If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way.

Brand is a phenomenon that has emerged over the last century as a method of differentiation and control, with marketing beating a drum of “brand messaging”, “consistent impressions”, and a single “brand value”. User Experience is a more recent unicorn to chase, with designers claiming to drive business success through a focus on a prescriptive customer experience. There is a long history of extremely fragile collaboration between the offices of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the traditional shepherds of behavior-by-design, as designers become enamored with brand embodiment in products, and marketers striving to “own” the product specifications, features and functions. The fragility of the bond is obvious, as both groups frequently disparage the other in both private and public venues. As blanket generalizations, designers describe marketers as less honest then themselves, and disparage the Product Requirement Document as a laundry-list of jargon and nonsense. Marketers, in turn, often view designers (and by proxy, the product itself) as a means to an end; the goal – revenue, market share, and brand equity – will be achieved through business rules, not through creative endeavors.

Both groups are to fault, and both groups are perilously ignoring the huge potential at their fingertips. As members of both groups cling to brand and UX as differentiators, they have mistakenly focused on control as a means of generating revenue. In fact, neither brand nor UX will serve as the driving force behind financial success in the coming decades. “User experience” is just a new name for old thinking, and “User experience practitioners” exhibit the same hubris that has long plagued “brand thinking”: the large name-as-mindshare mentality that a company can own a space, a segment, or even a consumer.

clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency

The Problems of Brand and User Experience
For most of the twentieth century, brand – and the marketing machine that created it – ruled the culture of developed countries. The earliest parts of the 1900s boasted brands built around industrialism and production, and these acted as literal and figurative crests, positioned as major pillars of production. The mid part of the century led to the family-focused brands positioned as domesticated icons of class and consumption. And the late 90’s exposed global brands, dominated by large, faceless and relatively unknown holding companies making profit simply by waiting for an opportune time to offload a company to another company. Yet the rules of the game are in deep flux, due to sustainability, a credit meltdown, and an awareness of humanitarian efforts in developing countries. The basic, fundamental properties of major brands are increasingly questioned, as evidenced by the disparaged and embattled Ford and Citibank, and the questions of these mega-brands are more commonly rhetorical and pejorative.

In spite of this, brand equity facilitated by market share is still a goal of the Fortune 500, and it is common to hear clients – both marketers and UX professionals – speak of “winning” in relationship to the user experience.

Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization

Simultaneously, however, clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency. They describe how their customers have become familiar with a particular brand-purchasing behavior, and continue to perform that rote behavior based on circumstances. This includes placement on the shelf, color of a label, and the realization that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There is no “relationship” with the customer; this is a fragile connection that is the consumptive equivalent to taking the same route to work each day. This is a scary reality to face, as brand complacency implies a dependency on switching-costs as a means of retaining market-share. Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization.

The Threat of Commoditization
A commodity is something that has no qualitative differentiation. Mass production drives commoditization within a particular product line, while the traditional “bunch and swarm” mentality of the marketplace drives commoditization across product lines. A desire to create a new set of interactions is an urge to escape this push towards sameness. Innovation is a business goal to produce products that have qualitative differentiation, and there are various forms of innovation – such as disruptive innovation – which are intended to produce massive qualitative differentiation.

In western civilization, the artifact is continuing to diminish in relevance and importance. While people continue to consume things, these things are increasingly a means to an end. Our relative wealth has positioned even the lower-middle class in a position where there is time for leisure, entertainment, and emotionally charged experiences.

Interesting, too, is the speed at which the digital artifact has moved from being exclusive and expensive to nearly free and ubiquitous. Software, once priced at hundreds of dollars and appropriately as scarce, is now widely available for no cost; networked services have enabled content feeds across artifacts, rendering even some services as irrelevant in the larger scheme of the competitive landscape. As an example, for many years, Microsoft offered a for-fee product called Outlook, which manages electronic mail. Google then offered a free service called Gmail, which also manages electronic mail. Then, as Google externalized the Google mail feed through a series of APIs, mail can be embedded in unlikely places – including other products, such as an instant messenger client (like Trillian), or even on other websites. The “designed product” has become less interesting and relevant, and no matter the innovations pushed by Google or Microsoft in their products, the data itself has been shifted to a champion position of value.

Behavioral Change: The Goal of Our Work
The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance – one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational. Conversation is only a metaphor for interaction, but it’s a useful one. Many of the same ways we “read” an actual, spoken conversation have parallels in describing and discussing interactions between people and things. Consider:

• Both conversations and interactions have flow, and often have a beginning, middle, and end;
• Both conversations and interactions act as intertwining of multiple viewpoints. In a conversation, the viewpoints come from people; in an interaction, viewpoints are embedded in an artifact by a designer;
• Both conversations and interactions act as both methods of communication and methods of comprehension; participants both contribute to, and take from, the activity;
• Ultimately, both conversations and interactions serve to affect behavioral change in participants.

