Asset Mapping for Experience Consistency

Consistency is essential for a great omnichannel user experience. When interactions look, feel, and function similarly across channels, not only is user effort reduced, but users’ trust and confidence are bolstered.   

To make an experience consistent, teams first need to catalog the interactions and assets that users engage with along their workflows and journeys. An effective tool for analyzing consistency across channels is an asset map.

What Is an Asset Map?

Definition: An asset map provides a high-level, chronological method of displaying and organizing all the screens and elements users encounter across channels when completing a workflow or journey to assess its consistency. Full or partial-page screenshots, social media posts, videos, emails, text messages, push notifications, copy, and photographs can be included in the map.

Prioritize including assets from the channels people use frequently to complete key workflows and journeys. These are typically channels such as the desktop website(s), mobile web, and mobile apps. It’s also acceptable to include subchannels of these main channels — such as chatbot messages on desktop web, customer-support messages communicated over the phone, or photos of a physical location, provided that these are part of the journey. 

Asset Map vs. Customer-Journey Map

Asset maps and customer-journey maps share commonalities and should be thought of as complimentary UX mapping methods. They’re both chronological representations of the user’s experience with a company and serve as foundational tools for determining where pain points exist.

Typically, customer-journey maps do not include the actual screens and elements users interact with. However, it’s perfectly acceptable to supplement actions in the customer-journey map with graphics or storyboards. If the journey map includes actual screenshots from the journey, it becomes an asset map. This way of creating an asset map lends credibility to the process, as it’s rooted in data from exploratory research such as field studies and diary studies that inform customer-journey maps.   

Asset maps work best for smaller tasks and workflows such as buying a new TV, checking into a flight and retrieving a mobile boarding pass, or signing up for a new mobile phone carrier, that teams can change to improve the consistency across channels. Bigger journeys like planning a vacation or looking for a new mobile-phone carrier can include many different information sources, channels, and assets that may be outside of the team or organization’s control, so for those an asset map will be less useful.  It’s best to focus on change that can actually happen.

Though a suboptimal approach, an asset map can also be created in the absence of a customer-journey map, if the team wants to do a baseline assessment of consistency or to fix any inconsistencies before doing user research. The asset map serves to ensure that the current state of the experience is as consistent as possible across all (or most) channels, before reaching users. The sooner the team detects inconsistencies, the faster it can identify the internal reasons behind them. Then, it can use user research to assign severity levels to these inconsistencies and prioritize fixing them.

Sometimes, including the asset map alongside the customer-journey map moves focus from understanding the user journey to detecting inconsistencies. If this is a challenge for your team, it might be best to keep customer-journey maps and asset maps as separate tools with different purposes: the journey map for understanding the user and the asset map for ideating solutions. (You can still use the journey map to create the asset map, though.) 

The distinction between asset maps and journey maps is similar to that between UI and UX: the asset map focuses on the user interface (UI) and the journey map focuses on the broader picture of the user experience. Understanding both is important; even if the interface and elements supporting a workflow or journey are perfectly consistent, if the journey misses the mark on what the user wants and needs in the first place, the total user experience will still be lousy. And vice versa, even if the big picture is right, when there are lots of problems at the basic interface level, the resulting experience will be affected.

Creating and Using Asset Maps

Map creation can be done in person, using a large whiteboard or wall space and printed assets, or remotely, through digital collaboration tools such as Miro, Mural, and Google Sheets, which scale to accommodate many assets of varying sizes.

Follow these five steps to create and use an asset map:

1. Find a journey map: If you have an existing customer-journey map, identify what steps in the journey or workflows have associated screens or assets to review. If you don’t have a customer-journey map, begin planning research to create one or choose a journey or workflow that’s important to your users and organization and complete it yourself. Only approach it this way if you’re using the asset map for baseline consistency evaluation before user research.


2. Collect assets on all channels for each step in the map: Go through the workflow and take screenshots of each step along the way (or find corresponding user-provided assets). Repeat this process for all channels and platforms where users can complete the workflow. After collecting all assets, arrange them in the order users encounter them and for each screenshot, indicate the channel it belongs to. Show the progressions for each channel horizontally and stack different channels vertically to align similar steps across different channels underneath one another in the map.


