The key message of the book is to start with the experience you want the customer to have, and then work backwards to develop journeys and touchpoints to enable this experience to happen. These experience words are designed to kick-start the process of describing the experience you wish to give your customers and employees. Companies often have problems defining the experience they wish to give and the book provides several ways of helping to describe experiences (using analogies and metaphors, customer input, cultural trends etc). The terminology of experience can sometimes be alien to project teams, and they struggle to find experiential words, or to be precise in their identification. The goal is not to limit your choice to words from the list, but to use it as an entry to a discussion about how you want your service to feel. Some of the terms are broad and are chosen as a way in to becoming more precise. Some are provocative and allow you to define what you definitely do not want to provide (this too is a way in to finding the right words). Use these words in workshops (or alone), to start the discussion about the experience you want to provide. Then, leave them behind as you become precise and in tune with the experiential DNA of the service provider.
These cards are designed to be used as part of the experience-journey design process. When used in the design of new services, they allow you to describe the experience that you want customers (or employees) to have. When used to map existing services, they allow you to describe the now situation of the experiences that they actually have. The cards can be used in workshops together with customers and/or together with a design team. They can also be used alone. They have a positive emotion on one side, and a negative on the other. If, in a workshop you find a red card (negative emotion), you can flip the card and ask the workshop team - “what do we have to do, to turn this negative emotion (flip card) into this positive emotion”?
The touchpoint cards are designed to be used as part of the experience-journey process. They can be used in many different ways, for both mapping existing experience-journeys and for designing desired future journeys. The cards can be used in workshops together with customers and/or together with a design team. They can also be used alone. The cards present possible touchpoints that might be relevant for a journey and this can help you consider new ways of designing your journey. More information is printed on the cards about how they can be used.