Experience Thinking: Creating Connected Experiences

Introduction

“Hi, my name is Matt.

”The words baffled me. I was at the airport, renting a car, as I’ve done a hundred times. Faced with a barrage of rental companies promising similar services, I’d walked up to one counter, expecting the usual treatment.

You know how it goes. You walk up to a counter and start answering questions for the attendant’s forms. You show your license and sign on the dotted line.

This time, however, the rental agent stuck out his hand and introduced himself. None of the usual hurry or annoyance—just a simple, friendly greeting before any attempt was made to establish a business connection.

Matt’s moment of connection seemed out of place in the middle of the basic transaction of my car rental. What should have been a dry and impersonal process immediately changed when he said his name, connected physically by shaking my hand, and paid attention to me as a person. I was invited into a relationship of sorts from the very beginning of the transaction.

Personal interaction wasn’t an afterthought; it was implemented by design. The company had done its homework, and it had taken the time to determine my wants and needs as a prospective client. Matt’s small act completely changed my perception and my experience of renting a car with that particular company.

The Experience Matters

Experiences are vital, and are the answer to such questions as: How do I engage my audience? Will my customer ever become a user? How can I move my user into the category of loyal client?

I answer product and service design questions every day and help organizations deliver better business results through better experiences. Using an approach I call “Experience Thinking,” organizations can direct their efforts in strategy, research, and design that lead to long-term customer relationships—and more revenue.

The good news is that you don’t have to work with a consultant like me to realize the benefits of Experience Thinking, or the principles that are part of this “experience design.” My goal in writing this book is to help and empower you with a more holistic perspective on creating experiences. A design process that you can manage on your own in the end.

Developing a product or service from the experiential perspective isn’t just a good idea or an opportunity to make audiences feel good, it has become essential. Experiences need to deliver from start to finish. Paying attention to the experience has become increasingly necessary because today’s users expect a cohesive experience journey. If they don’t get it from you, they’ll move on until they find it.

This Book Is for You

This is a book for people who create and build things and who want to create remarkable experiences for their audience. Whether you’re creating digital products, physical products, or services, Experience Thinking introduces a balanced left and right-brain approach to your experience creation process.

Experience Thinking applies in many design situations, it helps code, hardware and content developers move from creating what is feasible to creating what delivers impact.

Designers of sites have to be aware of their audience expectations and experience using the sites they develop. The magnitude of content, particularly on government websites, inherently makes the process of discovering information more difficult. Experience Thinking starts by delaying the technology building piece and focusing first on the experience.

If you work in the tech field in one way or another, with Experience Thinking you create the experience on paper first, and then test it with customers and users, before jumping headfirst into the functionality building. Working through the design in this way, from the position of the user’s experience, you expose potential problems early, before they create major issues once launched.

In the B2B world, if you focus on the experience, you can first determine if an idea, product or service is ultimately viable. For example, a company adding a new technology product to their line might start with functional requirements. After interviews and validation exercises, you might prove (or not prove) the product before you invest in it and design it. Creating the experience first is instrumental for early-stage validation and avoids building something that ultimately no one wants.

People building things that have a spatial element will also benefit from paying attention early to the experience. For example, how do visitors know where to go in a hospital? Is the experience different for patients than it is for visitors? What happens when you walk into a space that is highly emotional? These are only a few of the aspects you’d need to consider, in addition to base functionality and use.

Anyone who designs and builds products and services will benefit from the Experience Thinking approach. Put the experience first, not the software or the technology or even the business. Start with the intended experience, and take the impact of the experience on other factors seriously. Let the experience be the driving force behind your strategic decisions.

The experience matters. It’s good for your audience, and it’s good for your business. Once you understand and embrace the concepts of Experience Thinking, you will be able to transform your product-focused organization into one that is audience-focused and primed for repeatable success.

So why wouldn’t you do this?

Part One

Experience Thinking: The Concept

Chapter 1

Experience First

“Experience” is a big word. My experience of renting a car was much more than filling out a form and walking away with the keys. It involved my total immersion in the moment. I wasn’t just renting a car at an airport, I was experiencing the composite of everything around me.

