The Scope of Experience Design
When a dude sitting on the can is cycling through all his ringtones at full volume, I am experiencing his iPhone.
But I am not the user.
While I call myself an experience designer, I take issue with the term “user experience” for precisely this reason. It dishonestly limits the scope your work’s impact, absolving you, the designer, of responsibility for the unintended consequences of your designs. Designed products, whether they be websites or toothbrushes or corporate policies, affect an interconnected ecosystem of people, the majority of which are not actually your user.
Lately, though, I have felt that the title experience designer smacks of hubris, and is not necessarily representative of the work I do on a regular basis. I’ve conducted interviews, I’ve banged out wireframes, I’ve diagrammed affinities, I’ve whiteboarded and sketched and designed my way through sticky interface challenges, and I’ve prototyped software with sticky notes and sharpies.
It’s all great, yes, but it’s work I would call interaction design, not experience design. I’m roughing out interfaces and flows, which is to say I’m building websites or software, once or twice or thrice removed from the actual, you know, process of building. This is awkward for me, because my entire professional career I have been absolutely reliant on my own ability to build, implement and launch every one of my designs.
It’s awkward because it lacks coherence with my professional experience of needing to build what I imagine, but it’s also awkward because it lacks the idealistic scope and influence of what I imagine to be my unique contribution as an experience designer. If I’m not questioning assumptions, defining spaces for meaning-making, and considering the larger context in which a design should (or shouldn’t) exist, then what is my role as an experience designer at all?
Much of the work I am involved in is experience design, such as when I’m charged with imagining the future of “x”, where “x” might be media habits in the U.S. over the next few years, or the future of online personalization. Experience design is not merely hand-waving. It’s also not just fancied-up interaction design.
On many days, experience design may be more aspirational than anything else. Despite that you cannot actually design experiences, I believe experience design has a very special role to play precisely because of its impossible ambition.
Experience designers do not design experience. Visual designers do not design vision, and industrial designers do not design industry. What these professions have in common is that they have explicitly called out a medium in which they design. And while experience itself is not a medium, experience is the outcome of a person’s perception of a design, a design that could take the form of any media.
Perhaps you’ve seen a brochure for a ski resort at a local sporting goods shop. What if you saw the same brochure at an upscale restaurant in your neighborhood? What if you visit the resort’s website? What if you call them to make reservations for an upcoming weekend? What if you reschedule your reservations online? What if you’re on your way there, and you use your iPhone to get directions? Has the parking lot been plowed recently, or is it brimming with a foot of slush? What if you need to rent skis for your kids? What does the rental shop smell like? What if the lift lines are long? What’s it like when you lose your ticket? In your hotel room, can you hear it when your neighbors flush their toilet? How does that contribute to your overall experience?
Just as numerous people beyond a target “user” are impacted by the design of a product, many expected (but mostly unexpected) channels are implicated in the design of an experience. It is certainly within the interaction designer’s role to consider the coherence between the design of the ski resort’s website, its reservation system, its mobile strategy, etc. It is, in addition, the experience designer’s responsibility to consider the extended presence of the resort in the world, including physical materials, the call center, signage at the resort itself, etc.
Further, I would argue it is well within the realm of the experience designer to consider plowing schedules, mildew control, architectural robustness, even plumbing systems, and model how these seemingly disparate things conspire to create the overall experience of the ski resort.
Experience design, then, is not defined by its tangible output, but by a mindset and process that casts a wide net when considering everything that is implicated by a design, and thus what is “on-limits” for redesign, in order to craft a better overall experience for people. And while interaction design makes up a lot of the more pragmatic work we do, this is the sort of stuff that sets our hearts and minds on fire.
I guess what I’m saying is, when you hire experience designers to build your new website, don’t be surprised if they ask about your toilets.
And don’t be surprised if they deliver a snow shovel.
