EXPERIENCE
DESIGN
Download the Essential Experience Canvas
Use this canvas for solo work or workshops, whenever you need to create solutions for customers. This value proposition canvas will help you to:
-
Create services people love, by tapping onto their needs and emotions
-
Create alignment between customer and business needs
-
Go straight to the creation of concrete outcomes that tackle these needs.
Free PDF file. No sign up required.
Designing experiences that respond to needs and emotions
This canvas will help you organize your findings and tackle, one by one, the elicited feelings from each identified need. I have used Strategyzer's value proposition canvas quite a lot, and other models, as well. But I saw the need of adapting it to make it more architectural: placing all points of view at once, and exposing the feelings triggered by met and unmet needs of the user.
Let's unwrap, one by one, the canvas steps and go through an example.
The canvas model
This is the canvas model. Like most design canvasses, it works by filling it out with sticker notes, one field at a time.


Our vocabulary
The canvas has four fields to be explored:

ESSENTIALS


Let's fill the canvas with an example.
For this example, we will consider an urban Café chain digitizing their business.
The targeted segment is the coffee lover: urban, working or studying from home and appreciative of good coffee.
EXAMPLE


Ready?



Needs — the Jobs to be done
Like any business or design canvas, start by what you know. As you probably (hopefully!) has gathered information about your target users' needs, start there.
The needs, here, take the shape of the jobs to be done. Be expansive in how you perceive what is a "need". You may need social connection, food, self-reliance or humor. Thus, you will "hire" someone (a company, a service, a product) to get that job done for you.

Now that the needs are mapped out, let's map which emotions these needs trigger.



Here is the ideal outcome from the experience of your features. Go beyond "happy" or "satisfied", and describe some of the nuanced emotions that are triggered when those needs are fulfilled.

Now we understand the positive emotions triggered when your service meets customer needs.
What happens when needs are not met?



Here are the emotional consequence of not having the needs met. Go beyond "sad" or "angry" and describe as accurately as possible various emotions involved in the process.

Let's respond to needs and emotions with concrete features.
Pro tip
Great features are at one time a response to needs that explore positive emotions and mitigate negative ones.



A great feature will respond to the needs of the end user, as well as paying attention to the triggered feelings. This helps to design sharper features, that attack and counterattack specific emotions that lurk when the needs are coming to the user's attention.

In the example we were using, our features could be...
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A universal policy of 25-minute meetings, instead of 30 minutes
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A recommendation of reserving the 11:00-11:30 slot for lunch only
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Arranging outdoor breaks for employees who live near one another
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Offering online stretching, Pilates or Yoga
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Offering vouchers for nutritionally-savvy restaurants, and more.
In a real design process, the features will be prototyped and tested with real customers, and iterated after that to adapt to the new insights.

Other models
You will find more canvas models that take into consideration more stakeholders.
For instance, you may want to consider a shared value canvas, so you align end-users and the sponsor of the initiative (the company launching the service, aka your client). You may also need a B2B Value Proposition Canvas, specifically addressing the design process with B2B clients.
If you are creating an internal initiative for employees, there is also a canvas for creating value in employee experience.
Download the Essential Experience Canvas
Use this canvas for solo work or workshops, whenever you need to create solutions for customers. This value proposition canvas will help you to:
-
Create services people love, by tapping onto their needs and emotions
-
Create alignment between customer and business needs
-
Go straight to the creation of concrete outcomes that tackle these needs.
Free PDF file. No sign up required.