Experiences you encounter on a daily basis. It could be your commute to work or a wait at the subway station. Experiences “happen” in a space or environment. While in the environment, you may be using a product. The product might be a newspaper, or a cell phone, or even a space such as a café or coffee shop. These things are all part of your experience. For each of these touchpoints or more accurately experience points, your experience for that particular thing is made up of the set of events as you go through time.

In the world of design, experience can be understood in the same way: it’s a holistic view of how we interact with our surroundings. Both tangible and intangible characteristics make up an experience, because every experience point is funneled through our senses. An experience may be triggered by the senses and then funneled through such cognitive processes as awareness, thought, and observation, but there are a multitude of other levels at work. To design for these experiences, we need to take many aspects into account. Most experiences are made up of these key characteristics:

Flow: Touchpoints, interactions, and journeys that happen in a specific order.

Timing: The amount of time, from seconds to decades, in which the events in the experience occur.

Interaction: The participatory aspect of experience gained through an interaction with a product, service, or person may be passive, active, or through social channels.

Emotion: The feelings generated by experiences in a given situation.

Intensity: A flash moment or totally immersed in the experience.

Coverage: The number of products or services that are needed in the experience and its environment.

Meaning: The experience can be symbolic, pragmatic, and semantic.

Another way to understand experiences in the context of design is to look at the four major components of every experience:

The “people” component is made up of customers, users, and clients, depending on where they are on the timeline of the experience.

The “experience” component is all products, content, service, or a combination thereof you’d include in the experience.

The “space” component is a combination of all of the components that together form one event in one location, in one defined physical environment.

The “time” component that will include sequencing, duration of the experience.

In order to design using this holistic design approach, you need to design for all of the characteristics and experience components together, end-to-end, from the start of the experience to the end. The elements of experience are all connected—or they should be. For example, an organization may want to “fix” its software, but the software exists on a device and may be connected to an in-person customer service provided by the organization. If you simply work on the software, the focus is on only one element. Neglecting the other elements creates a breakdown in the experience. And this brokenness can overshadow the whole experience.

Experience Thinking

The concept of experience design takes all of the components of an experience into consideration. Experience Thinking gives you a framework for planning experience design in your organization. It’s fosters a mindset, or a way of looking at your product or service creation that connects all of the traditional silos into a significant event for each member in your audience. In taking this approach, you create experiences that provide the most satisfying outcome possible for your audience and result in the highest benefit for the organization, regardless of its for-profit or non-profit directive.

In my consulting work, I often hear an organization express its desire to create an outstanding experience. The organization may agree that the experience is important, even critical, but it often gets the details wrong. Why is that?

Instead of starting with the experience journey, organizations start with the specifics of technology, content, or some other aspect of the business. It’s backward thinking: you can’t start with the implementation details and end up with a remarkable end-to-end experience. A mind shift is necessary. The experience must come first, designed as it unfolds over time for the audience, for both the definition of the product or service as well as in assessing its business success. The experience forms the foundation; then you can create the components to bring the experience to life in the right order, with the right connections and dependencies.

When you take a holistic look at how people react and would interact within a set of events at specific points in time, you are implementing Experience Thinking. This thorough understanding will help you find your starting point of the experience; then you can move forward to determine the specific components in your designs to build the end-to-end experience.

The Experience Thinking concept works equally well with products and services that are existing or new. Start by creating early, non-technically working versions of the experience and involve the business stakeholders, the (potential) users and customers in that process to learn, assess, and adjust. It’s a fallacy that an actual working product or service is needed in order to evaluate its potential for success.

Instead, create experiences fit for specific purposes, even if they are throwaway versions that answer these questions: Will the experience suffice for users & customers? Will it deliver enough to meet the business goals? If the answer is yes, you can continue to fill out the other components that will also include technology and content.

Complete Design

In experience design, you want to create the entire experience. This means all products and services—everything in the environment. Of course, there’s no such thing as “entire,” but you can get close if you think like a filmmaker, one of the best examples of a true experience designer.

In creating a film, the filmmaker creates a complete world for the viewer. A good filmmaker uses the concepts of experience design to give the viewer the total package—sights, sounds, emotions, meaning, flow, intensity, and more. The film is even more experiential when the theater contributes additional elements such as moving chairs and 180 degrees viewing angles, so the viewer becomes completely immersed in the moment.

