Experience Design

A Framework for Integrating Brand, Experience, and Value

Kevin Farnham, Patrick Newbery

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118609637
• eBook ISBN: 9781118728390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Bridge the gap between business and design to improve the customer experience

Businesses thrive when they can engage customers. And, while many companies understand that design is a powerful tool for engagement, they do not have the vocabulary, tools, and processes that are required to enable design to make a difference. Experience Design bridges the gap between business and design, explaining how the quality of customer experience is the key to unlocking greater engagement and higher customer lifetime value. The book teaches businesses how to think about design as a process, and how this process can be used to create a better quality of experience across the entire customer journey.

Experience Design also serves as a reference tool for both designers and business leaders to help teams collaborate more effectively and to help keep focus on the quality of the experiences that are put in front of customers.

• Explains how to use experience-centric design for better customer engagement
• Offers a framework for thinking and talking about "experience design, " from a company and customer perspective
• Authors Patrick Newbery and Kevin Farnham are the Chief Strategy Officer and CEO of Method respectively, an experiencedesigncompany that solves business challenges through designto create integrated brand, product, and service experiences

Improve the quality of the experiences customers have with your company and watch engagement soar.

Section I

Context

The execution of an action by no means proves that we know, even superficially, what we are doing or how we are doing it.

If we attempt to carry out an action with awareness—that is, to follow it in detail—we soon discover that even the simplest and most common of actions, such as getting up from a chair, is a mystery, and that we have no idea at all how it is done.

—Moshé Feldenkrais1

Moshé Feldenkrais was a Ukrainian-born, French-educated physicist who helped the British improve sonar during World War II and later developed an approach to physical therapy that he practiced after moving to Tel Aviv in 1954. Feldenkrais therapy is a form of physical therapy that begins with raising self-awareness in how movement is occurring and then using this awareness and a gentle guiding of new ways of moving to overcome physical problems. Modern understanding of the relationship between the brain and the body acknowledges that the body is capable of much movement, completely independent of conscious thought or even any awareness of what is actually going on. To some degree, there may even be aspects of movement that are hardwired outside of the “thinking” brain.

Before any change can begin, there needs to be an awareness of a current state from which one is changing. A lot of what we see as customer experience, and how business approaches it, seems to be based on a response that is largely going through the motions. It’s something that everyone does, and often you simply improve what you did before or look around and see what others are doing and adopt aspects of it. The nature of the relationship between business and design that this creates also seems to occur without a real awareness of what’s actually going on. Much of our thinking about experience design is based on the belief in the appropriateness (and necessity) of asking, “Why?” Why do we do things the way that we do?

There’s a story we heard about a behavioral study in which five monkeys were put in a room with a banana hanging from the ceiling by a string. The only other thing in the room was a chair, which was high enough that a monkey standing on the chair could reach the banana. There was also a way for the observing team to spray the monkeys with ice-cold water if they tried to stand on the chair to reach the banana.

A short time after the monkeys had been trying to get the banana and after all had been uncomfortably soaked, the monkeys started to get wise. They stopped climbing on the chair. The researchers would then remove one of the monkeys and bring a new one in. Whenever the new member would try to go for the banana, the others would prevent it from getting on the chair. After a period of rotations, all of the monkeys who were in the first round had been replaced, yet the remaining monkeys would prevent any newly introduced monkey from climbing on the chair, even though none had firsthand experience of being sprayed with the cold water.

This story is based on a real research experiment, although the way the experiment was conducted was slightly different and the results weren’t quite as dramatic as the version of the story we heard led us to believe. But when we first heard the story, it was easy to laugh with a sense of recognition and acknowledgment—we have all seen analogies of this kind of behavior in people (including ourselves). We sometimes ask clients why they believe a particular line of thinking is appropriate to follow and how they know that the situation they’re in is the same as the one in which the original thinking was applied. Often, they can’t really answer (in most cases they recognize the fallacy of assuming that it does).

The purpose of this section is to provide some context around the influences that informed our approach to experience design, followed by the basic components of experience design itself. This background will help bring meaning to the frameworks and tools in Section II, which will help ground your efforts as you begin to experiment with integrating brand, experience, value, and changing the way that business and design collaborate within a given situation. By providing a solid understanding of how we arrived at our approach, we aim to make these frameworks and tools both accessible and effective to use.

Note

1 As quoted by Frank Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), Kindle edition.

Chapter 1

Thinking about Design

Dogs flew spaceships!

The Aztecs invented the vacation!

Men and women are the same sex!

Our forefathers took drugs!

Your brain is not the boss!

Yes! That’s right!

Everything you know is wrong!

—The Firesign Theatre, Everything You Know Is Wrong (1974)1

Samuel Arbesman believes that over the course of a lifetime, much of what one knows will lose relevance. It will either be shown to be incorrect, or it simply won’t have any purpose, as the overall context will change so much that many “facts” will essentially become useless. In the fascinating book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, he describes a kind of myopia that affects our understanding of knowledge and the world we live in. He calls this condition shifting baseline syndrome and describes it as follows2:

This condition . . . shifting baseline syndrome . . . refers to how we become used to whatever state of affairs is true when we are born, or when we first look at a situation.

His point is that it’s easy to take the ways things are for granted. We assume they have always been this way and will likely remain that way in the future. This can fool us into believing that there is some objective logic or rationale for why things are the way they are and that we can reliably build on that interpretation. A healthy counterview to shifting baseline syndrome is that the world is in constant flux and probably a lot less linear and serial than we think. What exists today is circumstantial, driven by influences we may not see, and therefore should not be assumed as being the right, or only, way to look at things.

