My group and I were to explore Westfield Stratford for the Brand Experience workshop. We were to reach the location using different means of transport. I was to start by foot, take two tubes to the Stratford station, and then walk another short walk till the mall. This was not to be. Though Chaitra, Simleen, Yashvi and I, all started at the same time, we reached at vastly different times. Chaitra, the first one to reach, had to wait two hours for me. And all this was because the tube broke down at Stratford Station. Simleen and Yashvi had to change to another tube, which luckily brought them to Stratford shortly. For me, though, I had to get off at Mile End Station, wait for a bus, and then wait another forty-five minutes until I could reach Westfield Stratford. 

This experience left us tired and we were low on spirits from the very beginning of our experience mapping. We had planned to map our journey using Adidas Run, which would help us with data like time, steps, distance, and speed. We split up into two groups and planned to pick two random stores that we would try to find while strolling through the mall. Chaitra and I picked Sephora and Foreign Circles. 

We found that the shape of the mall hindered customer experience. Spatially, Westfield Stratford cannot allow circular movement. Therefore, a user has to walk all the way to the far end of the mall and back if they are looking for a particular shop. This slowed us down a lot. After half an hour we were able to find Sephora. Being familiar with the store design and brand collateral helped us identify it. It was fifteen minutes and we still could not find Foreign Circles. Finally, we spotted a digital map that could direct us to the store. It turned out to be quite confusing and we were still clueless about where to look. It was then that it occurred to us that Foreign Circles was not a shop but a kiosk, and it was ten minutes later that we finally found it. 

For the experience map, we wanted to plot our energy levels, time and distance, as these were the main indicators of our journey. I have incorporated the Adidas Run map into it. 

In my opinion, our experience mapping could have been well planned – in terms of what we were going to achieve through the trip and how we could have visually represented it. We were evaluating a lot of factors such as the placement of the stores, spatial design of the mall, etc. but I wasn’t able to translate those into my map. I could brainstorm some ways to represent such a complex mix of qualitative and quantitative data into a map that is concise, relevant and easy to understand.