Jim Kalbach, @jimkalbach, is a Principal UX Designer with Citrix Online and an active speaker, writer, and instructor on business design, user experience, and information architecture. He has helped starting local UX groups as well as organize conferences in Germany and Europe. Jim is the author of the book Designing Web Navigation an O’Reilly Publication. Jim was on my podcast recently and we discussed Alignment diagrams.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Kalbach on User Design and Experience
Joe: The other area that I got lost in this morning looking at your blog was alignment diagrams. What’s an alignment diagram?
Jim Kalbach: An alignment diagram is a term that I kind of applied to a class of documents and there corresponding activities that are already part of the design cannon. So these are things that we are already doing. Basically, what I wanted to do was reframe the fundamental value that these documents and deliverables and activities bring to both us and the businesses that we consult or work for. So that class of documents includes things like customer journey maps, service blueprints, experience maps, things called mental model diagrams that Indi Young pioneered. There are some other examples. But what I believe these diagrams fundamentally do is align, hence the name alignment diagrams, align customer activity, user activity with what the business is doing to provide value. So it shows what the customer experience is in some way – usually chronological, not always. So customer journey map will have phases that move through a journey over time, and that’s a normal type of alignment diagram. And that’s often at the top of a diagram. So these are often horizontally oriented. And you described the pain points and all the activities or thoughts or devices – whatever story you’re trying to tell about the customer experience on the top.
Then down below you describe what the departments are involved, what are the offerings that a business is providing to the users. Where those two meet are the touch points. That’s where value is created. That’s where the users get their values when they come in contact with product or service you’re offering, and that’s also where the business is going to make it’s values well too, because if those touch points aren’t meaningful, if they’re not useable and attractive to those customers, they’re not going to be ultimately making money. I believe what alignment diagrams do is it’s a visual way for us to be able to locate and track the value creation chain. You and I were just chatting about that a little bit Joe before we started the podcast. I think an alignment diagram is a great way to both capture and diagnose an existing kind of state of play for a business. How are we creating value and what is that value that the customers desire. Yu can extend that – particularly if you’re in a B2B type of situation, you can extend that all the way down to the end consumer. So you can look at that value chain even further. But ultimately alignment diagrams align value creation and allow value extraction from the business.
Joe: One of the problems I have with alignment diagrams let’s say is that they get created in isolation, away from the customer. What are some tips to make them really valid, to make them really useful to me? What are some tips you can give?
Jim: Yeah, very often these things are kind of thought up in a closed room. So alignment diagrams as a class of documentation is not a prescribed method. It’s collection of these documents that already exist. But I want to do is talk about using them to point out alignment in the businesses that we work for or consult with. It’s really this principle of alignment that I’m really focusing on, and that has a bunch of sub-points to it. And one of them is the principle of validation that is we can’t just make up what we think the customer experience is. We actually have to go out and observe it and capture it in a real way. That’s very, very important. Sometimes you can usually set up the framework of an alignment diagram, but you need to go out and observe customers or talk to them first of all. I think that’s one of the first things that you need to do. I often will kind of capture some of that in a qualitative way in an alignment diagram. If there’s a pain point show a quote from a user that had that pain point to make it real. So try to bring reality into the alignment diagram because ultimately you want to bring that reality into the business as well too. Sometimes businesses convince themselves of a different reality than customers are going through, and alignment diagrams are a way to kind of expose that and shine a light on “Well this is actually what is going on.” Bring as much as possible, through primary research – that is direct observation, questioning, whatever method you want to use – to try to bring that right back into the alignment diagram. I’ve also done in a more limited way using alignment diagrams actually with end users or the consumers themselves and actually stepping through it with them to get their insight of it. “Is this how you would describe your journey with a product or service? Is this your workflow when you’re working at work for instance?”
Ultimately for me the value of an alignment diagram particularly for designers and consultants is to be able to work with the business stakeholders. An alignment diagram project for me almost always ends up in a workshop where we will actually go through and read and look at all of the touch points in slow motion. It’s artificial, but it slows it down so you start seeing things sometimes at a microscopic level but at a very analytical level, and you’re looking at those touch points and how value is created, what the pain points are for the customer, what the problems of service provision are on the business side of things and doing that with business stakeholders. Very often they don’t have that big picture.
Businesses are really complex now particularly with dealing with partnerships and outsourcing and all this stuff. Once you put all those things together suddenly it becomes a lot more apparent where potential breakdowns can occur, where there is an opportunity for efficiencies, on their side as well too, but also on the consumer side. It’s basically a set of principles with a corresponding class of documents that allow us to diagnose the value creation process on both sides of the equation.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Kalbach on User Design and Experience
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