Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity

by Chris Risdon, Patrick Quattlebaum, Nick Madden (Illustrator)

Customer experiences are increasingly complicated—with multiple channels, touchpoints, contexts, and moving parts—all delivered by fragmented organizations. How can you bring your ideas to life in the face of such complexity? Orchestrating Experiences is a practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.

Genres: Design, Business, Nonfiction, Professional Development, Reference

336 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you work in large organizations that provide complex, multi-step services like banking, airline travel, and pharmacy chains, this book is for you. The book will show you how to address touchpoints across these services so your customers have a consistent, productive, branded experience.

For instance, if you work for the retailer Target, this book will help you consider all the interactions customers have with Target, including when they visit Target.com, go to the brick-and-mortar retail pharmacy, or use the store’s app.

If you work in a smaller organization, you can still pull insights from the book.

I appreciate all the instructions on how to run workshops and activities with your team. At the end of most chapters, the authors explain how to run a workshop to achieve what they describe in the chapter. They walk you through the process (some of these workshops will span several working days) so you’re prepared to lead the activity.

I learned about a few new activities from the book:

A Question Map: A session with abroad range of stakeholders. You gather questions that each stakeholder has about the customer experience. You then analyze everyone’s input as a group to identify key topics to investigate in your research.

A Gallery Tour: When you finish conducting field research, you collect raw information from your sessions like photos of each participant, the journey and ecosystem maps you created, and sticky notes with key insights from each session. Then, you have an open house for other stakeholders to tour the research gallery.

The book also explains how to do some activities I’m familiar with, such as brainstorms, How MIght We’s, and Bodystorming.

I appreciate the brief section near the end about running remote workshops. The co-author, Patrick Quattlebaum, suggests a few approaches I haven’t considered for remote collaboration, including giving yourself more time to facilitate activities. He says many things take longer to do in remote session due to lagged communications and synthesis steps.

I recommend this read, especially if you work at a large organization. If you work at a small organization, you can still pull insights from this book.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opinionated end-to-end look at the process of bringing service delivery optimization, improvement, or re-imagination to life. Best suited for the context of larger, established organizations that work with customers/end-users across a variety of channels.

It's a thorough look at the process with actionable workshop outlines and agendas provided for each of the major activities involved. The subtext running throughout is the slow process of showing impact and building influence... slowly shepherding a big ship to changing course.

Because of this strategic bent, it's not the best place to start for learning the building blocks of service design and how to use them. Instead, it's a deep well of knowledge & guidance to draw from if you're already in a position to do this type of work.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve far passed up the point in my career where I’d find this useful but I still like to scan methods books to see how the field evolves and whether I’d recommend them to newer designers. This is a book I wish I’d had earlier in my career. The balance between concept and practical workshops you can use is immensely helpful for newer designers and researchers at large organizations. I think it will be particularly helpful for those moving into more senior roles and/or spearheading design processes.

[Michał · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very exhaustive book on creating experiences. The authors approached the subject of channels, touchpoints and user journeys in general with great detail. It's a practical guide which is really easy to follow (if you know the lingo). I think it should be read cover to cover. It's not something you can breeze through or skip chapters. I highly recommend sitting down and read it carefully. It's a must read even for experienced designers and executives. One thing though... If you are not familiar with the digital product delivery business, than you might struggle to keep up. Don't get discouraged. It's definitely worth your time.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably good advice for an organization that is both much much bigger and less already customer-focused as mine. Some very good general advice, but not useful for me just at the moment.

[Matthew Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity is a comprehensive look at core concepts and how to orchestrate experiences is presented in three stages.

An integrated approach to improve customer experience architecture by understanding channels, touchpoints, ecosystems and journeys is explored in "A Common Foundation." In it, the author advocates for ensuring your organization's terms are used consistently, and it provides tools and techniques for this purpose.

This guide highlights how to organize an organization's cross-functional team so they can identify and prioritize customer needs, as well as identify opportunities for improving and reimagining end-to-end customer experiences.

It describes how by generating ideas collaboratively and guiding them through a vision that is inspirational, stakeholders will be brought together and action will follow. In addition, this book teaches techniques for moving your organization towards orchestrating experiences more intentionally by conveying your intent through touchpoint design.

To improve or reimagine end-to-end experiences, cross-functional collaboration is essential. The authors also include examples of various workshops designed to help them illustrate the benefits of orchestrating products and services.

[Sam Rye · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very much a book about Service Design, rather than fourth order design (systems).

It has some useful, practical guidance, but little about Complexity itself - in fact I'm not sure it really deals with Complexity so much as complexity (small 'c').

Complexity science is interesting as it provides a profound counterpoint for Design as a practice, because it introduces an increase in uncertainty, diverse and non-standard experiences, and the need for adaptation over time, into the design process. Yet this is largely overlooked, instead settling more for 'collaborative design for *complicated problems*'?

[Jared Pickering · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best, most refreshing approaches to user experience that I’ve ever read. This takes out all of the fluff and nonsense circulating online about what UX design ‘feels like’ to people and breaks it down to the nitty gritty science of human-computer interaction. If this is a field you want to enter, or even one you’ve been in for a while, this is a must-read.

[Melih Ozgul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very technical book

I started reading this book with an ambition 9/10 however move very slowly due to the too much technical guidance about workshops etc. That could be the aim anyway more stories would have been much better

[Christina Vasilevski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starts off strong and ends strong, but the middle part is a slog. I ended up skipping over the sections discussing how to run the workshops, since they weren't immediately relevant to the context in which I was reading the story.

[Thomas Cleary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Super easy to read - and it mixes theory and practice well

[Beth Filar Williams]

Great professional read, covers more holistic UX ... Gleaned a lot!

[Massimo Curatella · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Systematic approach to Service Design for all Designers
3 maggio 2018 - Published also on Amazon.com

Although I received a free advance copy of the book for review purposes... I also bought it.

Read through to discover why.

I knew and applied most of the concepts presented in “Orchestrating Experiences” but it’s immensely useful to have them in a systematic framework.

You can think about orchestrating experiences as applying a Systems Thinking approach to Service Design, Experience Design and Interaction Design through the Human-Centred Design philosophy.

The detailed explanation of how to conduct the workshops for each phase is well done and useful for starting facilitators, and very helpful for the more experienced ones. I appreciate passing from theory to well-structured practice.

The writing style is clear, concise and smooth. I really appreciated the well-thought structure of the chapters and sections. A useful summary is presented at the end of each chapter to highlight the key learning points.

From time to time you can also find little bits of humor as in:
"Unpacking an ecosystem is not unlike peeling an onion: there are many layers, and at some point in the process, you might start to cry."

In this book, you can find a detailed and articulated Service Design framework to enrich the collaboration of diverse teams when dealing with complex design challenges.

If you are a practitioner in any Design field but especially in Service Design and Experience Design I strongly recommend to you to read this book.

I think the authors made a great effort to create a book that will be an important reference in the design field so I bought the book I already had for free because they really deserved it.