When is it experience design? When is it user centered design? When is it design?
Developing research questions around fuzzy ideas is really hard so I’ve had to try and define what experience design can mean. It is not supposed to be all inclusive but it should be a good basis to move forward with some research questions (feedback is appreciated, this is just a strawman).
Strategic Experience design: the process used to define, drive or inform the orchestration of the organizations products, behaviors, communications, environments across multiple tasks/activities/contexts and partners
Experience Design: is a process through which an individual product or service is designed to fit into the larger context of use. (this could be called Product Experience Design or Tactical Experience Design)
User-centered Design: is a process through which an individual product or service is designed to based upon the context of a particular function or task.
Brad Lauster did a great job of using some of these definitions to contribute to thinking about experience and brand.
I hope you don’t think it’s a cop out to just post a quote, but it is super relevant and did I mention from 1955
“What people really desire are not products, but satisfying experiences. People want products because they want the experience-bringing services which they hope the products will render.”
Lawrence Abbott, Quality and Competition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 25.
It seems that business (and academia) is on a continual cycle of discovering, discarding, and re-discovering things that are true.
Grudin’s Law:
When those who benefit are not those who do the work, then the technology is likely to fail, or at least be subverted
(not sure where this was first proposed but I found it in Donald Normans essential book “Things that make us smart” pg. 113)
This is very applicable to the realm of Experience Design, I found it especially relevant when designing a knowledge management system a couple of years ago.
Most IT applications that are put in place fail or our subverted because they are designed to benefit management. It is much better to build a system that makes employees lives easier *and* achieve management goals. How many IT systems have failed or limped along due to adoption issues? More like subverted IMHO.
It is only through thinking outside the product that companies can really start “orchestrating” the entire customer experience, the product, the brand, the service, the support etc.
Experience design is pretty ill defined at this stage of the game, people rightly point out that you can’t design an experience. I’ve been struggling trying to define Experience Design because it can be used at so many levels (product, business, brand), it’s a huge concept. Then I started to think about how Experience Design is really a process of designing a product that better satisfies users by taking into account the wider context of use. That’s when the idea struck that it really helps organizations and designers “think outside the product”. What prompted this thinking was Marc Rettig’s piece on interaction design history that illustrated a jump from task focus to a wider experience perspective. I think its possble to think about the wider experience as a bundle of interrelated tasks.
So then (strategic) Experience Design is the orchestration of a company’s products and services to provide the highest value to customers.
And getting back to my subject of competitive advantage, it may be easy to copy a product but it is a lot harder to copy or compete with a well integrated system (network if you like).
Even Sony, a company renowned for giving business units unprecedented freedom over individual products is re-structuring its business units try and leverage inter-product/inter-business unit synergies (damn I can’t remember where I read that).
In the article “consumers are looking for meaningful brand experiences” these guys propose that there is an opportunity to build cultural capital with brands. It is true that as culture becomes less owned by the public (who’s paying for cultural events?) and religion brings less meaning to peoples existence the more companies will continue to co-opt culture. Brands are already items of meaning making in our lives, replacing culture in many ways, no wonder we pine for meaningful brands. no logo is a great book that talks about how corporations are co-opting culture.
The experience strategy newsletter is published by yamamoto-moss, one of the more ’strategic’ strategic design agencies.
An important design rule, that is the “rule of least astonishment”, whatever the interface does it should not be the least bit astonishing, like you hit search and the window closes. (I don’t remember the source of this rule so post a comment if you know)
In a my previous post on brand behavior I proposed that behavior is one of the major and least managed components of how a brand is experienced.
Conversely comes the idea that a strong brand can align employee behavior to be congruent with the brand image. I believe that incongruence between message and experience is a major destroyer of brand equity. Many companies express incongruence because there internal operations, culture etc. are not aligned with their external brand messages.
I believe on of the major benefits of a strong brand is to encourage congruent behavior (another reason I think internal branding is more important to a services company). The Fed-Ex concept of absolutely, positively overnight, provides guidance to all its employees about what’s important, it actually provides a decision making framework for front-line employees. If someone calls up to complain that a package didn’t get there on time you can be sure that you will get attention.
Experience = sensory orgy is similar to the misconception that design = high styling
An experience needs to be appropriate.
It needs to be appropriate to customer expectation (however that is formed)
It needs to be appropriate to the organizations strategy
Getting closer to the customer through contextual research to understand there unstated and unserved needs is one way Experience Design can enable us to provide highly relevant experiences.
In many cases the most satisfying customer experiences come from companies that have a crystal clear vision (strategy) of what value they are providing. It is only through that overarching vision that every element of a company can act in an integrated fashion and therefore provide a customer experience that is entirely appropriate, the experience has integrity.
Two very good HBR articles that are very relevant to this are:
Michael Porter’s ‘What is Strategy’ and The Power of Product Integrity by Kim B. Clark; Takahiro Fujimoto
Read the rest of this for some examples…
Continue reading ‘experience != sensory orgy’
some ideas for a survey on what designers and business people think Experience Design contributes to competitive advantage.
(as a working definition Experience Design is the end to end design process of proactively managing all touch points a user/customer has with a product, system or service ensuring a user / customers expectations are met or exceeded.)
I’ve been working on the idea that there are two distinct foci of Experience Design that could contribute to competitive advantage, internal and external. Internal Experience Design is focused on internal designs that can contribute to organizational performance, for instance a knowledge management system developed using Experience Design methodologies could lead to better knowledge management (I would hope it wouldn’t hurt)? The other focus is external Experience Design, that is maybe the more conventional lens that we’ve used to look at this.
Read more of this entry to see my ideas for questions that could be asked on this survey, (comments appreciated, I’m looking for feedback 
Continue reading ‘Survey Ideas’
Some opportunities for strategic use of experience design was highlighted In this recent article from the Boston Consulting Group, I just pulled out the points that I thought experience design could contribute significantly to or even lead (hence the numbering order).
The Boston Consulting Group, Retailing Online: Coming of Age
1. Identify your highest-value customers across all channels and study every nuance of their needs, aspirations, and shopping behavior.
2. Design your of offerings, rewards, and service levels to favor your most valued customers.
4. Integrate your branding, merchandising, and marketing ef effor forts across channels.
8. Develop a curriculum of contact for all consumer touch points across channels.
9. Encourage multichannel customers to return by providing a flawless shopping experience.
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