If you can think like a filmmaker when building a product, a service, an app, a piece of hardware, or a space, you’ll start to understand what the experience should consist of. What’s the end-to-end experience of your product? Where will it live? How long will it be a part of someone’s life? When you start thinking about the “product” from the experience side first, you learn the answers to all such questions, and your “build” has a much better chance of success. Filmmakers understand much of the experience they are creating before hiring the first actor or booking the first location.

Similarly, office builders don’t just jump in and start constructing a wall. There’s a plan, created by the architect. The vision of the architect comes first, then the blueprint with calculations that the building doesn’t collapse, then the building starts. A builder would never start erecting walls without first understanding what the final result will look like, based on the blueprint.

In product and service design, the experience is the blueprint. More mature industries are good examples, because they seem to have a better understanding of the role experience plays. For example, car makers know that their customers don’t necessarily care about technology or engineering. Every company in the automotive sector can build a car. It’s not about the clutch, the brakes, or the engine—as long as they reliably work. It’s all about the design and the experience, so car makers start designing their own blueprint. How does the car smell? How does it drive? How does the car door sound when it closes? How does the engine sound? How does it make you feel when you are sitting in the driver’s seat? The driver experience is a key point of differentiation.

Make sure you design for the complete environment. Don’t rely only on a bottom up approach where you start with the tech, functionality and content to then add the experience layer on top. Start with your top down design, from an experiential viewpoint, and then go from there. Both top down and bottom up design will need to happen, but most of the time you want to start with top-down design for the best results.

The Balance of Design and Technology

The point of Experience Thinking is to get the necessary information and insight before you commit time and resources to building a product. Rather than evaluating the product after the fact, consider the risks early.

It’s a little magical when you think about it: you are going to create the experience without actually building anything. In this way you can evaluate the experience and know you are building the right thing. Ideal product solutions often lie somewhere between design and technology, and Experience Thinking can help you create the right mix.

When the focus is mainly on technology, you may end up with a functional product that is ultimately a failure. Users want more than functionality; they want experiences.

On the flip side, Experience Thinking can’t be solely about design. The most beautifully designed and marketed product may still fail, because it’s not about simply looking good—that would be art. You want to create a design that meets an audience need as well as a business need. If your product doesn’t meet their needs, it will fail in the end or be replaced by something better regardless of how stunning it is or how easy it is to use.

Consider the iPad. We were all wowed by the design and cool qualities at first, but tablet use is diminishing. Reality has kicked in, and the tablet doesn’t add as much value as it once did, or as we once thought it did. Laptops have gotten smaller and phones have gotten larger, and the iPad is no longer meeting the needs of many users.

The key is balance. Apply Experience Thinking to make sure you give equal attention to the design, interaction, content and functionality. When you validate and test the experience early with your audience, you will create a focused design that serves the right purpose.

Benefits of Experience Thinking

Experience Thinking includes a repeatable process, but most of all, it makes sense. It connects the dots along the customer’s journey, connects the details, and drives the creation of remarkable experiences. Although improving the design of often disjointed events experienced by your customer creates client loyalty and increases business success, the benefits of designing the experience first can be found at every stage of your project.

Experience Thinking Enhances Good Engineering

Once you know what the experience is, you can build to fit it. Experience Thinking flips the process on its head and drives engineering, rather than the engineering driving the design.

By creating the experience first, you avoid the mental churn of trying to figure out what need the design will fulfill. There’s no need for each decision-maker to gaze into a crystal ball for options as they try to predict the future in incremental steps. Even when the options seem exhausted, they are probably wrong, outdated, or at least incomplete.

Decision makers need to assume that they are missing some requirements during the design process. Even if the CEO and engineers are experts in their field, the shortest way to get a successful end result is to understand the user, create early mockups, and test the design before committing significant resources to the building phase. Additionally, this testing must be conducted with the only true expert—the user.

