Story Mapping
Background
At the time of this work, Autodesk had two completely different and independent solutions for electrical controls design as a result of acquisitions. It has been several years since these products were acquired and there is really no need for two solutions that do the same thing, this just causes confusion for potential customers. This map was created to help with an intiative to identify the best of both applications, and create a single, new solution to serve both user bases.
I developed this map to identify and follow the users workflow as they moved through the application. This map was used to communicate two things, existing workflows from the two products that were in the market today, and gaps that were identified and we could look to fill to improve the new solution for the user. Of course, addressing these workflow gaps that were identified would be above and beyond addressing any UX issues within existing workflows since we would be re-creating them for the new solution.
While it looks rudimentary, we used an internal tool, AutoCAD, to document this story map. Given the size, complexity, and diverse audience I included a legend to guide consumers on how to interpret the map since not all consumers have interacted with a story map before and because there was a couple different categories of data. This ensured a shared and consistent understanding for anyone viewing it asynchronously.
The image above provides a closer look at part of the story map. During the project, we printed out the entire story map on a large format printer and hung it in the conference room where we would regularly meet. This allowed us to gather around the map to review and in some cases write directly on the map or write on a sticky note and place it onto the map.