This is powerful, as it describes an implicit way of extending a designers reach – and personal point of view, or message – into the masses. It is this mass distribution of dialogue that describes culture; we build culture through our objects, services and systems, as we define behavior through interactions. This is of equal prominence to the claim of “designing experiences”, yet leaves open the potential – the need – for the people (pardon, the consumers) to actually participate and contribute in a meaningful way. The things we do in the design studio have grand significance in the world. Our design decisions – even small, detailed, nuanced design decisions – resonate for years, and usually in a phenomenally large scale. Yet because these design decisions have an impact that is diffused and quiet, our impact is hard to notice and pin down. Culture is something that’s not immediately describable; the question “where does culture come from?” is almost as large a question as “where does life come from”, and is equally as evasive.

Cultural Change: The Implications of Our Work
This is a fundamental point that serves to elevate the importance of a designer, and also serves to articulate the implicit responsibility a designer has to the world around them. It’s such a fundamental point that it’s worth making again, in a more overt manner:

1. The interaction designer designs various aspects of an artifact;
2. The designer either explicitly or implicitly hopes to change behavior in a user;
3. This behavioral change is “baked” into the artifact, and then disseminated, in mass;
4. The artifact serves as a stimulus to change behavior in society;
5. This combination of artifacts and behavior describes culture.

Every design decision – from the large and strategic decision to design accounting software, to the small and nuanced decision to use a checkbox instead of a radio button – contributes to the behavior of the masses, and helps define the culture of our society. This describes an enormous opportunity for designers, one that is rarely realized. We are, quite literally, building the culture around us; arguably, our effect is larger and more immediate than even policy decisions of our government. We are responsible for both the positive and negative repercussions of our design decisions, and these decisions have monumental repercussions.

Our Deep Responsibility
For most designers, this responsibility is hidden by the celebratory claims of designing experiences. This claim almost abdicates the long-term responsibility, as “an experience” has an end, at which time the designers’ role seemingly ends. The work is meaningful only on an immediate level of craft and creation, and while designers often take pride in a product once it has launched, they do not frequently make the connection between their creations and the culture that surrounds them. “They’ve stopped using my product – their experience is over.” Convenient – but utterly false. Because emphasis is placed on innovation or brand, designers learn to value their work based on newness or recognition; metrics for success are tied to profit and marketshare, rather than positive and long-term culture change. As the causality is extended over a long period of time, it is diffused as a single product mixes with the rest of the milieu. The individual contribution of a single designer feels muted and insignificant, as there is no feedback loop to indicate the role of an individual design in shaping culture and society.

These negative qualities of our last century’s focus on brand and experience have been forced upon the business of design and the design of business, but it is only interaction and the ability to change behavior that will serve as fundamental pillars upon which to drive successful new endeavors. We must refocus and reposition our work within major companies away from a marketing-driven focus on brand and a design-driven focus on experiential ownership. Instead, it is up to us to emphasize the value a company can provide in changing human behavior – the lasting, nuanced, intellectual, and deep responsibility we have to the culture we are building.

This requires a conscious tradeoff and reprioritization. Instead of control, we must focus on frameworks. Instead of seeking to own and prescribe a singular experience, we must strive to adapt to the peculiarities and nuances of human behavior. And instead of complicity absorbing the corporate drive towards power and brand positioning, we must acknowledge the huge responsibility implicit in our work and constantly vocalize how our work supports humanity and the cultural landscape that surrounds us. We’ve built that cultural landscape, and we owe it to ourselves and to our work to tend to our creation as it morphs, changes and adapts. As you cringe from someone talking into a Bluetooth headset on the subway, or smile as a child and mother look at photos on their phone, realize that this technological culture is ours in the making. Both the bad and good are our ongoing fault and responsibility.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Jon Kolko in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Photos by: hipposrunsuperfast, Lord Jim & arquera

Ahead of this year’s EuroIA conference I caught up with experience architect, strategist and all-round nice guy Joe Lamantia. We talked about designing for experiences, games design, Killzone and monasteries.

Steve Baty: Joe, you’ve been working in User Experience design for many years. What is it that first got you interested in the discipline?
Joe Lamantia: Waaaaay back in the day, I wanted to be an absent-minded professor. I’d always been interested in the transformations that emerge when you bring dynamic cultural, technological, and social layers together, and disciplines like media theory and cultural studies seemed like a good spot from which to watch all the action.  Then the birth of the Web presented a perfect opportunity to participate in the creation of a new medium from the inside.  In terms of aspiration, what could be more rewarding than having a hand in building the world we all inhabit in the future?  I find that it is more fun to create than to critique, so I stayed on the ‘creating’ side of the balance every time I came to a career decision.  In retrospect, looking at my writing and speaking, whether on user experience or ubiquitous computing, it’s become obvious to me that I’m in between the creator and critic camps. I like to do both. So far, I’ve had opportunities to follow through on this synthesis, and I hope that continues to be the case.