What does shifting baseline syndrome have to do with design? One of the hallmarks of the designer mind-set is a natural curiosity about why things are the way they are. Which assumptions should be explored because they might be more limiting than beneficial? What emerging information and practices can be acquired and used to expand our understanding of how the designs of tomorrow will be different from those of today? This should be relevant to business as well because design helps create the value that businesses bring to their customers.

For our purposes, the important point is that things have not always been as they are today, and the current relationship between business and design is stuck in the past. It doesn’t necessarily represent the best approach moving forward.

Kjetil Fallan is a faculty member at University of Oslo, in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas. In Design History: Understanding Theory and Method, he makes the point that the current state of design may not be an optimized one3:

Although the world never was as simple and neatly defined as it might appear in retrospect, there can be little doubt that the massive changes in industrial structures, manufacturing technologies, market organization, consumer behaviors, communication technologies, visualization techniques and so on over the past few decades are of vast importance for the restructuring of design practice.

We agree. Certainly the rate of change of nearly everything over the past few decades has accelerated greatly. The kinds of work and the nature of the problems that designers work on have shifted as a result. We find it useful to look further back than the past few decades to understand what has led up to the situation today and why this recent increase in the frequency of change is so important for what business and design do together in the future.

Over the past few centuries there’s been a transition in the objectives of design and who provides it. In fact, an entire field is devoted to design history. We’re not going to review the theories and approaches here. It’s a worthwhile subject we recommend perusing sometime, and it’s certainly relevant to the practice of design analysis. But we couldn’t do it justice and still focus on more relevant issues, such as the future of how business and design work together, in a single volume. That said, a little perspective is useful, especially for those who are less familiar with design.

But before we look back, we should make sure that we all have the same view of what we mean when we say design. To have a meaningful discussion of how business and design should be looking at each other’s worlds and working together, we need a common understanding of design and the role it plays to realize that what we take for granted about design has not always been the case.

As we consider design and what is changing in the role that design plays in business and everyday life, we will also point out the emerging importance of time. With the increased rate of change in technology today, products have increasingly shorter life spans. Services deliver time-based value, and that value must be evident to people to make them feel like they should continue to pay for it. Likewise, businesses look to translate their brand values into lasting relationships with customers that not only allow a business to exist, but with luck, allow it to grow. In fact, we see the role that time plays in design as being a large component of experience design. The benefit is that a deeper consideration of time across multiple interconnected areas of a business and customer relationship allows for better leverage of systemic qualities that design can provide and the ability to plan for options without the cost of fully committing to them—all with one common objective: keeping the customer engaged by providing value.

The Duality of Design

Look at this book—the texture and size of the pages, the words on the page, the diagrams, and the cover art (or the e-book reader you are holding and the way that it allows you to flip “pages” and change the size of the type to better suit your eyesight). Every aspect of what you see was designed. Now look around the room you’re in (or the vehicle, if you are travelling). Consider how many discrete objects there are and how many people and how much time was involved in creating them. We live in a designed world, yet we rarely think about it.

Some believe that design is responsible merely for why things look the way they do. Every human-made object we encounter in our lives has an appearance, and at some point in the process of creating it, someone made a decision—intentionally or not—that would affect how it would look. Most of us are familiar with (and may actually use) the phrase form follows function. Even many things that we think of as being in their “natural” state have been visually altered to look the way they do, and in many cases, this is highly intentional (for instance, when we see meat, sugar, rice, leather, landscapes, and people, we take it for granted that they are always in their natural state, but they aren’t; perhaps we should be slightly uncomfortable in the way the form/function model gets applied these days). It’s pretty easy for us to form an intuitive sense about what design is, based on the fact that we can see it all around us. Even so, we can forget that everything is designed, not just designer furniture and fashion clothing. With so many examples like these, it’s easy to think that design as it relates to appearance is what determines the cost of things, especially because the most expensive things seem to have very conspicuous designs. We are delighted when we find a more ordinary object—a tea kettle, an iron, a broom—that strikes us as “designed” but is very affordable, perhaps not much more expensive than other “nondesigned” variations of the same product. Many businesses have become successful by realizing this and providing affordable design.

This role of arbiter of appearances is an important one for design to play for a very simple reason: We are visual animals. Sight is the predominant way that we relate to the world around us. We may be attracted by a wonderful smell, but we would rarely eat anything without first looking at it. When we hear something, we look to see where the noise is coming from to understand the significance of the noise—should we investigate, ignore, or run like hell?

Although we develop the sense of hearing very early in development, we see well before we can use or understand language. We may first learn of many things through words, written and spoken, but it’s all the more real when we see whatever it is for the first time. For humans, seeing is believing. And our natural cognitive reaction to seeing something is to focus on the object to derive meaning from what we see.

So attributing the reasons that things look the way that they do to design is useful. Certainly one role of design is to make objects have more value within their context of use (this includes functional, financial, cultural, and social contexts). But it’s not the full picture. It suggests that design is a final step; a wrapper, or a container, or the presentation. In this position, design occurs toward the end stages of the process of planning and making objects. This is only half the story. Design is not just a noun; design is also a verb—a process. It is the thinking and the actions that go into producing the final design. A good way to understand the importance of this noun/verb connection is through procedural description, so here’s a scenario:

Imagine you are housesitting for a friend who has a small woodshop in his basement. He...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Section I: Context
• Section II: Frameworks and Tools
• Section III: Moving Forward
• Final Thoughts
• Acknowledgments
• Index