Quotes from James Kalbach

the goal of a mapping effort isn't to complete an artifact, but to address the challenges the diagrams help discover and understand. Diagrams

An experience is something that is constructed in the mind of the perceiver. It's not something an organization owns. To map experiences, investigation into those experiences from the perspective of the individual is necessary.

Empathy is about seeing the world through someone else's eyes. It's about an implicit sense of what an experience is like, what people value, and what emotions are involved

Creating great experiences is not about individual touchpoint optimization but rather how touchpoints come together into a unified whole.

In a broader sense, visualizations inform strategy. They are a key way of seeing the market from the customer's perspective. Mapping experiences isn't a nice-to-have design tool; it's a must-have for strategic alignment.

You don't compete against products and services in your category: you compete against anything that gets the job done from the user's point of view.

The mind constructs small-scale models of reality to anticipate events, to reason, and to underlie explanation.

Similarly, this is what mapping offers: new insight. It starts with an investigation and illustration of the human condition and then works out ways to support people's needs.

FIGURE 5-1. Comb existing sources for relevant evidence, group the implications on the experience people may have, and make conclusions.

Moments of truth can be thought of as a special type of touchpoint. They are critical, emotionally charged interactions, and usually occur when someone has invested a high degree of energy in a desired outcome. Moments of truth either make or break the relationship.

The advice is clear: don't force people to bridge gaps of your offering. That's your job. Mapping experiences allows you to locate transitional volatility within a broader system of interactions and find innovative solutions to address it.