Your customers are trying to solve tasks

The mainstay of Aiava is the concept of describing what's happening in terms of tasks. We are used to the term task from school and work; you want to achieve a certain result, so you put your best effort into getting that result. With Aiava, we take advantage of the fact that your customers are actually solving a lot of tasks as they approach your organization or business. They have a certain result in mind, and put more or less effort into getting it.

Learning the skill of describing the customer's journey in terms of tasks is by no means difficult, but it might force you to put on a new pair of goggles – the ones labeled storytelling.

Aiava is built around storytelling – a tool familiar and intuitive to us, as it was to our anchestors sitting around a bonfire.

What you see with new goggles

As you are reading this article, you are solving a task. Your goal might be to enlighten yourself, kill time, impress your boss, and so on. You put a small amount of effort into solving this task.

At Aiava, we describe these tasks in a pretty intuitive and standardized way:

Who does what, or if more people are involved, Who does what to whom.

In your case, in reading this article you are not involving anyone else, so we can simply put it like this: Reader reads an article.

To get a bit more accustomed to the new goggles, let's walk through a scenario from our daily life: you go shopping.

The goal of this task is probably getting fed. You can split go shopping into smaller tasks.

• You travel by car in order to get to the store.
• You collect the goods and put them into a shopping basket in order to get the goods to the cashier.
• You pay the cashier in order to legally get out of the store with the goods.
• You travel by car in order to bring the goods home.

When you zoom in, you can see that each task can be split into even smaller tasks. For example: when you travel by car necessarily involves the following: you unlock the car, you start the car, and so on. And we can also zoom out to. For example: my company arranges a party; probably you go shopping is one of many tasks you need to accomplish for the party to happen.

Feel the flow

As in a lot of cases, tasks can have different outcomes, like a story having multiple turns and endings. Here comes the next step; our storytelling is organized in a flowchart.

So, refering to the everyday example above, when you try to pay for the goods, there are basically two outcomes: there is enough money in the bank, or there's not. The story could take two pretty different turns. With Aiava we can describe this and explore what might happen.

Why this is so powerful

By describing the world in terms of tasks, we are able to describe complex events and chains of events with different outcomes and parallelity in a familiar and intuitive way.

We are able to take a step back from the nitty-gritty tech world. Instead of software code or tech documentation we could read something like. Server A notifies Server B that storage is full. This is understandable to anyone. Code and documentation are not.

Aiava enables us to get a fuller picture and explore all the desolate roads along which not many customers happen to travel. Those few customers that happen to have some rather different needs deserve a chance as well, right?

In your organization, it also enables people that adopt an entirely different approach and competence to talk the same language. Maybe you are familiar with silos within your organization? With Aiava, you can meet and start to understand each others worlds.

As you start to build up a picture of how your customers are treated, what scenarios they might end up in, and what communication they get, you are able to see the world from their point of view. That’s powerful.

Become a storyteller

Aiava is built around storytelling – a tool familiar and intuitive to us, as it was to our anchestors sitting around a bonfire. With Aiava, we make the storytelling even clearer and easier to follow; every sentence you add to your story are visualized with easy to understand illustrations.

To make your way into Aiava smooth and enjoyable, we have recently launched Aiava Academy. Currently, this consists of four courses, taking about 13 minutes to read. Once you have logged in, you will be able to access these courses.