SB: The connection between experience design and game design has been gaining interest in recent times. What is it about game design that we can use to inform the design of other types of experience?
JL: I wouldn’t say I have an insider’s view of game design, since I’m not a professional, and the only game I designed was 20 years ago.  (I used to make my friends play; the fact that some of us are still friends is a testament to the strength of the friendships, and not the game!)  The two things I try to take away from game design are a sense of wonder at the amazing diversity of experiences that people crave and want to engage with, and a broader appreciation of what people will happily accept as a natural part of those experiences.  At the more tactical levels of methods, design patterns, codified best practices, etc. the biggest lesson from games seems to me to be that many of the hoary old truths of experience design that are rooted in established disciplines like human factors / usability and information science, are easily trumped by considerations such as emotional and social aspects.  (Err, in all but life-threatening contexts, perhaps.)  I don’t mean to throw out the baby with the bathwater – properly minding our foundations is critical to creating good experiences – but there are wider horizons out there for how we should be working, and what we work with.  Lazzaro’s language of choice is a good example.

Why not borrow from game design to add richness to what seems a very hum-drum type of chore?  People take pleasure in mastering even the simplest tasks. Thus the rewards of ritual; say when cooking using traditional tools & methods such as whisking everything by hand with the just right amount of manual dexterity. We can design for the emotional rewards that come from the different levels of accomplishment and knowledge for even simple tasks.

Take the design of interactive voice response systems: I’ve observed that people who use the same IVR repeatedly often make a game out of going through a menu of choices as fast as possible by speaking memorized choices before the system prompts them with a question, once they know the timing and the choice trees well enough.  Why not take this into account by offering the option of issuing a string of several commands up front that will take you directly to the choice you need, and then recognizing you for getting it right?

SB: You’re recent article for Johnny Holland presented an overview of the work of Lazzaro. What is it about her work that resonates with you most?
JL: Nicole’s work directly connects the way that designers create experiences – our materials, processes, outlook on what’s possible, etc. – with the emotions that these experiences inspire or encourage.  Her language for design is close to fundamental, since it works at the level of choices.  There’s no ‘middle layer’ of abstraction that Lazzaro’s design language has to work with or through.  For example, we’ve learned much about the psychological and emotional impact of design decisions about elements such as language, typography, color, and line weight via research in cognitive science, linguistics, the vision system, etc..  But remember that these design elements are often heavily coded by culture and context; at different times and places, the people experiencing these elements will have different feelings about them, and the experience as a whole.  Designers have to work with these elements as they are mediated by cultural and contextual layers.  Lazzaro’s language of choice addresses a deeper level that is less dependent on context and culture.  If someone has the choice of fragging you or working together with you, very little of the emotional impact of that choice on the experience you have is determined by cultural and contextual factors.

SB: What are the parallels between the design of the social mechanics in games that we can draw for other social environments?
JL: Relationships are one of the four basic types of fun Lazzaro identifies, which means that we should be able to directly translate these ideas into the design of enterprise social environments.  Groups of humans will always have work that needs to be done. Why not structure the working experiences to directly provide social rewards in the same ways that games do, in addition to the usual pay or other sorts of incentives?  Looking further afield, new models for economic and cultural production like co-creation and distributed business (and we’ll see if social business catches on) all depend directly on well-designed social mechanisms for their basic functioning.  Far from being a game element, social mechanics that encourage feelings of cooperation (or competition!) are indispensable for the new ways that we’ll be working and creating in the future.  Here perhaps we finally see potential for cracking the glass wall that separates the commonly understood purview of experience design from activity and effectiveness at the levels of organizational structure and culture [that some of our leaders in the field have been pushing industry to recognize].

For a good historical example of how this all comes together, I think there’s lots to be learned from the monastic orders – Christian and otherwise.  These experiences were structured by mechanisms designed to create mixes of the different sorts of emotional rewards Lazzaro identifies, in addition to the fundamentals of providing food and shelter for their members.  Recall that the original monks were hermits who avoided society; the rise of the various orders reflects a substantial change in the basic character of the experience offered.  We have different language for the core attributes now – value proposition, brand promise, experience theme, what have you – but as designers of social environments, we could use the analytical power of Lazzaro’s model to examine the historical evolution of the monasteries, since all the major orders were carefully designed to create a certain sort of experience, each distinct from the others.

SB: For EuroIA you’re presenting a case study on Killzone. Can you tell us a little about that game?
JL: Killzone is a popular first-person shooter style game with a science-fiction setting, created by an Amsterdam-based studio called Guerilla Games, which is owned by Sony.  The Killzone family is known for offering an experience that’s rich in environmental detail such as graphics and physics, as well as an extensive character creation and advancement possibility space.  We’ll talk specifically about Killzone 2, looking at some of the many social elements that this release includes.

