Cornelius Rachieru Jr. is Founder and Creative Director of the popular CanUX conference, and is also founder of Canadian UX consultancy Ampli2de Inc. I spoke with Cornelius about his work in UX strategy, and in particular, ecosystem mapping. Cornelius will be holding his workshop “Mapping Multi-Channel Ecosystems” at the UX STRAT Europe conference, which will take place in Amsterdam on June 10 – 12 (see https://www.uxstrat.com/europe for more info).
Paul: Hi Cornelius, thanks for taking time out to talk with me. Can you tell us a little about yourself, such as your current role, what you’ve been up to, how you got to this stage in your career?
Cornelius: I currently run Ampli2de, a small Canadian UX consultancy I founded about 15 years ago. I’m also the co-founder and co-chair of a conference called CanUX, which happens to be the largest and longest running UX conference in Canada. Prior to that, I used to lead the UX practices of a couple of large enterprises, Deloitte Consulting and Shaw Communications, a large telecom provider in Western Canada.
I guess that’s also how I got into the enterprise space. I’ve always been fascinated by solving large scale problems, which are more of the norm in those kind of environments. In most cases, designers are asked to focus deeply into creating experiences for the users, but there is also a high level big picture at the intersection of business strategy and UX strategy that we’re getting into more and more as designers move into leadership positions. I focus on making sure they are as prepared as possible for that environment, and are able to tackle those kind of problems on even footing with our business counterparts who expect us to be able to apply design concepts and visualize their business reality at scale.
Paul: Tell us about your workshop that’s coming up at UX STRAT Europe.
Cornelius: I’m thrilled to be running my workshop on ecosystem mapping for only the second time in Europe at UX STRAT. I started out thinking about techniques related to mapping ecosystems a while back when I started to realize that our current service design tools are not always great at making sense of the increasingly complex and ambiguous systems that we’re starting to tackle. W starting to consider problems at scale, but our toolset is restricted in the service design world to things like service blueprinting, customer journey maps, experience maps, on top of our typical UX method. I’ve found, after talking to quite a few colleagues, that these don’t always scale up very well at the system level in complex industries and larger enterprises, because they have so many moving parts.
About three years ago I started looking deeply into systems thinking and systems dynamics, and tried to sort out and synthesize what I learned, and eventually came up with a method that can be used as part of a typical product or design strategy engagement with business stakeholders in order to map out and the various moving parts of an ecosystem for the purpose of understanding it, and making decisions about which parts and lenses we should focus on during additional deep dives. My workshop is basically a way to snapshot the 10,000-foot view of a system that a company plays in, and then using that to make decisions regarding which areas of the system need to be examined in more detail, using our more conventional service design tools
Paul: UX STRAT focuses on experience design strategy. People have different ideas about what strategy is. As you look at ecosystems and ecosystem mapping, how do you think that relates to strategy?
Cornelius: I think part of being strategic is to be able to look at problem from multiple perspectives: you can look at it from an experience design perspective, but also look at it from a business perspective, and this part almost always requires some sort of coming to alignment on understanding of the big picture. Because typically the output of a strategy is to create a plan or a roadmap creating something, I would argue that understanding the system in which the company resides will become increasingly important in the near future as we’ve seen from the increase of ecosystem-related presentations by design leaders in the last couple of years. Understand how that fits within the bigger picture of your company. I’ve seen recently, this month actually, a conference talk in which the presenter talked about a customer journey map that they completed for a client as for a client. The physical form of that was actually a 46-foot journey map when it was all nicely put together. And while I’m sure the work was fantastic from an experience design perspective, in my opinion, that is something that no business leader would have the patience to look at or go through in any kind of detail. So, there needs to be something in our arsenal, from a toolset perspective, that we can tackle a problem of that complexity and only then deep dive in. That is precisely why I think ecosystem mapping has a place in what we call experience design strategy.
Paul: I’ve been interviewing a lot of UX leaders over the past few weeks, and one topic that’s coming up a lot is artificial intelligence and how that will impact experience design. Is that something that you’re seeing as well, or have you had any experience involving artificial intelligence in ecosystems?
Cornelius: Absolutely. Though at a system level, AI-enabled elements are typically black boxes connected to a number of parts in the system for either input or output. I don’t think I’ve come up with a better paradigm, especially since I chose to look at systems from a user-centric perspective.
Paul: There are a number of other technologies that are also arriving on the scene at the same time which seem to make our world a lot more complex, which in turn will make ecosystems more complex. As you think about your work and the workshop that you teach, what do you think is coming along that’s going to really make some substantial changes to the way that you map ecosystems?
Cornelius: I know you’re familiar with this yourself because you started the XD Immersive conference looking at AR and VR and how immersive technologies change the way we need to think about describing and mapping environments. I think we need to add a time perspective or dimension to everything. I think we need to look into cinematic approaches to some of the things that we do. So, we need to consider some of the problems we’re trying to solve in a similar manner to the video production industry. We need to understand how perspective and framing work in order to be able to understand how to map the way cinematic or immersive experiences will work in the future--or currently, for the ones that are mature enough.
Paul: Interesting time for us.
Cornelius: It is. And scary.
Paul: Is there anything else that people considering attending should know about the workshop?
Cornelius: Well, I think it’s that whole idea of do you find that you need to deal with more and more complexity in your day-to-day life, as a design leader, as a business leader in general? Looking at your arsenal and tools and figuring out if you think that adding a tool like ecosystem mapping would help you in this endeavor.
As we’ve seen at recent UX STRAT conferences over the last couple of years, more and more design leaders care about the ecosystem that they’re in. But they also reiterated countless times that they kind of winged it; they haven’t really thought about how to put this together following a specific methodology or method that can be replicated multiple times… And I think, in the long run, an ecosystem mapping method will help a lot. If folks at UX STRAT Europe think they can get value out of that, I think they should definitely give the workshop a shot.
Paul: Thanks Cornelius!