Even if there is no product or service experience like yours yet on the market you follow a similar approach. After assessing the market potential, you create designs and mockups of the anticipated experience and go through testing these concepts with potential customers and users. In the testing, you would find early evidence if the new product or service is going to fill a need, will be bought, will be valued. All without really building the product or delivering the service. This is a phase where design really helps de-risk the business case, creating a validated Experience Case (XC) that complements the business case (BC) for a new initiative.

In many of the current approaches, the marketplace tests the experience. Then, the engineers begin an iterative fixing-and-adding pattern to the experience design. They work with their fingers crossed that the market will respond positively. Through Experience Thinking, you can move that moment of success to the front of the process. Wouldn’t you rather release a version that delivers the right experience in release one, or two at the latest? Wouldn’t that make sense?

The argument is often that there is a need to go to market earlier in order to create revenue. This real or perceived need results in launching unfinished experiences that actually hurt market success. In hindsight, it may be unclear what went wrong. More often than not, however, unmet customer needs and a subpar level of experience drift to the top as reasons for market failure. These things can be prevented by taking a harder look at what experience is going to fly, and committing engineering resources to building it. It’s a sensible approach that all too often gets overruled by risky corner cutting.

Experience Thinking Impacts Business and Marketing Strategy

In order to implement a successful strategy and design for a new product, you have to understand your customers and your users. They can’t be treated equally. Experience Thinking is a process to understand the unique needs of members of your audience at each stage of their journey so you can optimally design the experiences of each journey.

This means that customers— the people that buy, value, and benefit from your offering—need an experience that is tailored to exactly that. The experience must tell the customer why she should buy from you, what your value is, and what product benefits she will enjoy once she’s handed over the cash. This is a distinct type of experience design that focuses on the customer.

It all changes once she’s bought a product, onboarded, or signed up to the service. In that moment, she changes from a customer to a user. The user’s interest shifts to a focus on enjoying the benefits of the experience she’s just bought, finding out how it works, and what it’s like to use the product. The user gets immersed in the product/service experience and reaps the reward of a remarkably designed experience.

It is at this moment (and research supports this in no uncertain terms) that the satisfaction and delight in the brand or product starts to diminish. The customer high was the moment of purchase or onboarding and nothing after that meets or exceeds that thrill. Why is that? What makes the customer experience so much better than the user experience? What is this sinking feeling that we endured a bait and switch where the company lured us in just to desert us at the shiny portal into their ecosystem?

This is where the holistic, end-to-end experience lifecycle saves the day. If an organization wants to create loyal and vocal fans of their products and services that keep coming back, they have to extend the “wow.” They have to keep delivering experiences that meet or exceed the customer experience before engaging, committing, or onboarding. For this reason, Experience Thinking is a powerful tool for any organization that wants to improve their delivery and innovate at the experience level, where it really matters.

Throughout the experience lifecycle, from customer to user to loyal client, organizations need to acquire new customers, but most of all, they need to keep their audience captured in their eco system. Successful companies do this by taking care of their audience in the customer experience phases, and providing excellent experiences all the way down the product and service lifecycle.

Companies do themselves a disservice when the user experience is not up to the standard of the customer experience. When a user is unsatisfied post-purchase, they are less likely to make repeat purchases. However, when equal attention is paid to ease of use and other post-purchase phases, users will become loyal clients and return for more.

Apple is a company that created a user experience to rival all others. They have a great marketing team, but it’s the ease of use and the high level of quality that keeps customers coming back. The value is embedded in the products. The great experience doesn’t stop at the final sale; it continues from cradle to grave.

It’s not enough to focus only on the business and profit side, or just the engineering and product-building side, or just marketing, or just support. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and make sure they can move seamlessly from one experience point to the next without losing interest.

Experience Thinking Justifies Investments in Time, Money, and People

The strategic impact of Experience Thinking doesn’t only reach the understanding and design aspects of product creation. It also plays an important role in bringing proof that the experience indeed delivers to the business strategy. This proof is a critical business need in order to justify investments in time, money and people. Without proof, we are merely assuming the experience will deliver success: a real life fingers crossed approach. Yet, those assumptions (and gut feel) are often the shaky foundation that many teams and organizations rely on. So we reason our way through what a customer or user would need, do, and experience and we want to believe that it will work out.