3. Investigate and identify inconsistencies: Once everything is organized, look for inconsistencies along the following dimensions, listed in priority order:
   
   
   • Core functionality: We often assume consistency equates to visual design. However, it’s more important to first look at the asset map for functional inconsistencies. Evaluate if users can do what they need to do across channels with quality and ease. If people can’t do what they need to do in the first place, it doesn’t matter what the visual design looks like. For example, can users sign into their account or get help across all channels? Can they do all the important tasks on all channels? If core functionality must differ for business or strategic reasons from one channel to another, don’t mislead users. Be upfront about it through content and help users recover.   
   
   
   • Workflows and process: Though certain device capabilities (like biometric identification or a full physical keyboard) can streamline or accelerate steps in a workflow, the general process should be consistent across channels. Consistent processes and flows instill confidence in users — no matter which channel they reach for, there won’t be any surprises. Examine the workflows to see if they’re similarly implemented across channels. If users begin a step on one channel and proceed to the next on another, is the overall process consistent?
   
   
   • Data and content: Is the data and information clear, accurate, and consistent from one channel to the next, or are users getting confusing mixed messages? Examine the content and copy across channels, as well as messages coming from backend data systems, front-line staff, and customer support. Are all these consistent with each other?
   
   
   • Tone of voice: Read the copy and content that appears across channels and check how the information is communicated. Is the tone of voice consistent from one channel to the next or do certain channels introduce different personalities? Though tone of voice can vary slightly depending on the channel’s context (for example, a casual tone can be okay on social media but not on a corporate website), messages should still sound consistent to users across channels.
   
   
   • Look and feel: Look and feel comprises visual-design and branding elements such as graphics, icons, colors, and fonts, as well as interactive elements like animations and transitions. Inconsistencies among channels can make users question their security and legitimacy, leading to negative perceptions of the channel, brand, and organization. Once users have a poor experience on a channel, they’re less likely to return to it in the future.
4. Call out disconnects: After reviewing the map, draw circles around inconsistencies and lines to connect corresponding ones across channels or steps.

At this stage, involve crossfunctional partners or other channel-dedicated teams. Share the map, discuss the inconsistencies uncovered, and their negative effects on users. Engaging these individuals early on in the process, before proposing any changes, will help to break down organizational silos and garner buy-in. After examining the asset map for themselves, they may suggest missing assets and examples that belong in the map or propose a solution. Through this process, strategic partnerships and collaborative opportunities become clear, thus reducing institutional compartmentalization.

5. Prioritize inconsistencies and decide which to fix first: Though consistency in core functionality is the most important, resolving functional inconsistencies can take much longer than reconciling look, feel, content, and tone. Focus first on inconsistencies that will provide positive impact with minimal effort. This approach will help demonstrate iterative progress, especially if developers and IT partners need time to facilitate consistent core functionality across channels.

Benefits of Asset Mapping

Asset maps provide an easy way to pinpoint inconsistencies and lead to informed recommendations for tactical improvements. Reviewing assets from all channels at once allows teams to collaboratively evaluate, compare, and understand what users see, hear, and interact with across channels, not just on one touchpoint or channel. Asset maps can also expose unnecessary redundancies, such as multiple emails that could be consolidated into one, areas where users lack critical information, or disparate functionality from one channel to another.

And finally, asset maps are great tools for creating and scaling a design system or component library. They offer a methodical way of auditing existing assets and components for consistency and provide an inventory of what already exists, is missing, or reusable across channels.

Conclusion

Because organizational factors such as culture, buy-in, team structures, and technical constraints can sometimes hold teams back or slow progress with omnichannel initiatives, asset mapping is a low-effort, high-impact activity for teams to undertake in order to prove incremental consistency improvements while waiting for more time-intensive factors to resolve.

To learn even more about creating consistent user experiences, take our Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience course at the UX Conference.