Experience Design 101

By Peter Boersma (Info.nl)

Stop! Before we begin, check to see if you know your experience design classics:

• Anything by Donald Norman (”beautiful things work better”)
• “Designing for People” by Henry Dreyfuss
• George A. Miller’s “The Psychology of Communication” (with Chapter 2: “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”)
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow”
• Christopher Alexander’s “The Timeless Way of Building” and “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”
• Nathan Shedroff’s “Experience Design” (you may want to check the new edition “1.1″).

From that last one I’ll use the definition of Experience Design, just so we’re all on the same page:

“Experience Design is an approach to creating successful experiences for people in any medium. This approach includes consideration and design in all 3 spatial dimensions, over time, all 5 common senses, and interactivity, as well as customer value, personal meaning, and emotional context. Experience Design is not merely the design of Web pages or other interactive media or on-screen digital content. Designed experiences can be in any medium, including spatial/environmental installations, print products, hard products, services, broadcast images and sounds, live performances and events, digital and online media, etc.”

Got that? Good. Let’s see what happened since those works were written.

Experience Design

Design answers the who, what, when and where questions. So let’s look at social (who), things (what), time (when) and mobile (where, and the theme for Design for Conversion).

Who: Social

I know you, you know me, so let’s…let’s do what? The rule is that you don’t connect to people directly, but through social objects. And who designs these social objects?

• Jyry Engeström’s PubSubHubbub, “A simple, open, server-to-server publish/subscribe protocol“
• Kars Alfrink’s Hubbub; “We create physical, social games for public space. Our games get people moving and talking.”
• David Armano’s Social Business by Design; “Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, processes, and culture”
• And to show what happens with good experience designers: Christina Wodtke, formerly a well-known Information Architect, is now Manager Social of MySpace.

What: Things

Eventually, everything will get an IP-address. And we will be able to interact with it, or access the data from its sensors. What will that be like?

• Tom Coates’ Native to a Web of Data
• Ulla-Maaria Engeström’s “Thinglink”
• Adam Greenfield’s “Everyware”

When: Time

Interaction Design is all about time. The 4^th dimension (Why is Dr.Who not called Dr.When?).

• Bill Scott’s “Interesting Moments“
• User Interface Engineering’s Seducible Moments; “If we identify the key seducible moment for a specific offer, we can often see over 10 times as many requests.”
• Stephen Anderson’s “The Conversation Gets Interesting: Creating the Adaptive Interface” About interfaces that adapt over time based on usage
• Matt Jones’ “All the time in the world” Presentation from the recent Design by Fire conference, with the brilliant observation “what will happen if everything pings you all the time?” (see “Things”)

Where: Mobile

This one is simple: Get an iPhone. Oh, and read Dakota Reese Brown’s “Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience Design”:

1. There is an intimate relationship between a user and their mobile device.
2. Screen size implies a user’s state. The user’s state infers their commitment to what is on the screen.
3. Mobile interfaces are truncated. Other interfaces are not.
4. Design for mobile platforms — the real ones (voice, messaging, internet, apps

Service Design

Yes, Service Design is here. And it’s supposed to be new, even though every book or article you read acknowledges that the service industry (main examples: hotels, restaurants) have been designing their services for ages. So what is new: The inclusion and central placement of the digital channel in modern services that do not require face-to-face contact.

Some books will try to make you believe there is something new (like “Service Design – Designing Services with Innovative Methods” by Satu Miettinen and Mikko Koivisto) but a lot of it should sound very, very familiar for anyone who ever realized that redesigning a website and its FAQ section might have an influence on the types of questions a call centre might get.

For further updates on this field, try and visit the Service Design drinks or talks that are popping up everywhere. Here in The Netherlands, it’s 31volts and STBY that alternate as hosts. Oh, and check out Arne van Oosterom’s design thinkers network WENOVSKI.

As for the visual standards in service design, the Design Management Institute has been around for a while and started to cover designing for interactive services a while ago. Case in point: they co-published “Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value”

Oh, and don’t forget about Service Design’s nephew-with-an-MBA: Design Thinking. This is all about making sure executives are using designers’ tried-and-tested methods to do the creative part of their work. This fall’s “Change by Design” by IDEO’s Tim Brown  might as well be the last book written about his subject.

Optimal Experience Design

And now for the tricky part: Optimal Experience Design. You might say (again) that there’s nothing new here: a good designer always strives for the optimal experience. Usually there are business or technical requirements that will not allow us to create it. But now that business and technology environments are more conductive to design, we might take a stab at it.

Check out the following and see if you can apply the lessons to your next, more optimal design.

Cheating

M.I.T Professor Dan Ariely’s research with people who were told they were wearing “fake” designer sunglasses were found significantly more likely to cheat on tests than ones told they were wearing “real” ones.

Seduction

Christopher Fahey’s “The Three Stages of Seduction” (below)  and his presentation on “Style“.

Persuadability

“Persuadability interiorises rational and emotional needs, the surfer’s momentum, our value proposition and the best of our online marketing strategies into a whole, using real-time measurement to monitor our conversion rates and allowing us to “tweak”, in a process of continuous improvement.”

Emotion

• Good-old Philips Design is involved in both toys for stock brokers and Vibrators (Note of the editor: “sensual massagers”)!
• From a Forrester report, these are the 3 principles for Emotional Experience Design:

1. Address customers’ real goals
2. Develop a coherent personality
3. Engage a mix of sense

And finally, I encourage you to read “We Feel Fine – An Almanac to Human Emotion” with a great quote to finish this blog post:

I have a problem I’m sure many other bloggers face: I am perfectly comfortable sharing intimate details about my emotions with complete strangers I meet online but shy away from expressing my true feelings to anyone I know in real life. (by a woman in Maine, USA)