CONIFER’S 5E FRAMEWORK FOR EXPERIENCE MAPPING

How to use Conifer’s 5E Framework to deconstruct a user experience and hone in on bright spots, gaps, and pain points.

We no longer exist in an economy of products or services, but of experiences. Businesses, in turn, have to obsess over the details of “What is it like to use/encounter/connect with our product/service/brand?” This attention shift yields huge strategic benefits, but product and service development teams require simple tools to grapple with the nuance and complexity of “experiences” – aka customer journeys or service blueprints. Here, we share our framework to help teams get a new perspective on opportunities for product and service development. Since the goal is to find “buried treasure” hidden in everyday life, our tool of choice is a map: the 5E Experience Map.

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WHAT IS AN EXPERIENCE MAP?

An Experience Map is a model of how people experience a product, service, environment, or ecosystem.

Like a good highway map, it organizes and abstracts complex reality to focus us on the important bits. Many people and businesses use Experience Maps of one sort or another. For instance, web designers routinely model the experiences they hope to create for their site’s users. Adventurous business process engineers have been known to ship themselves as packages to track the “experience” offered by freight handlers. Experience Maps can be simple or complex, diagrammatic or photo-intensive. At their core, they are all structured stories about an experience, with beginnings, middles, and ends; and often with identifiable characters and common plot twists.

The Most Useful Experience Maps Are:

Told from the point of view of people having the experience, not the point of view of the business (as are most Process Maps) or information flow (as are the Data Maps used to design computer systems).
Well-structured, with clear divisions and hierarchy that allows teams to parse a complex experience into manageable pieces.
Collaborative, emerging from conversations between team members of different points of view and expertise.
Photo or video documented. This permits teams to have rich, grounded conversations about the experience. It also helps teams talk about the experience with others.

THE HISTORY OF THE 5E

Our approach builds on decades of anthropological research into how cultures create and perpetuate rituals — the most highly structured experiences human beings create for one another. Not every product or service experience needs to be a ritual, but all should aspire to have some characteristics of one. They should be designed to be distinct, resonant, and transformative. To assist and inspire clients to do this, we use the 5E model.

Across most cultures and throughout history, there is a common structure to rituals. Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep first laid out this structure to explain the common human rituals of transformation — coming-of-age, graduation, marriage, dying, etc.

The 5E Framework derives from Van Gennep’s work on rites of passage, and the universal characteristics that gave them their underlying resonance and power.

Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way.

← ARNOLD VAN GENNEP

What do we learn from Arnold van Gennep?

Structure is essential to the power of rites and rituals to transform.

Rites of passage contain incredible variety cross-culturally and highly localized symbolism. They have a structure that initiates and transforms individuals from one social status (and attendant privileges, responsibilities, and expectations) to another.

Rites of passage are critical to cultural reproduction.

People are not simply attracted to rites and rituals — they are compelled to do them. Rites are necessary because as they move individuals through recognized life stages, they also reproduce and reinforce the socio-cultural structures that created those very same rites.

Liminality provides us a way to think about people and places that “don’t fit”.

The concept of liminality can be applied to a huge range of questions from controversies around rights for transgendered persons or undocumented individuals to why people are afraid of ghosts. The common thread is that liminality identifies phenomena and individuals who are not simply on the edges of structures, but are actually between structures.

PARSING AN AMERICAN WEDDING

Through the lens of an American wedding, we can see the stages of Van Gennep’s framework as an unmarried individual passes through moments of separation and then incorporation on their way to being a married person.

Status 1: Unmarried
Fewer responsibilities
Expectations about getting married
More traditionally: no cohabitation, no children
Father walking the bride down the aisle
Carring over the threshold
Honeymoon

Rite of
Separation
Bachelor/ette party
Not seeing each other on the wedding day
Families seated on opposite sides
Father walking the bride down the aisle
Carring over the threshold
Honeymoon

Rite of
Liminality
Ceremony with a formula
Wedding party
An authority instilled with the power of transformation
Father walking the bride down the aisle
Carring over the threshold
Honeymoon

Rite of
Incorporation
“I now pronounce you…”
First dance
Bouquet toss
Toasts
Carring over the threshold
Honeymoon

Status 2:
Married
Starting a family
Expectations about “settling down”
Legal rights
Merging of assets
Carring over the threshold
Honeymoon

being unmarried, an individual may have fewer responsibilities or expectations about getting married from themselves, society, or their families, and may not cohabitate or have children.

In the liminary stage, rituals usher the individual through transformation. Many forms of separation occur between the individual, their partner, and the families throughout the transformation. As the ceremony begins, the individual sits between the two positions, unmarried and married. The rituals within the ceremony and acts following it, such as the first dance, complete the transformation, removing the separation that was established prior to the ceremony as the families and people on both sides celebrate together.

At the conclusion of the wedding and all the rituals it encompases, the individual now has the status of being married. This status comes with it’s own social structures such as, the expectations of starting a family and settling down.

CONIFER’S 5E FRAMEWORK

Over the years, others have used and built on van Gennep’s basic theory. The version we like is streamlined and simplified to make it easy to remember and use, but it captures the basic idea. In essence, this model describes what we as human beings expect from a ritual, or any experience meant to transform us. We use this model as scaffolding when we build Experience Maps.

how to make an experience model define airplane

HOW TO MAKE AN EXPERIENCE MODEL USING THE 5E FRAMEWORK

1DEFINE

First you need to determine which experience you want to map. While you will almost always expand your definition of the experience through mapping, you’ll need to focus your efforts to get useful insight.