The challenge lies in that when we design, we can only look at what users did in the past, which sometimes is a predictor of future behavior, but that gets increasingly tenuous the more disruptive the new product or service is. We simply don’t know enough about the future customer or user behavior to assure success. We increase risk, something all organizations try to reduce.

So how do we de-risk our experience? In Experience Thinking, we move from the combination of reasoning, assumptions, and personal beliefs to reasoning, proof, and ultimately management buy-in. Finding proof that the experience will deliver before we launch into the market is where this approach vastly de-risks the experience.

Design de-risking happens when we take an unpolished experience, and we gather feedback (i.e. test) from our audience. Then we iterate the unpolished experience, gather more feedback, and optimize further. Usually, two iterations lead to vastly reduced risk while balancing business constraints. The testing is another story.

There are distinct differences between customers and users, and the testing is also different. Customer testing of the experience revolves around whether the person would buy the product. Does the customer see value? What is it about the product that is interesting to the customer? How can the product be marketed to address those answers?

The second level of testing is based on whether or not someone can actually use the product or service. Can they turn it on? Can they interact with the product in the way it is intended? Can they complete the service onboarding process? These things are critical to the user’s perception of the overall experience.

Keep in mind that this testing is not about blindly following customer or user demands. You can’t please everyone. Your goal is to test and validate, iterate and ultimately deliver experiences that are usable and that meet a real need. The only way to get solid proof of the success of those differentiating features is to get as close as you can to the real experience early on and involve prospective customer and users.

Chapter 2

Think You Don’t Need an Experience Strategy[MOU1] ?

Experience is ultimately what you deliver and what your audience lives through. If the overall experience isn’t a good one, chances are you’ll lose your customer or user to a competitor.

To win in today’s hypercompetitive business environment, companies must research, design, strategize, and test their products and services before they launch. If you can engineer memorable product and service experiences, you will firmly position your organization in the hearts and minds of customers. Happy users become loyal clients, and loyal clients add to your bottom line.

Experiential elements are all connected. It’s not just about technology, vision, or brand alone. Without an experience strategy in place that addresses every experience point, and connects them cohesively, you can’t guarantee an overall positive experience for your customer or user.

Knowing this, can you really afford to cut corners designing the customer experience journey? Why wouldn’t you approach design from the perspective of Experience Thinking?

1001 Reasons Not to Do This

Experience Thinking is the holistic approach to experience design. Most organizations agree that the customer or citizen comes first, yet they don’t apply the concepts that create demonstrable value. The reasons for ignoring these opportunities are numerous and often unfounded.

“It Will Add Additional Costs and Extend Our Timeline”

A common misconception about designing for the experience first is that it’s more expensive than traditional design processes. While there are upfront costs with experience design, building the wrong thing is much more expensive in the end. Often, the greatest expense is the failure. It costs much more to build something that nobody wants, nobody buys, and nobody uses.

In reality, experience design is not a huge expense because you get the information you need before you produce anything. Getting early feedback on functionality cuts down on the expensive journey of building the wrong thing as well as the endless arguing about features and functions in a vacuum.

A common cause of time and cost overruns is changes in requirements throughout in the project. It’s easy for clients and stakeholders to change their minds about what they want because they really have no idea what the customer will value. Is it cost-effective to spend millions on the gut feeling of an executive or one lead customer? Can one data point that is not of a target user of the product be enough proof what the product should be?

Experience design doesn’t extend timelines or processes. There are fewer changes when your requirements are higher quality at the start of your project. The rest is quite predictable. Upfront planning saves time and expense down the road.

“No One Knows Our Market Better Than We Do”

Some organizations are reluctant to apply a different design process to help them improve their own product’s experience. They think that no one could know their market, product, or user better than they do. These executives are missing the point. It’s a fallacy that the experience designer has to be an upfront domain expert in the particular market.

Regardless of the product or category it belongs to, the process of involving customers and users to understand the experience and validate use is similar, even if the specific tools and inquiry vary. It’s actually often preferred to start without preconceived notions of your customers and users. You can’t assume you know what kind of functionality should be in a product experience simply because you’ve been in business awhile. User needs evolve over time. Static assumptions rarely lead to sustained success.

