visions are opinionated. If one is creating a future, one has to recognize that it is a bet. Fundamentally, when a business creates a product or a service, or makes a trade-off to pursue strategy A vs strategy B, it effectively placing a bet that its customers will find value in them and pay for them. Experience visions de-risk this bet by visually demonstrating the experience a user could have.

I purposefully use “visions” instead of “vision”. Because experience visions imagine the future, we want to rapidly explore multiple futures and evaluate them simultaneously before committing to any one of them. The reason is pretty simple — noone can predict the future and we want to mitigate the chances of getting it wrong as best as we can.

For example, big bets in business often get made without any consideration of the experience. Usually, traditional business metrics in financial terms (renewals, new business, TAM) are presented. Roadmap and technology discussions alongside tech debt and speed of delivery occur. Experience implications only become clear once all the major “business” decisions have been made and come down to the design team who then take on research and design tasks to discover the consequences of the decision (and often are frustrated that “business” does not seem to focus on the user needs)

Experience visions are input to these major decisions upstream which helps save precious time and frustration downstream. They add the necessary color at a high level to decision-makers. The result is a richer trade-off discussions and a smarter business decision.

There are additional benefit of stronger alignment since experience visions are visual. A decision-maker can use the visual artifacts from the experience vision to communicate the decision more effectively and get buy-in, address disagreements and concerns earlier in the process.

While I gave an example of how experience vision help decision makers such as business leadership, I recognize that experience design does not always have the reach at the highest strata of an organization. While I have strong opinions on where UX should sit in an organization that may be an article down the line, the value of Experience Vision remains unchanged. What changes is the scope and fidelity of the experience vision.

For example, a cross-functional team accountable for a specific aspect of the strategy, can create an experience vision that enables them to envision the problem / opportunity / solution from their vantage point. Not only can it crystallize their areas of accountability, the team may be able to identify misses or duplication of work, and flag them early in the process.

Finally, experience vision is one of the many methods. It is one of many tools for organization and teams to fill the strategy-to-execution air gap. Like any method or tool, experience visions are not a silver bullet. Creating experiences that satisfies user needs is both art and science and there are rarely one size fits all solution to a problem.