Collaborative Product Design

Chapter 15. Identify What to Build with Touchpoint Maps

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Identify What to Build with Touchpoint Maps

It’s tough to make your product easy to use when you don’t know how users will use it. Your team builds features without a clear view into how well they work together. You can help teams orchestrate better product experiences when you think about how the user completes individual tasks.

In this chapter, we’ll map how a user moves through a series of tasks, so your team can build touchpoints that are easier to use, are more satisfying, and convert better. You can map tasks for a touchpoint as part of sprint planning or formal product discovery. Lightweight versions of this activity help unravel random discussions about improving product flow.

How Touchpoint Maps Work

Before the team maps the tasks for the interaction, step back and specify the story, user, and channel. With everyone aligned on the story, generate and refine the tasks and their order (Figure 15-1):

1. Working together, team discusses and aligns on story, user, and channel.
2. Team generates tasks needed to complete the story.
3. Team refines tasks, task order, and handoffs to other interactions.
4. Team explores task flow to understand relevant information like data, processes, content, analytics, and interfaces.

Figure 15-1

First identify the story, user, and channel, then generate and refine the tasks needed ...