You may think you know your users, but the way they use products can change very quickly. For example, mobile may be defined as using “on the go,” but what if the most frequent place we use your app is on the couch? It may not be that “mobile” at all.

Users can be a fickle group. You can’t know what your users want or need, or how they’ll behave, unless you ask them in current time. Don’t make assumptions based on what you’ve always known to be true. When you rely on such assumptions, you’re basing your requirements on your own anecdote based opinions, not on the observed behavior of your real audience today.

“We Don’t Want Outside Interference in Our Business”

If you’re hesitant to work with external consultants, there’s another way: Make experience design a part of your core business! Just like you hire in-house engineering, hr, finance, sales, or marketing professionals, hire experience designers, user researchers, and experience testers as part of your core team.

An in-house research and design team helps you determine your requirements for a project before expending resources. For example, instead of having five coders on staff before you even know what needs coding, understand and validate concept designs first. You will have a better sense what you need.

Before you hire more people that can build stuff, decide what kind of company you are. What is your key differentiator? More often than not, ‘ease of use’ or ‘an effortless experience’ is part of the top 3 unique selling points of your product or service. But then the actual experience design work is outsourced. Seems a contradiction. Consider hiring not only the designers and researchers but also higher-level strategic thinkers who can work with management to discover the right products. You want to build value, and value is expressed through the experience. To consistently build great experiences, you will need a robust experience design process and strategy to keep delivering excellence.

“We’d Rather Be Reactive”

Another reason some organizations don’t immediately implement Experience Thinking is because they’re stuck in a reactive mentality. They assume they know their customers and will be able to change in appropriate ways as the need arises. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this attitude, but wouldn’t you rather work more efficiently? Why react to unforeseen complaints when experience design can help you be proactive? Wouldn’t you rather anticipate and solve most problems before they occur?

The prevailing approach in some digital product cases seems to be to launch and make fixes later. This can be after release four of the product/service. There are ever changing business names for these processes that make an organization feel better about the state of its operations. Though there may be occasions that doing the “minimum viable product” launch, or starting “lean” may work, the concepts in Experience Thinking eliminate much of the time and money required to build, get results, fix, and repeat.

In more mature industries, design flaws can result in wide scale product recalls (cars), worker accidents (building) and even deaths (airplanes). The companies in those markets see the need to get the product experience quality right before launch. The consequences are simply too high. When is the digital industry going to catch up?

“Experience Variables Are Too Difficult to Measure”

Good experience design isn’t magic; it’s a scientific approach from the perspective of the customer. Although experiences are not easily measured, there’s quantifiable data that you can rely on when you compare the reactions of customers. For example, specific measures might be customer preference of the new design over the old one (emotion), giving the right information to the customer (usefulness), or how long it took to get that information. Another metric is if the customer would recommend the product or service to another based on the experience.

On the commerce side, you simply look at your business success. Did the customer buy or not? What were the conversion rates, and where did changes occur in the sales funnel?

It’s equally as easy to quantify success in “use.” Again, it’s a matter of testing. Give users the product and see if they can successfully use it in the way it’s intended to be used. When you watch and record the interaction of the user with the product, service, or app, you get a very clear yes-or-no answer to the question of whether your experience design is successful. If your client can’t complete the task, sign up, or make the transaction in a reasonable time with little help or training, you know you have issues.

Benchmarking on the experience side, not just the technology side, is another way to make sure you are creating the best possible user experience. First test, then redesign to make the product better than it previously tested, and repeat. Designers can try to improve their “build” in ways to make the percentage of task completion better and the satisfaction level higher.

Key experience metrics include market and user research through surveys, focus groups, interviews, or observation. How do users behave? How do customers perceive? When the experience is good and people can use the product easily, they’re happier and more engaged. When consumers and users are happier, companies will see a direct correlation in advocacy, in sales, and ultimately in business impact.

Are You Ready to Embrace Change?

Change is a constant in business. When you change your process or design, there’s always a risk. But if you do it in the right way, the risk will be outweighed by the immense benefits to your customer, your user, and to your bottom line.

Experience Thinking is logical and holistic. Embrace it and you will deliver ongoing value in tune with your audience’s needs and desires.

[MOU1]Complete