Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

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).