I guess “Experience” and “Design” are two really trendy terms and it is only normal that they are put together to form “Experience Design”. Nevertheless, it really bothers me to see them put side-by-side like that, as the resulting meaning is really misleading. As Wikipedia puts it:
Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments — each of which is a human experience — based on the consideration of an individual’s or group’s needs, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions.
Wait a second?! Say that again. Experience Design is not about designing an experience??
That’s right!! Experience Design is about designing the elements that will contribute to creating the experience, like a product, or a service, not designing the experience itself.
So, I cannot design an experience?
No, an experience cannot be designed! An experience is created out of the interactions between a company and an individual, and most importantly is anchored in our unconscious / emotional selves. As such an experience is non-tangible and different for each individual. Good luck designing that! (refer to my older post for more on what is Customer Experience)
For example, if you are in a bank queuing up and the guy behind you stands too close. This will affect your experience with that bank, but it has not been “designed” in the system (one should hope). Or if your teenage kid installed some weird flashing animal-shaped cursor and changed the mouse settings on your computer, this will affect your experience with a website. Even more simple, if you are in a bad mood that day, that will affect your experience with any company. The experience a person will have with a company just cannot be designed.
Hasn’t Apple designed a great experience!?
Apple is usually mentioned as delivering “THE” most impressive experience among companies. But that is a terrible mistake. Apple, as great as it is, does not deliver one single great experience. Apple has designed great products, great strategies and a great system in general to reach customers on an emotional level and lead them to develop their own positive experience with the company. If you ask Apple fans around the world each will have a different story about why they love Apple. There is no Apple experience… but a multitude of people having great experiences with the company.
What do I do if I cannot design an experience?
Not being able to design an experience is not a problem. The right way to do is to manage the experience people have with your company. This is really well explained in Lewis Carbone’s “Clued In“, where he sets up the standard approach to follow to manage experiences.
I have been pretty happy with the term “experience management” on my side. I think it conveys very well that you cannot control every aspect of an experience and that the best you can do is try your best to manage it and make sure that all the negative uncontrollable factors affecting your customers can be minimized.
As part of the effort to manage experiences, designers (in the general sense) are indeed key. You need to design workflows, design interfaces, design products, etc. to make sure your customers can have a positive experience with your company. It is just that you are not designing the experience per se.
Coming from the usability field, I like it when the “labeling” of something is clear and prevents confusion or misunderstanding. As such I think the label experience design really does a bad job…
Great point! At best an organization can create the conditions or provide a “platform” that enables their customers to have an outsanding experience.
In fact, I would go a step beyond what you suggested… that “an experience is created out of the interactions between a company and an individual.”
Although you could argue this endlessly, we’ve found that the most productive and customer-centric definition of “customer experience” is… “a customers rational and emotional reactions… across their end-to-end process… of achieving one or more goals that important to them.”
Once our clients have been able to get their head around this way of thinking, they’ve realized that a lot of the customer experience happens at the non-touchpoints. And that understanding what happens at these non-touchpoints is the key to designing a platform that enables the customer to have a fundamentally better experience.
One of the other great ways of thinking about this… design for emergence… comes from Chris Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” which describes how an architect can design physical space in a way that encourages the emergence of compelling experience. Definitely worth checking out.
Cheers,
Frank Capek
SVP, Customer Driven Innovation
BSG Concours
I concur with the message of the article. As much as designers now are trying to move away from only aesthetics and get involved in the entire experience with a company, you don’t “design” experiences. You can research them, understand how experiences are formed, and can facet them through some strategies, but you don’t design experiences. You can design individual parts though.
Using a product, which is designed, can influence the user’s customer experience. Same with a service, an ad, a store layout, etc.
Note that customer service protocols, IVRS and such are also part of the experience with a company. But you don’t see designers throw themselves at designing that. Is is a question of visibility? Prestige? I bet that in a few years when the breadth of applications Customer Experience management is well know, people will start talking about Customer Service Design (unless the new buzz-word “Service Design” starts covering it).
David Jacques
Customer input Limited
Great points! ha ha… “Service Design”… I am sure we will see that coming soon. And what about “Managing Employees” becoming “Designing Employees”… maybe we can replace everybody by robots!
More seriously, reading articles and books it looks like the word “management” is getting outdated really quickly. As much as I hate the “buzz”, we still have to get a way to get people getting interested in what we do. If people think management is boring and outdated… would there be a need for a name that sells better?