As digital design is moving into more complex domains, our tools have been stuck and limited by our past. As a domain, we have moved from digital products to services and multi-channel experiences. In parallel, our practice has expanded from UI/visual design and human factors to interaction design, to service and experience design and the power of our conceptual tools has improved too, from mockups to UI flow diagrams (wireframes), to journey and ecosystem maps and service blueprints. Our key tool is often post-it’s and sharpies on large canvases and whiteboards as they facilitate collaboration and extremely malleable. Beyond that, however, our tools have hardly improved. Instead of Fireworks, Photoshop et al., it is now Sketch, Figma, Overflow, Mural and et al., which all utterly fail to capture journeys meaningfully.

These tools all try to flatten multi-dimensional spaces onto a 2D surface because that’s the best we know how “to design”. And while this approach means less tool to learn, it also results in most of the drawbacks of paper without the advantages: The tools are shallow, as they all produce lines on a canvas. Any process or journey mapped becomes a landscape of boxes without any inherent logic. Tools like OmniGraffle and LucidChart handle diagrams and graph layout better, and BPM tools like IBM’s BlueWorks allow to quickly model processes. But no tool provides the ability to describe a journey as simply as textografo but with depth and thus the ability to change perspective.

And while drawing digitally allows for easy duplication, undo, templates and remote collaboration, it also limits users in terms of screen space, especially when abstraction is handled as zooming rather than summarizing. For example, taking a full end-to-end product/service user journey, we can identify a number of phases that can be broken into smaller steps, which may break into specific actions. With pen and paper, we would draw this through a set of diagrams that cut at the right level of granularity: high, medium and detail level. With our digital tools, we can either replicate the same or allow for zooming. What no tool provides, is an ability to automatically collapse, aggregate and drill-down based on inherent logic.

The key to user experience is the flow of a journey: A flow from screen to screen, from touch-point to touch-point or from process to process. In more complex ecosystems, these flows are intertwined and interdependent, best described through a graph. Ideally, we would like to have one large interconnected model, that allows moving through levels of abstraction rather than levels of zoom. Even more, if these journeys are modelled through structured and semantic objects, it would allow us to filter our view dynamically (e.g. critical path, processing time, swim lane, failures, etc.) and—more importantly—turn our perspective. For example, a base view may be the logical flow through the journey, while another view could show RASCI definitions, while even other views may be based on timelines, checklists, list of pain-points, etc.

Architects and industrial designers use their CAD programs exactly for that: To help them view their artefacts through various dimensions. To do something that is incredibly painstaking or impossible on pen and paper. For digital design we should have come to the point, where such a tool makes sense to exist. A generic tool that allows multiple users to come together remotely to document an as-is process with pain points, or create a to-be process, add comments. A generic tool, where time is not spent on laying out work visually but to describe connections between actors, actions, objects, systems, processes, failures, comments, metrics, etc. A generic tool that allows simple sharing of a journey, where one can drill down to understand more or dynamically toggle to show comments, or elapsed time, or mapping onto a timeline, or a specific actor’s actions and quality criteria.

Such a tool would be a truly computer-aided design tool for the experience designer. Our work has moved from UI layouts to multi-dimensional journeys. Our tools must catch up.

Note: This is a first post on modelling complex operations. My next post will elaborate on modelling processes and the various dimensions to look at operations.

#Design, #Tools, #ToolsForDesign, #Modelling, #Graph