Audible has grown to a multi-platform service over the years. Since the platforms have been handled by separate teams, customer experience inevitably become segmented and inconsistent. We want to help every team understand the life cycle of customers and all the potential touch points/teams they will encounter, in order to help everyone strategize universally rather than sectionally.
The platforms and touchpoint that an Audible can encounter are incredibly diverse and vast. The order can be non-linear as well. It was clear from the beginning that we needed to be very careful about the width and depth we land so it is digestible yet insightful.
The reason why UX, or the product team needed a journey map was clear, but not every team. The other teams we worked with such as tech, marketing, customer support, business intelligence… all have different pain points that didn’t always seem to reveal themselves as solvable problems by a journey map. Treating it like an actual design task, doing lot of interviews to collect insights was necessary. It also helped us make sure we didn’t create a map that’s perfect by the book, but not realistically valuable for the entire organization.
There has been a lot of separate effort done in the organization around the idea of customer journey, user flows, marketing funnels… It was critical to exchange knowledge efficiently by locating past effort and explorations. It is also helpful for establishing trusting relationships with all the partners who will ultimately be the users of the final outcome.
The journey map was shared to multiple teams. For the player redesign project, I was able to use it as a draft framework for use cases. It effectively shorten the time before we kicked off ideation. Please see player work by clicking the button.
Due to the timeframe and resource, we were looking for past related effort to help us build a foundation knowledge instead of opening new research initiatives.
After we collected all the existent materials and interviewed representatives of all teams, we started organizing information and identify patterns. The most important thing was to be laser-focused on the angle we looked at this journey, which is based on customer goals. Every time we started seeing a pattern forming, we went back to customer goals and wh exercise to make sure that we were building mental models that came from customers’ actual behavior.
While identifying patterns, we also started to see relationships between mental spaces emerge naturally. What was challenging was to find a logical framework to house these relationships in a digestible and meaningful way. Therefore, it was helpful for us to sketch in hand and before we used digitalized tools. That way we could really explore all the possible visualizations and challenge each others’ assumptions and come up with solutions easily.
The below are the iterations explored for the overview of relationships between mental spaces. The main spaces identified were awareness, discover, manage and listen. We explored different visualizations based on the relationships we categorized.
Once we had the few overview options, the next step was to break that down into activities, along with slices that were meaningful to most of our partners. We explored touch points, platforms… to make sure that this map is ultimately going to help solve most people’s pain points.
Finally, we decided to have a hybrid of affinity mapping and linear suggestion. In this map, we have mental spaces sized based on the frequency and layered based on the overlaps. We also moved spaces close to each other when there are activities happen in relationship with another.
For the detail view, we not only incorporated activities, but also key user goals, platforms and touch points. That way we got to satisfy our partners’ need for knowing exactly what’s happening on our service and what customers are really after.
The journey map was shared to multiple teams. For the player redesign project, I was able to use it as a draft framework for use cases. It effectively shorten the time before we kicked off ideation. Please see player work by clicking the button.
