What is Experience Design?

In one sense you are always designing experiences: when you have a conversation, when you hold a meeting, when you build a website, when you run a training course. You cannot not do experience design.

To see what I mean, imagine two restaurants. One rents a building, sets out tables and chairs, hires a chef, and opens for business. They serve food and people pay to eat it.

The second restaurant belongs to Heston Blumenthal. He carefully considers each moment in the dining experience – from the promotional flyers to the arrival at the venue, to the minute-by-minute experience of consuming the food.

Both are ‘dining experiences’, both are ‘designed’ in some sense, but one is more deliberately designed from an experiential standpoint.

This second sense – of deliberate experiential design – is how the term ‘experience design’ is usually used.

In practice this means we are often doing experience design in the first sense - i.e. in a haphazard, conventional or intuitive way. We are told, for example, that we need to organise a training course. We put some information on some powerpoint slides, add the course name to the learning management system, book a room, and when people turn up they sit in their seats listening to someone talk. 

This is an experience design like the first restaurant example: we have not thought carefully about the experience people will have or how it will change them – we have merely followed the convention for these sorts of things. If we simply get people together in a room to chat they will still design an experience for themselves, but that design will likely be whatever is easiest and most familiar - and unlikely to bring about change. It will merely feel comfortable.

What about a meeting? You call a meeting, distribute an agenda, people take turns to talk. But have you thought about the meeting minute-to-minute? Have you considered each individual and what they will experience at various points in the meeting, and how this will impact them?

How about a conversation? How do people perceive you when you first meet? Where do you begin? What will be some of the memorable experiences they will have, while talking to you?

There is a tendency to scoff at this idea – to fall back on conventions and intuition. We know how to do these things, surely?

But pause to consider the customer experience and those companies – like Uber, or Amazon, or Apple – who did not merely take the experience for granted but took the time to think about how it might be improved or re-engineered. Customer experience design is a part of experience design.

So this is the true sense of experience design: the careful design of an experience to achieve a particular outcome.

What kind of outcome? An experience design outcome can fall into one of two broad categories: ease of use/seamlessness or challenge/change. Each experience we design can be considered from one of these two standpoints.

It can be so unintrusive that it is invisible, or so disruptive that it changes us forever.

We are either going with the flow of desire, or disrupting it.