My role in the presentation is describing how Lazzaro’s language points the way toward the hybrids of game and social experience that Killzone exemplifies.  Reinoud Bosman -  esteemed former colleague and experience architect par excellence – takes the spotlight by looking at the structure and design of the Killzone experience in detail. Reinoud was directly involved in the design of those social elements, so his perspective is – pardon the pun – first person.

SB: Thank you for the interview.

Joe is one of the speakers at the EuroIA 09 conference, being held in Copenhagen (Denmark) on September 25 and 26. The theme of this year is “Beyond Structure”.

Emotion is one of the most powerful elements of an experience, and also the most difficult to design.  Yet games regularly inspire intense emotions, drawing players into the experience they offer, and making these experiences enjoyable and memorable.

With the best games, these feelings endure long after we finish playing.  Plainly, interaction designers who want to better understand how to inspire emotions could learn a lot from games. Nicole Lazzaro, a leading games researcher and design consultant, has studied games and game players extensively; her work on games and emotion offers useful insights for interaction designers seeking ways to inspire emotional impact.

In Lazzaro’s view, feelings are the motivation and reward (the source of ‘value’, in business terms) for playing a game. Lazzaro believes people play games specifically to experience the different feelings games can create; “the opportunity for challenge and mastery, the sense of accomplishment, the feeling of total immersion, a ticket to relaxation, or simply the opportunity to spend time with friends.” [5] This emotional reward distinguishes people who play games from the multitudes of gold farmers who earn a living performing game tasks for pay.

Of course, game designers cannot ‘directly’ create the emotions people feel while playing (at least, not until mind control technology is effectively ‘productized’ by some well-meaning corporation or government).  Instead, game creators “design the mechanics that offer players choices. It is in the making of these choices that players feel the emotions coming from game play. It is this new way of creating emotion that separates games from other media.”

The Architecture of Fun

Emotions emerge from the choices that game players make, within the space of possibilities defined by game designers. Thus design decisions about which kinds of choices to allow players to make strongly shape the eventual experience of playing the game.  I call this designing the Achitecture of Fun; Figure 1 illustrates the progression in level of impact linking game mechanics to player experience.

figure 1. The Architecture of Fun

For example, placing the collaboration mechanic in a game by design allows players to choose whether or not to cooperate with one another. Their choices yield feelings of generosity or gratitude (or perhaps schadenfreude at what happens when others suffer for choosing not to cooperate!), contributing to a game experience of enhanced (or not!) relationships with friends and other players. Figure 2 shows how the architecture of fun relies on choices and emotions to build relationships based on social fun.

Lazzaro describes game design as ”the language of choice that creates not just a game for the player, but a player experience” [3]. What is the vocabulary of the language of game design? And how can experience designers learn to speak and use this language?

figure 2. Social Mechanics and Relationship Fun

Lazzaro uses a diverse set of tools and methods including emotion profiles, play styles, and game genres to describe and design game experiences. [3]

One tool especially useful to interaction designers is a simple model in Figure 3 which identifies the emotional rewards different kinds of games provide. Lazzaro identifies up to 30 distinct emotions associated with games, based on direct observation. The model groups these different feelings players experience into four broad areas – ‘Hard fun’, ‘Easy fun’, ‘People fun’, and ‘Serious fun’ – and identifies the game mechanics that encourage each emotion.

As illustrated, the landscape of possible game experiences designers can choose to create ranges from goal directed to open-ended, and from game-like to life-oriented.

Four Kinds of Fun

In figure 3 you see game experiences providing ‘hard fun’ center on feelings of player accomplishment. As Lazzaro describes it, “Hard Fun is the perfect balance of player skill with game difficulty. If the game is too easy the player quits because they are bored. If the game is too hard players quit because they are too frustrated.” [1] Fiero – not the GM faux sports car of the 90’s but, as Lazzaro defines it, ‘the Italian word for “Personal triumph over adversity.” – is the emotion that accompanies the experience of mastery.  Game mechanics that encourage feelings of fiero and the experience of mastery include; wins, goals, challenges, obstacles, leveling-up, enhancing powers, etc.

figure 3. Four Kinds of Fun

According to Lazzaro, ‘Easy Fun’ rewards players differently, creating curiosity by sparking players’ imaginations, relying on mechanics such as detailed environments that encourage exploration. ‘People Fun’ provides amusement based on relationships and social bonds. ‘Serious Fun’ yields relaxation, addressing players’ personal values with mechanics such as practice and rhythm. (For more extensive descriptions of the other three types of fun and the related game mechanics, see sources listed in the References section)