Set the right scope

For instance, as an airline, it makes a big difference whether you decide to focus on “Boarding,” “Flying” or “Traveling.” A rule of thumb to follow here: if you’re seeking highly detailed improvements that don’t challenge the existing experience much, choose the narrowest possible scope (Boarding). If you want to find things that are completely outside the box of your current business, select the broadest (Traveling).

Agree on a Point of View.

Who’s having the experience? It can work to look at the same experience from multiple points of view, but only if you manage the boundaries between viewpoints carefully. In our airline example, the Crew experience might be very different (and worth considering) from that of Passengers.

Set constraints.

Every experience has a beginning, a middle, and end — and transitions between these stages. Again, expect Mapping to challenge your assumptions. Which stages interest you most and least? Which are you most likely to be able to influence with your products and services? For instance, you might decide that you want to study Travel, but that you’re going to define the beginning as arrival at an airport, rather than at the beginning of trip planning.

how to make an experience model document camera

2DOCUMENT

After you’ve defined your target, gather the raw material for your map: images, written observations, diagrams, and interviews with people having the experience, etc. The map will only be as useful as it is accurate. Good documentation also makes conversations about the meaning of the map much more participatory and robust.

Go where it happens.

Experience maps are not a “thought experiment.” Don’t rely on your memory or imagination alone. It’s easy to assume you know what happens, especially if you have the experience yourself a lot. We may ‘know’ the process, but we’ve never been through it from different customers’ perspectives and use cases.

Have the experience yourself.

Be in their lives, take pictures, ask them to show you how and what.

Use a mix of media.

Document the experience as you see others going through it. Use photographs, sketches, video and any other tools at your disposal. Draw maps of environments and paths through them.

Pick stuff up.

Collect artifacts and samples, not just images. If you’re shopping, be sure to buy and bring back products. Pick up any instructions or collateral you see along the way.

Keep good track of your data.

As you take pictures and video, be sure to label the media as they come back in. You will need to organize your media three ways: 1) as you collect it, by date, place, etc. 2) as you analyze it, by theme, keyword, etc.; and 3) as you communicate it, by the story it supports.

how to make an experience model dig chest

3DIG

Now you have what it takes to make the Map and look for treasure. We suggest that the teams find a room they can dedicate to this purpose. If you can’t get a room, get a big table.

Post-It™ notes, push pins, and foamcore boards are great tools to get pictures and words in front of the team early and often.

Get physical.

Even if you use a digital camera to gather images, print them out. If you collected images on video, be sure to grab some still frames and print them. Also, get a TV in the room so you can refer to any video. Sort images and artifacts on a surface, or tape them to a wall with drafting dots.

Map the process.

Arrange the images and artifacts in a simple time sequence, we like to use the 5E framework here. Make note of variations that might exist at each stage of the sequence. Even from the simple time sequence, the shape of today’s experience can become clear. Capture the entire journey, before and beyond your product/service and don’t shy away from the alternate pathways, bail points and recurring loops where people get stuck, skip ahead or backtrack.

Map the experience.

The process map tells you what people are doing. Now it’s time to make a subtle shift to understand what people are experiencing as they go through the process.

Emotionally literate & visually expressive: Get specific with word choice, emotions and user language and purposeful visual language visuals like, squiggles, loops, icons.
Look for “bright spots”: Where does the experience really seem to be working for people? At what points do they seem to be having a great time? Where do the things and spaces provided seem to meet their needs particularly well?
Look for “hot spots”: Where does the experience break down? When are people frustrated? Are they missing things they need? Where are they forced to “work around” the systems and processes in place? When do they look uncomfortable?
Be contextually aware: Surface reminders of the environment and context surrounding the experience.
Look at the big picture: Pull back from your Map and try to characterize the experience as a whole. Look for a central theme. Identify a couple of metaphors that capture the essence of the experience. When you have a metaphor, pick out a few iconic images or artifacts that convey the metaphor particularly well.
Look for gaps: At which stages of the experience are there few resources offered to customers? Where are transitions poorly handled or simply ignored?

HOW TO USE AN EXPERIENCE MODEL

If you’ve followed the process so far, you have a room full of images sequenced according to process, then mapped to the stages of the experience model. You have identified key features, hot spots, bright spots, gaps, and iconic moments. Most important, your team has had a series of rich conversations about the experience from the user’s point of view. Now you can use an Experience Map to innovate.

Groups working with shared visuals can create a powerful, shared picture of what they learn, as they learn it.

Explore the metaphor. Discuss the implications of the existing metaphor for your long-term relationship with customers. Is the metaphor compatible with the promise of your brand? What products, services, and processes contribute to the truth of the metaphor?
Fix hot spots. Phrase each hot spot as a problem to solve. For instance, “Travelers need help with luggage.” Then ideate around the problem statement, generating ideas for how to fix the problem. From these, you can cull ideas best suited to your needs.
Gather benchmarks.Where in the world have other businesses done a great job of addressing the experience issues you identified? When looking for clues about how to better divide space in the workplace, one team looked at the interiors of yachts and campers.
Build on bright spots. For each bright spot, generate a list of ways you could extend the goodwill of that moment to other parts of the experience.
Fill in the gaps. For each stage of the experience model, brainstorm opportunities to improve the experience. For instance, we might focus brainstorming around the “Entice” stage of the model, generating concepts about how the company might create new processes to build customer excitement and set expectations for the experience to follow.
Create an Experience Plan. Arrange ideas generated in your brainstorms into the five stages of the Experience Model. Use verbal descriptions, sketches or whatever else you have at your disposal to communicate the new stages of the experience. Share this Plan (and the Experience Map) with key stakeholders to provoke critique and improvement.