Experience Design

Experience Design is one of those things that if you ask 10 people what it means, you get 10 different answers.  Above is a presentation in which I attempted to define Experience Design within the narrower context of the digital medium as practiced within an agency setting.  It's not perfect and needs refinement—but since the presentation got over 3,000 views—I'm assuming there is interest in this topic.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Experience Design:

"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. An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, product design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking. Another term for experience design is experiential design."

You've seen my deck.  I'll be looking to evolve the thinking over the next few months.  Question is—what do you have to say about Experience Design?

Comments

[Tony D. Clark]

Great deck, David. I agree about the term Experience Design. It can be loaded.

I've been a graphic designer, an interaction designer, an interface designer, and a Web/software designer. Each one had similarities and differences when approaching experience design.

I'm also a cartoonist -- and out of all of those, airbrushing a wacky monster face on a biker's gas tank was the purest form of experience design. From that point on, I had a direct reflection on his experience, and the experience of other bikers who saw his ride.

"And that Charlie Brown is what Christmas is all about..." ;)

[davidicus]

i wanted to be a multimedia designer before the word "multimedia" referred to the digital kind. pretty tough charting that course and i feel the same way now that experience design rings true. the key touchstone for me is the word "holistic." a number of things have to come together, perhaps like adding a third dimension to eMedia's two.

[Bob Jacobson]

Nice deck, David. Well done, and your qualifier that it applies specifically to the digital space is well taken.

I collaborated, asynchronously, with Nathan Shedroff in creating the Wikipedia entry on experience design. As one of the Wikipedia reviewers noted (perhaps a bit too harshly), our definition is intuitive, itself experiential, without a lot of articles to reference. That's why I linked all of the professional tributaries to experience design in the section of the entry you've quoted above. Even though we haven't a decisive description of experience design, from studying the cognate professions and practices that surround and infuse it, we can get a rough idea of what's in the middle.

On my blog, Total Experience, I've begun working up some serious thoughts on experience design, the framework of a book I'm writing on the topic. I'm going beyond the contemporary discourse experience design, currently a mile wide and an inch deep, which is mainly designers talking about what they do, not what they can or should do based on a solid understanding of experience. Of course, they're not alone: try to talk about "experience" per se and you discover that you inevitably come back to "experience." Like the sense of smell, for which we most often use descriptors based on the sense of taste ("the salty air"), we have extensive ways of using similes from other perceptual and cognitive phenomena to describe experience; often we rely on descriptions of the artifacts used to produce experiences. But just as "This is not a pipe" in Magritte's famous painting, experience, the thing itself, eludes us.

This is too bad, because if we can't get our heads around the very phenomenon we intend to produce with our designs, then how good can those designs be? What are their unintended consequences, and how do these prejudice us in having subsequent experiences? I hope to answer some of these questions, but a community effort is required to suss out the full meaning of experience and its implications for design. As yet, I sense no urgency in the meta-community of designers to come to grips with this lacuna, perhaps because it's daunting for practical people, as designers are, to find answers in philosophy and critical thinking.

Until we do find those answers, however, our championing experience design is always going to be suspect, as will be the designs we propose based on a correct, but numinous, awareness of experience's significance. To take a prominent case in point: although they've done well among the managerial class for whom book titles are more important than the contents of the books, Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, the authors of The Experience Economy -- arguably the seminal work of the last decade -- face the same skepticism all of the time. We all need to do better to satisfy the critics that we do know what we're talking about, so that we can work with more open-minded clients to decisively make the case for experience design.

[DA]

Tony, that's a pretty interesting take. And you know what a soft spot I have for bikers! ;)

Davidicus, your point about "holistic" is well taken. Though Experience Design is still in the process of being defined. I think the discipline is a holisitc one at the core.

Bob, what can I say? Thank you for the thoughtful comment which you obviously put a lot of effort into. I'm heading over to Total Experience right after I finish writing this. I'm glad that you are taking a deeper dive here and I agree that it's needed in order for the emerging forms of this discipline to gain credibility.

I also think that communities outside of the "experience design" aiga list are ready to participate in this conversation. It's time to move this into the mainstream arena, but in order to do so, we need to be able to articulate, and demonstrate what exactly it is we mean when we say "experience design".

[Matthew Grant]

I agree with Bob that, without thinking through the philosophical issues - for example, what constitutes an "experience"? - the expression "experience design" is more alluring than actually meaningful. Since, in a rather banal sense, we "experience" (sense, perceive, interact with, are influenced by) everything that is designed, all design is, more or less, experience design.

Rather than describing a specific design discipline such as "print design" or "furniture design," as your deck (and your response to the preceding comments) suggests, "experience design" defines a particular approach to problems which emphasizes integration, cross-pollination, and interdependence between multiple disciplines (engineering/design/marketing; psychology/anthropology/architecture, etc.)

Although this approach could be applied to anything that is designed (when designing a weekly circular for a supermarket chain, I could take the store environment into consideration, the fragrance and texture of the paper, the actual use of coupons, the potential interactions between the circular itself and POP displays, etc.) it would seem to lend itself more specifically to those design projects which involve a lot of moving parts: websites/apps, household appliances, theme parks, etc.

As the thinking about this approach matures, I wonder if the label "experience design" will survive. Personally, I think it will eventually succumb to its vagueness and all-encompassing-ness and be replaced by one or several terms. Alternately, it will come to refer solely to the direct manipulation of the cognitive apparatus by chemical means and be used almost exclusively by the pharmaceutical industry.

[Doug Meacham]

David,
I agree that other communities are ready for this. As I read through the deck, I'm thinking of the concepts through the lens of category-killer retail (it's what I know the best). There are a handful of players who I think understand the concepts and are doing reasonably good job at implementing them (REI for example), but in general, these retail models are in serious need of something to differentiate themselves from the big-box and warehouse guys.

Experience design may be the way to do that. The challenge for many of them will be whether they can manage the cultural change, financial investment and overall risk associated with making the transition.

[Adam Kayce : Monk At Work]

I'm all for it — because what I see is about richness. Richness of experience, abundance of authenticity, and heart-to-heart connection.

Fundamentally, I believe experience is what touches hearts. Sure, you can 'glamour and glitz' people to death, but the shallowness of it will eventually backfire.

I believe that companies that exist to truly touch people's hearts will create the kinds of experiences that are lasting, create enduring relationships, and, as they say, the cream will rise to the top.

(gee, I'm not passionate about this or anything, am I?) ;-)

[Gino]

David, with all due respect since you're a professional colleague, I think experience design as it exists now is a load of new age, naval-gazing crap.

So, ironically, I agree with Bob Jacobson that it really needs to be attacked and picked at to get at what it is we talk about when we talk about experience design before we get too fixed about a label. I am suspicious of grand narrative designs, designs with capital letters that try to describe things that seem on the surface to be connected. They are frameworks that seek to be ambitious, but there is little rigor in them and they dilute the diversity and richness of ideas within. That's why I say everything is design, death to Design.

[DA]

Gino,

It may indeed be label that gets thrown around and as you say can be a load of crap.

But let me make this personal. I think it accurately describes what I do more so than other titles. Though I'm not a hands on designer anymore (though I still do the visuals here) what I am responsible for is the strategy and direction of the design of digital experiences. So I'm not a graphic designer, or information architect, or interaction designer even though I've worked in wire frame mode—and I don't really relate to the creative director title much anymore.

So, for me Experience Design works. Maybe we're over thinking this as well. Experience Design as a two word combination implies the design of experiences. That's what I do in my profession—as opposed to writing taglines or telling stories through 30 second television spots.

Speaking of navel gazing...
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/being-shallow

;)