Emotions Aren’t Linear

Of course, designers cannot simply paint by numbers, because players do not feel emotions in a linear and tightly compartmented way. Rather, “emotions are fluid and braided over time, one emotion blending into the next.” [1] Accordingly, games that succeed usually offer players experiences that blend three or all four types of fun, emphasizing them differently throughout the game experience. [3]

And inspiring a particular emotion such as fiero requires designers to carefully balance all elements of the game experience. ”To get Fiero, the player must succeed just when they are on the verge of quitting. When they achieve at that point they experience a huge phase shift in the body from feeling very bad to feeling very good. This enhances the feelings of elation.”[1]

New Design Method

Lazzaro believes that by understanding and designing for the emotions associated with each kind of play, “designers have a new method for creating broader and deeper experiences”. [3] I believe this language of choice and emotion is relevant not just for game creators, but for experience designers broadly. Why? Everything people do is touched by and dependent on the emotional aspects of being human; from our tasks at work, to our relationships with friends and family, to our plans for the future. Cognitive and neurological research shows we cannot make the simplest decision about what to have for lunch without emotions.[6] If we can design emotional elements of experiences even to a limited extent, the reach and impact of interaction design is dramatically enhanced.

Lazzaro’s approach offers immediate applications at the tactical and strategic levels of experience design. The language of choice can help with everything from choosing the content, controls and other tangible elements of user experiences, to defining the essential concepts and mental models that structure those experiences. The language of choice can also serve as an assessment method for existing products and services, a concepts and options generator, a prioritization tool, and one source of input in the creation of roadmaps for products and services.

What’s Next

Looking ahead, as convergence and technological change relentlessly blenderize familiar devices, media, genres, industries, and even our basic concepts of product and services, it’s natural to ask “What’s next?” in experiences. In Lazzaro’s model, ‘People fun’, based on mechanics like cooperation, communication and competition, is one of the most important emotional sources of experience value.  Based on this view, Lazzaro believes the combination of social emotions with traditional skill-based game emotions offers tremendous potential for game makers and creators of social experiences, and predicted the emergence of hybrid experiences that combine these two sources of emotion several years ago.

We can see hybrids as they arise thanks to the ‘social shift’, the transformation of digital experiences of all kinds through the addition of social mechanisms such as conversation, sharing, identity, relationships, etc. The social shift is especially visible in the enterprise space, where collaboration capabilities seek to transform the structure and functioning of even the largest organizations, and the precipitous growth of socially-focused experiences in the on-line world. Likewise, in the games universe, the success of individual game titles and game consoles is now dramatically affected by the size and value of the player communities they connect, as well as the graphic quality, hardware, or other experience element.

Lazzaro describes the creation of games by analogy, observing, “Shakespeare designed the emotional space between characters. Game developers design the emotional space between player and game.” [3] In the same way, the language of choice she presents provides interaction designers with the tools and perspective necessary for designing the emotional space between people and digital experiences.

References & Resources

[1] Lazzaro, Nicole. “Why We Play Games.” Games for Health Grantee Dinner. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Baltimore, Maryland May 6. 2008.

[2] Lazzaro, Nicole. “Halo Vs. Facebook: Emotion and the Fun of Games.” Etech Conference. March 4. 2008. [http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/schedule/detail/1589]

[3] Lazzaro, Nicole. “The 4 most Important Emotions of Game Design.”
Game Developer’s Cconference. March 8. 2007. [http://www.2007.loginconference.com/session.php?id=46]

[4] Based on an original diagram created by Nicole Lazzaro / XEO Design Inc. All content and ideas copyright XEO Design Inc. 2008.

[5] XEO Design, Inc., “Philosophy” http://www.xeodesign.com/philosophy.html (Accessed May 8, 2009).

[6] Dan Vergano, “Study: Emotion rules the brain’s decisions” USA TODAY, August 6, 2006. [http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2006-08-06-brain-study_x.htm]

Photos by: Sean Dreilinger

We’ve heard it before: we should focus on designing for an experience; experiences are fundamentally different design challenges to a product or services; experiences are designed from the outside in.

We’re also told that we can apply this experience-centric perspective to tackle problems beyond the design of a product or piece of software. But we don’t often see examples of these ideas being put into practice. So that’s what I’d like to share.

Earlier this year I was asked by a client -YHA Australia – to work with them on a project aimed at selecting a new core IT platform for the organization. YHA Australia operate a network of some 120 or so hostels across Australia, and the system serves as the primary booking and hostel management system for each property.

During the first meetings to discuss the system it became fairly clear that the organization lacked any real sense of purpose for the system, and no clear idea of the strategic role the system might play in the organization.

More importantly for me, there was no real understanding of the role of the hostel management system in delivering a service or experience to hostel guests. What this meant was that we had no basis for prioritizing system features, or weighting features in the selection process.

