RKS is an innovation and design consulting firm with headquarters in Thousand Oaks, California and a satellite office in Los Angeles. The document discusses various tools used by RKS to synthesize research findings and design human-centered solutions, including affinity mapping, creating personas, user experience mapping, role playing, and psycho-aesthetics mapping. These tools help identify insights, patterns, and opportunities to improve users' experiences with a service.
2. RKS is an innovation and design consulting firm delivering
human focused solutions with global impact. Founded in
1980, RKS utilizes design as a strategic tool advancing
client’s ability to focus on people’s needs and aspirations.
WHO WE ARE
3. RKS is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, in the heart of the
beautiful Santa Monica Mountains. RKS recently opened a
satellite office at Cross Campus, a high energy,
collaborative environment at the center of Silicon Beach.
WHERE WE ARE
4. WHY SYNTHESIZE?
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did
something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw
something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were
able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.”
-Steve Jobs
7. Affinity Mapping helps to categorize the vast array of findings gathered during
the research phase thus developing strategic areas for further brainstorming.
We use Affinity Mapping as a tool to cluster raw findings into relational
groupings that emerge as patterns and themes.
AFFINITY MAPPING
8. 1. Visualize your key insights. Use post-its to capture your research findings
2. Collaborate. As you put your post-its up on the wall, read out loud to your
team to maintain a high level understanding
3. Identify patterns that arise in your findings and cluster them accordingly
4. Name your groupings as overarching themes
AFFINITY MAPPING
10. A persona is an insight cluster that is formed balancing demographic data and
psychographic attributes to communicate the most relevant research insights.
Personas are created to cover a broad spectrum of key players in the service
ecosystem. We use this tool to empathize with users and understand multiple
perspectives that will drive a service innovation. Personas also anchor and
depict real human needs for the creation of your service offering.
PERSONAS
11. 1. Identify the players in your service ecosystem – service providers,
consumers and/or stakeholders
2. Select 3 relevant players and briefly describe them.
3. Make them real. Give this persona a name, age, profession, income, family,
needs, values, aspirations and challenges.
4. Enlist circumstances in the service offering that prevent them from reaching
their full potential
5. Create personas with extreme challenges to test a range of different use
cases for your service
CREATING PERSONAS
13. A User Experience Journey begins before a service is used and continues after
the user’s engaged with that offering. This tool is used to map out critical
moments in the user’s journey to identify opportunities for improvement with the
greatest impact and meaning for users. We use this method to identify key
steps in the process, the tangible and intangible touchpoints and emotional
highs and lows throughout the experience. This tool lays the foundation for
opportunity areas to emerge.
EXPERIENCE MAPPING
14. 1. Based on your research, write (visualize) each step in the service, 7-10
crucial activities (hint: the journey begins before the service begins and
continues even after the service is used)
2. Make sure to integrate activities that are unique to each persona
3. Discuss and identify the key activities that need the most improvement and
you would like to focus on
CREATING A USER EXPERIENCE MAP
15. 1. Create an Emotional Spectrum - the emotional highs and lows in the existing
experience that you observed during the research
2. Discuss and identify the key activities that need the most improvement and
your team would like to focus on
CREATING A USER EXPERIENCE MAP
17. Role playing is acting out a scenario to better understand the user experience.
Each team member becomes a player in the existing service ecosystem,
learning about individual motivations, challenges and needs as well as
relationships that emerge from the service context through the physical
enactment.
ROLE PLAYING
18. 1. Assign each team member a role or persona and act out some of the key
activities your team chose in the User Experience Journey
2. Use props and the environment to help you role play your chosen persona
HOW TO ROLE PLAY
19. 1. Capture (through photos, post its or sketches) key moments that can be
improved and write them as Help Me statements – don’t forget to note which
parts of the service are working well too!
2. Identify the key Help Me statements that can transform your service
experience
CREATING A USER EXPERIENCE MAP
21. Psycho-aesthetics is RKS’ proprietary framework adapted from Abraham
Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” to strategically frame meaningful consumer
experiences and game changing business opportunities. This framework
enables the translation of peoples’ desires into visual context while providing
direction for innovation teams throughout the process of a project.
We use it to map consumer segments, position products, services and brands,
analyze industry landscapes and to frame new business opportunities.
WHAT IS PSYCHO-AESTHETICS?
22. 1. Think about existing competitive offerings that relate to your service
2. Map out the existing offerings relative each other on map – least interactive
to most interactive
3. Keeping your key persona in mind, think about how your service can
address their needs better than existing competitors. “It’s not how you feel
about the design or experience, it’s how it makes you feel about yourself”
4. Based on competitors and your persona’s aspirations, identify the
positioning of your opportunity zone
HOW TO USE IT
23. What we saw-
Flow your thinking in the following order:
Insights are derived from asking Why’s?
Actionable directions are derived from asking How’s?
TIPS
What did we see? What did we learn?
What does it mean for
our service offering?
How do we change
the service offering?
