4x4 Experience Canvas
The 4x4 Experience Canvas is based on User Centered Design (UCD) practises and defines the elements necessary to create intentional human experiences for a product or service; whether it is in private industry or a public agency. The 4x4 approach provides the blueprint for an organizations' experience-creation infrastructure that can be tracked, measured and improved over time.
An experience includes usually one to four elements: Product, Software, Space and Service. So when we talk about creation of an experience any and all of these elements can be part of the experience you deliver.
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The first four elements of the 4x4 Experience Canvas cover Business, Human, Content and Technology. The business aspect of each experience is for private companies to deliver value to the organisation, usually monetary but in case of government and non-profit organisations it can be fullfilling the mandate or reaching a wider audience.
These values will have an audience externally and this is where the human aspect of experiences come into play. These humans are the customers, users and clients of the product & services where the input they can provide throughout the creation process is critical for success.
After all, these are the humans that will buy, recieve and use the product & services from the company or organisation.
Next up is the content aspect of an experience. Here is where we think about production, editorial guidelines, governance, search engine optimization, retention and metadata of the information of the product & service. With more and more information around us that is either provided by an organisation or created by users; it becomes increasingly important to have specific governance, strategies and processes around how to work with the information & content. This thinking applies both from an organisation perspective as from an audience and user perspective.
The fourth aspect is the role of technology in experiences and usually acts as an enabler of the above three aspects. Here is where boundaries are placed around what technology wise can be done in the real world with the resources available.
All four have their place in the creation process and failing to give any of them sufficient attention and resources has a direct and negative impact on the overall quality of the experience you deliver.
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The second set of elements on the 4x4 Experience Canvas is taking four elements that are often found in a process to project delivery: create an experience strategy (why this product & service, what challenge does it solve), conduct sufficient experience research (what is the customer space, what is out there already, who would use the solution and see value in the solution), sketch and design the experience (how to deliver to the challenge) and finally test the outcome (where did we miss the mark, what needs to happen to meet our success metrics) in an iterative fashion. So that by the time we go to manufacturing, engineering and finally launch, we will have sufficiently de-risked the product & service experience.
The key thinking at this point is that no matter whether we talk about business, human, content and technology; each strand will have a strategy, research & design component and will be tested before we make a major capital investment in manufacturing and/or (software) engineering.
For organisations that want to create succesful intentional experiences, a balanced creation process will include the appropriate 4x4 mix.
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