To help facilitate this understanding I proposed to undertake some work with organization to help them better understand three things:

• what does the guest lifecycle look like, and what are the characteristics of the experience at each point in that lifecycle;
• in order to deliver on that desired experience, what does the business need to be doing; and
• what are the technology requirements or features needed to support these business functions.

This approach explicitly mirrors the user:business:technology trinity of requirements that need to be balanced in order to deliver a quality experience, that in turns delivers value to the business. It also provides us a slightly simplified view of the framework Peter Merholz discussed in his recent HBR article, which begins with the experience and works inwards through interactions, touchpoints, procedures & systems.

In order to understand the guest lifecycle we brought together a group of experienced industry operations (hostel management), marketing and front-line service staff. We worked through a series of brain-storming and analysis tasks to arrive at a draft lifecycle.

This draft lifecycle was held up to reality using a number of techniques including:

• contextual enquiry
• interviews (with guests, more staff)
• research in social networks

Using materials, research notes from previous projects (I’ve been working with YHA Australia for a decade), and interviews with back-office staff, each element of the customer experience was mapped to one or more front- and back-office tasks that need to occur to ensure the delivery of the experience as ‘designed’.

This research allowed for significant improvements to be made to the lifecycle in the pre- and post-stay stages of the service delivery. The detail in these two stages was meaningful because it allowed us to identify elements of the experience that would have been unsupported and yet clearly fit within a guest’s mental model of what constitutes the experience, even if not being a part of the traditional view of the service.

Most importantly, the research allowed for the experience to be deconstructed, and the important elements highlighted. This part of the work was informed by competitive analysis carried out previously, allowing points of clear and valuable difference between YHA and it’s competitors to be identified and prioritized.

By this stage we were back into familiar IT territory: what were the characteristics and features of the system needed to support the business functions previously identified. The big difference now, however, is that each business activity is directly related to a specific element of the guest’s experience.

Structuring the evaluation framework in this way also allowed us to question a lot of firm assumptions about what elements and functions within the IT system were most important. When features aren’t directly delivering a customer benefit, or enabling staff to deliver a customer benefit, it is muct easier to question the importance of that feature.

This framing of the problem also focused attention on several different sets of interactions within the overall service delivery system:

• that between guests and the system, mediated through 3rd-parties (e.g. external reservation sites);
• that between customers and front-line staff; and
• that between staff and the hostel management system.

In other words, we have defined user experience requirements for two distinct audiences: customers and staff.

Describing multiple interfaces

The next stage in the project is to layer in the functions that the business needs that aren’t tied directly to a customer experience. These include features related to financial management, corporate governance and risk management. In this model, these business-centric considerations are separated from the guest-centric considerations, and evaluated in parallel.

We are still in the process of using this approach to select the organization’s new IT platform, but this new framework has helped to transform the decision from a tactical, ‘day-to-day’ operations decision into a strategic choice affecting the whole organization’s positioning and point of difference.

I’ll be talking about this project, the approach, and lessons learned at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference, with inspiring and practical presentations , covering a range of topics about how to design great experiences for people. It will be held on 26-28 August 2009, in Canberra (Australia).

We often discuss the need for us to be designing for an experience. And we talk about the importance of experience design – and design generally – playing a strategic role in business decisions. But we’re less forthcoming when it comes to discussing what is an experience strategy?

The question of what, exactly, do I mean when I talk about experience strategy has been coming up a bit recently. In part, that’s because a good chunk of the work I do revolves around experiences; and in part it’s topical here in Sydney since UX Book Club has been reading Subject to change by the folks at Adaptive Path as our title for June.

As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of discussing experiences, and strategy, and what an experience strategy actually is. So here is my definition of experience strategy in one statement:

An experience strategy is that collection of activities that an organization chooses to undertake to deliver a series of (positive, exceptional) interactions which, when taken together, constitute an (product or service) offering that is superior in some meaningful, hard-to-replicate way; that is unique, distinct & distinguishable from that available from a competitor.

Let’s deconstruct that a bit and see what I’m trying to say.

An experience strategy is that collection of activities…

Delivering products or services, or hybrid systems of both, is a complex undertaking that involves many people executing many tasks and activities. Some of these activities are really obvious: the sales staff in your retail store; the product engineer; the call-centre staff. And some are not so obvious: like the person responsible for driving the forklift in the warehouse to move spare parts to where they’re needed; or the person responsible for the servicing of the forklift. Some activities have a much more direct impact on the end customer, but all contribute to that customer’s perception of us and our products. And if a change to an activity is required in order to deliver on your new experience, then that should be mentioned in your strategy.

That collection of activities is often summarized in the experience vision. Subject to Change includes a very nice example of an experience vision from Eastman Kodak over 100 years ago: “You press the button, we do the rest”. Or Apple’s experience vision for the iPod: “All your music, any time, any where”[1]. Drawing on a literary heritage Cindy Chastain puts forward the idea of an experience theme as the coherent, binding articulation of our intent. Both work for me; the theme/vision helps us not only choose the activities needed in execution, they also help to galvanise and coordinate the way these activities are carried out.

