What an experience canvas actually is
You have an idea.
The pull to start building is strong, and every day you spend planning feels like a day you are not shipping.
But there is a cheaper way to find out whether your idea hangs together than writing code: an experience canvas.
This guide explains what one is, when it earns its keep, and when you should skip it and just build.
An experience canvas is a one-page framework for thinking through your customers' needs and experience.
It also checks that the solutions you consider are viable and valuable from the business's perspective.
Atlassian publishes the method in its Team Playbook and describes it as inspired by the classic lean canvas.
It clarifies what problem your project solves, who it is for, and what success looks like Atlassian Team Playbook.
The key word is experience.
A lean canvas mostly asks business questions.
An experience canvas forces you to see the problem through your customers' eyes.
Atlassian argues this is the biggest challenge in any project, especially when serving several customer types or personas at once.
Without a structured way to do that, they warn, you risk missing the mark with your solution, and you probably will not realize it until you have delivered something.
That last point is the whole argument for the tool.
The canvas is relatively cheap compared to building.
Use it to examine assumptions before committing to a substantial build.
When the canvas is worth your time
Atlassian is candid that the experience canvas is not a quick and easy activity.
They recommend it for gnarly projects, where the time is well spent.
So the first question is honest: is your problem actually gnarly?
Use a canvas when several of these are true:
- You have more than one customer type or persona, and pleasing them pulls in different directions.
- You are not sure what success looks like, or different stakeholders would give different answers.
- The build will take real time or money, so a wrong assumption is costly to discover late.
- Your team is struggling with shared understanding, value and metrics, or getting from a one-pager to a proof of concept, which Atlassian lists as signals that this play might help.