Suppose you’ve reached the point where you’re interested in visually mapping your product, service, or experience. Yet, you or a person in power might ask, before committing fully to a mapping adventure  “What benefit does all this visual committing mapping bring?”

It’s a reasonable question.

High quality experience maps demand significant investment in time and effort. They are also a precursor, or upstream thinking tool, to the downstream assets like prototypes, user interface designs and high-fidelity mockups. In face of tight timelines and budgets, it’s hard to avoid the urgency of getting right down to detailed design.

Glad you asked.

The value of visual experience mapping is substantial. Consider this Top 12 Benefits of Visual Product, Service and Experience Mapping

1. Maps give the ability to see an experience from a wide range of perspectives: users, customers, employees, citizens, patients and more. This shifting perspective ensures that teams design products and services from the perspective of the people that will use it, and those others directly affected by it.

2. Maps provide visual outputs that are easy to understand for all stakeholders. They quickly bring distributed teams onto the same page. This is especially valuable in our new world of mixed-mode methods of collaboration.

3. Maps give context to well-written stories of behaviour and need. Maps, similar to those found in classic fantasy novels, provide narrative context. They help bring needs to life, by showing them in space and time.

4. Maps allow the exploration of future ideas before committing the resources to building the full solution. Seeing something come to life in map form saves time, money and avoids expensive mistakes.

5. Maps help show how to build things that are more usable, desirable, valuable, ethical and safe. A map gives a solid backbone to evaluate each of usability and experience criteria both separately, and in context with the entire product or service.

6. Maps drive the creation of technologies that are easier to build and maintain because they’re built against rational, staged, experience-driven requirements. Maps give holistic views of an experience, allowing teams to drive down from user needs to the right technology. This creates systems that are built around the most meaningful needs, things, or actions.

7. Maps break down the barriers between business, technology, people, process and policy by bringing everything into a series of visual views for everyone to see. Organisations are often stuck building products and services in the image of their own organisational back-of-house structures. This makes for experiences that are awkward, fragmented, confusing, inefficient and unusable. Maps, especially those oriented from an experience down, flip that model on its head.

8. Maps, with their layers, breakaways, and focus areas to help unify both big picture and detail. Maps are renown for their ability to show the ‘big picture’ and slices of key detail. It’s all about planning which maps are most useful.

9. Maps untangle complexity and lift crucial insights, so you don’t miss what really matters. Maps make choices about what they show, which means they have the effect of filtering and organising noisy data into comprehensible patterns.

10. Maps tie experiences to underpinning business models, ensuring there is value in your product or service. Though maps might start from experiences, they are most powerful when they tie into the underpinning organisation’s operations, systems, and business models. This connects desired experiences with supporting operational and business models.

11. Maps act as architectural site plans for a project, showing everyone involved in planning and construction the outline of the space and where things will go. It’s why every formal engineering discipline in the world makes their own maps; from civil engineering drawings, to circuit board diagrams, to geospatial plans.

12. Maps help you avoid the dangerous impulse of detailed design and build before you have answers about what problem you’re trying to solve, who you’re solving it for, the context of use and how the experience will unfold.

But here’s a catch (caveat); mapping results from correct and well-designed user research. User research is required to feed the maps with good information and insight. So maps have many benefits, but only when linked with the exceptional user research.

The moral of the story is simple.

Do the research and draw the maps.

Then use the insights and clarity they provide to build the products, services and experiences your customers really want and need, and to build them quickly and the most cost effectively.