…that an organization chooses to undertake…

Strategy is about two things: compromise and intent. When we devise a strategy we are necessarily indicating an intent or aim. If there is no goal then you don’t have a strategy: you have a to-do list.
We choose certain activities over others for a number of reasons:

• We can’t do everything;
• We don’t need to do everything in order to reach our intended goal;
• There are some activities that will actually take us further from our goal.

A core component of an experience strategy is also an articulation of the what. That is, the collection of activities described above. The choice of activities is also a way of putting into action a specific design solution – the how.

…to deliver a series of (positive, exceptional) interactions…

There are actually two points in here worth identifying and discussing. The first is that the experience we deliver is the sum of a series of separate interactions. I like the way Eric Reiss articulated this concept in his article explaining how he thinks of user experience. Our experience at a restaurant is more than the food; more than the service; more than the wine list or the decor. It’s each of those things, and all of those things, and it’s the way in which each is choreographed with respect to the others.

But there’s a second facet here that is important: not every interaction has to be exceptional or even good. It’s OK for some components to be average, satisfactory or mundane. This is one of the choices that we make in selecting our activities: not only which ones to carry out, but at which we’re going to excel. A memorable experience isn’t necessarily made up entirely of memorable interactions. Making every interaction memorable might make the entire experience too expensive for anyone to afford; or too time-consuming; or impractical. And so we’re back to compromise: what are the critical components of the experience that…

…when taken together, constitute an (product or service) offering that is superior in some meaningful, [hard-to-replicate] way…

We’ll go out of business quickly if our offering is inferior. That’s pretty simple. When all of those activities are brought together we need to have something that sings, and – more importantly – sings in the hearts and minds of our customers. Our offering needs to be meaningful for our customers – and there are ways that we can try to achieve that, through our design process – but our aim should be clear.

…offering that is superior in some meaningful, hard-to-replicate way…

Businesses that wish to be profitable design experiences that are meaningful for their customers. Businesses that wish to remain profitable in the long term offer something that is not only meaningful but also hard to copy. In business parlance that’s call a sustainable competitive advantage and it’s the shining difference between companies like Apple or Toyota and the also-rans in the market-place.

Think of it this way: if your offering is easy to copy; easy to replicate – you won’t be the only one offering it for long. And that just means your profits will very quickly be eroded as you shift from a value proposition built on the strength of the experience, to a price war driven by operational and scale efficiency.

…that is unique, distinct & distinguishable from that available from a competitor.

Your offering – as good as it is; as compelling as it is; as hard to reproduce – needs to be uniquely identified with your organization for you to really reap the benefits. There’s a great photo of Lance Armstrong – 7 time Tour de France winner – shown in Bill Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences in which Lance is shown on a stationary exercise bike warming up for an event (he’s not sweating so I assume he’s not cooling down). From his ears are two white cords that converge and disappear into his pocket. He’s quite clearly listening to an iPod even though the product is nowhere to be seen.

There’s a restaurant in Sydney named Tetsuya’s – one of the finest restaurant’s you’ll find, anywhere – that dishes up what can only be described as an eating experience. 13 courses complemented by a 7-course degustation wine list that delights, and tantalises, hints and astounds your taste senses over several hours. The experience is unique, and distinctive.

And one of my favourite distinctive experiences: driving a Mini Cooper S (original or modern).

These are experiences that are exceptional (as a whole), memorable, and worth telling to others. They sell themselves through the passionate response of the people who have already experienced them, and they are uniquely connected to the name and the brand behind them. There is no mistaking the experience of driving a Mini Cooper with any other car. Other consumer electronics manufacturers don’t design and make products like Apple. In fact, if they did, it would so clearly be inspired by Apple that the other company would be doing Apple’s advertising for them.

Finis

Delivering on an experience requires the coordinated effort of many parts of an organization. Whilst the experience vision or theme provides the guiding light for those efforts, the experience strategy takes that vision and articulates the specific areas of focus around which the organization will strive to differentiate itself in the market by crafting that experience in a particular way.

The strategy holds and speaks to both the destination and the journey and in so doing bridges the gap between concept and action.

I’d like to send out a big thank you to Cindy Chastain, Joe Lamantia, Donna Spencer & Ruth Ellison for reading through the draft of this article. Their time and insights were much appreciated.

[1]: In Subject to Change the authors refer to these as experience strategies.

In my opinion they’re not. A strategy encompasses both a goal and the path. These statements are vision statements. At best they describe the experience – such as the example experience on page 28 of the book – but without the activities needed to deliver on that vision I don’t class these as strategies.

