- After you've done some observations,
around three to four people
in each of your potential categories
and at least eight individuals,
it's time to put all your observation notes together
into one place,
so you can see the big picture
but also tell stories about individual observations.
I really encourage you to work as a team
with the same people involved now,
who'll be responsible for delivering the software later.
That way you all build
the same foundation of experiences to draw on
when you need to solve problems later on.
Everyone on the team should participate in the observations.
And because you'll be splitting into groups
of two or three people for each observation,
you now need to bring all that knowledge back together,
so you can see the similarities and differences
in each of your participants feedback.
As soon as possible after you've done the observations,
pull out the salient pieces from the notes you took
and write each one down on its own Sticky Note.
Put all of those notes up on the wall
and then group them into themes,
with the first part of the process on the left of the wall
and each step following on from left to right.
Label these themes and also label the process.
You can see here we used yellow stickies
for our observations,
green ones to label the themes
and blue ones to label each step of the process.
Leave yourself a lot of room for this exercise.
Our little problem filled up an entire wall,
yours will probably do the same.
I call this set of observations an experience map.
You may be familiar with that term.
Often, you'll see sexier looking experience maps
you use to demonstrate the customer's journey
with a list of all the actors or actions,
and even sometimes indication
of the customer's emotional state at each point.
This is the same thing,
basically a way of showing the customer's journey,
but we made it in a very low fidelity way
and a very fast way.
It's amazing how well even this
scrappy-looking experience map works
to show other people like project sponsors
what the experience looks like today
on where the problems lie.
Obviously, if you want to,
you can create one of the slick looking experience maps
from this data later on to show other people.
But for now, this set of Sticky Notes
is more than adequate for the team to work with.