We should feel ashamed of ourselves. According to a recent research people get angry and frustrated by the complexity of modern mobile phones. We, experience designers, are stupid… We’ve got the greatest job in the world, full of endless posibilities to make people’s lives better, easier and happier. And we still manage to only make things worse.

According to a research done by Mformation (with 4.000 participants) modern mobile phones are too complex. “Operators and device manufacturers need to remove barriers to service uptake and unlock the true power of advanced mobile technology. The message from consumers is that phone setup is simply too complex. Clearly, this needs to be addressed.”

It doesn’t come as a surprise that people find phone complex, but it’s still shocking to see it in these hard numbers:

• two-third of the mobile users find phone setup just as frustrating as changing bank accounts
• 65% of the respondents agree “that mobile operators are losing out, as people will not buy a new phone because of the time it takes to set up”
• 78% would change handsets more often if the setup wouldn’t be a bitch
• 88% doesn’t use additional services because the setup is to complicated
• 61% stopped using mobile apps because they couldn’t solve problems with them

According to the article people feel it should take no longer than 15 minutes to get your phone up and running. They get frustrated when this isn’t true and irritated when they must setup services through several steps. It should a smooth ride in the park: opening the box with your phone, starting it up and start using it. Along the way you should be asked simple questions so the phone knows what you want. In the background it can set these things up and sometimes ask if it’s doing the right things.

Why is it so hard for us to create a good experience? Personally I think to many mobile phones are still being developed with engineers in the lead instead of experience designers. Technology and features overrule experience.

Use patterns, stop innovating
On of the biggest problems in my eyes is the total lack of direction. Every single phone has it’s own way of interacting with it. All companies try to be innovative, coming up with new design patterns to make our lives ‘better’. But in the end we still have to learn how to work with them… and since these patterns don’t show up on any other device, we don’t really get to understand them. When the manufacturers do come up with a general pattern, like T9 for SMS, they immediately see the benefits. People have time to learn and understand the pattern and can use it over and over, blindly. But when every single phone of HTC or Nokia gets it’s own way of navigating, setting up services, etc…. people lose focus and get frustrated. This is one of the reasons I’m so enthusiastic about Samsung’s decision to create one interface for all their products. And it would be even better if the manufacturers sat together with a good cup of tea and choose some patterns they will all use. Patterns for all the basic features of a phone, which have proven to work. If they start innovating from that point on, building upon those patterns… people will be happy.

And no, I don’t want to kill innovation. There should still be phones that go over the edge and challenge the way we interact with mobile devices. But there should be more phones that don’t do this, then those who do.

photo Torbert Timson
via BBC News

Why can’t the web be a total experience? Even though we have Flash, Silverlight, Ajax and the most beautifully designed websites, I never feel submerged. How can this be? My opinion is that the webbrowser is slowing us down, killing the experience in the process.

When you think of it: the functional framework of an average browser takes up 10-15% of our screen. Showing us buttons, icons and textfields that we won’t be using for most of the time. In fact, it’s defining the way I use and experience websites. By generalising navigation structures it forces us to navigate 95% of the web in exactly the same way: hierarchal. This of course enhances usability, but degrades user experience.

Besides the fact that it generalises the way we navigate, an even bigger issue is the lack of submergence. When I think of ‘real experiences’ a big range of moments comes to mind, ranging from computer games to movies and entertainment parks. There I feel totally submerged. You go 110% into the experience, not noticing the surroundings. This happens when you are in rollercoaster, racing on the highway and for example when playing an exciting game. But on the Internet I never get past the feeling that I’m just browsing around. And that makes me act accordingly.

There is of course the full screen mode, which enables me to hide the framework of my browser. But this is a power user tool, hidden behind a button. And so almost nobody uses it and thus no creative has ever made a website that mimics a true experience. There are of course a few examples that come close, such as Firefox plugin CoolIris (which isn’t actually a website). This plugin enables people to view photos and videos of the web in a fullscreen representation, submerging people in a beautiful webexperience. When I think of it… this is actually a good example of where the web could go when browsers become unobtrusive. Flash and Silverlight are a perfect base for this.

So what now?
I believe in an unobtrusive browser, which is mainly there to guarantee that I’m surfing the web safely. By removing the visual framework you force (and motivate) web creatives to rethink the way to move through websites. And because there is no framework the freedom will be total. 3D interfaces won’t look strange within a 2D shell anymore. I believe it will pave the way for a new generation of online experiences and interactions. Maybe Youtube could become a real online tv channel…

Of course not all the functionality a webbrowser offers is waste. The address- and searchbar are pretty useful, when combined (like in Chrome). But they should only appear when necessary. In it’s core this could be all the browser has to offer. And if somebody wants more functionality, this can be added by clicking in widgets – adding functionality. I can imagine a co-op widget, which shows me other people who are on the same webpage/-site.

Anyway… the bottomline is this: let’s open up our minds for a new generation of web experience. I want to submerge.