The April issue of UXmatters magazine is out and Dirk Knemeyer has written an article titled “Defining Experience: Clarity Amidst the Jargon“.

The word experience has gained significant traction over the past 15 years. Beginning with the mainstreaming of the term user experience in the software industry and, later, extended to the work of marketing professionals who began thinking about marketing as being experiential, the idea of experience as a focused professional area of endeavor is alive, well, and growing rapidly. However, the more our space grows, the more confused and chaotic is our collective understanding of the meaning of these terms. To try to help clarify this murkiness, I want to share my definitional model for the fields of experience and provide guidelines for the use of various terms.

This is an important step forward towards better definitions of the various terms in the field of designing experiences. After reading the article you will realize that one term is missing: customer experience. Since my blog is titled “The Customer Experience Labs” I feel obliged to add a definition for this term.

Customer Experience refers to all touchpoints people have from the moment they are aware of a need until they have fulfilled the need or reached a certain goal. While Brand Experience offers an “inside-out” perspective with a scope that is defined through the organization’s boundaries, Customer Experience takes an “outside-in” perspective and recognizes that there are more actors (organizations) involved when a customer is striving to reach a certain outcome.

One example:

Imagine you are planing your next flight and you will realize that there are more than a few different actors involved. You might have booked your ticket on a travel website like Expedia (Actor #1). You will have to arrive by train, bus or taxi (Actor #2). After arriving at the airport you have to find your check-in counter, check-in and kill time in one of the restaurants, bars or shops at the airport (Actor #3). When boarding the plane you have the first interaction with the airline (Actor #4) and after landing you interact with the destination airport (Actor #5) and public transportation to reach your destination (Actor #6).

All these interactions with different actors influence the Customer Experience. Organizations that adopt the customer’s point of view and look beyond the current organizational boundaries are able to create truly remarkable experiences. All these independent organizations can optimize their Brand Experience, but only by understanding the overall context in which customers are interacting them, an organization can become an “synchronized” actor in the system and remarkable Customer Experiences can be created.

Is it different from User Experience? Yes, since it is not just one specific design but all the experiences that a user (or customer) has in order to fulfill a need.

Is it different from Brand Experience? Yes, since it is and “outside-in” perspective from the customer’s point of view.

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Prof. Chriss Voss and Leonieke Zomerdijk are the authors of this publication from London Business School. The report is based on around 100 case studies of well-known (experiential) service companies (i.e. Virgin Atlantic, Disney World, Royal Caribbean) that have been collected over a period of four years.

The study focuses on the special characteristics of services and especially experiential services. In this context, the “customer journey” is the common perspective or metaphor shared by design and consultancy firms and experiential service providers.

In order to design new services they divide the service into five areas that directly or indirectly contribute to a customer’s experience. These areas are (1) physical environment, (2) service employees, (3) service delivery process, (4) fellow customers and (5) back office support. These areas are outlined shortly.

Chapter 3 “The Process of Innovation” is particularly interesting because methods, tools and other common practices like simulation, prototyping and experimentation are introduced. This chapter gives some good ideas for practitioners where to start to develop new and innovative services.

The report is completed with a summary of some other observations in the case studies, namely business model innovation, the role of competition as a driver of innovation and how experiential service innovations were protected from copying by competitors.

All in all a well-grounded report that provides a good overview over most important areas of experiential service design.

The full report can be downloaded here.

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Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing”, talks about the increasing trend to see products and services being combined in a way that focuses on the customer’s experience when using the product/service bundle. In his article titled “On the ground running: Lessons from experience design” he explains some of the underlying design principles of some well-known products.

Starting with the positive example of the iPod/iTunes bundle he dives into the challenges of designing end-to-end experiences when one company is not in control of the whole experience. IDEO’s approach to redesigning Amtrak’s Acela Express not just by looking at the train interior but by designing the overall travel experience is mentioned but also the challenges of keeping the experience “alive” are portrayed.

He concludes with:

If absolutely top-shelf design organizations like IDEO and Apple are unable to fully encompass the challenges of everyday life in the real world, how will the rest of us fair? Isn’t it better, then, to open these systems up—to provide the APIs and other hooks that would allow people to configure them to their own liking?

This goes beyond William Gibson’s oft-quoted and unimpeachably correct observation that “the street finds its own uses for things,” toward the recognition that designers cannot, even in principle, encompass at design time the full range of uses to which their work will be put. In some respects, too, this is what human-computer interaction guru Don Norman is alluding to, when he argues that the person formerly known to experience design as the “user,” “customer,” or “consumer”; needs to be understood as a human being before designers can do their work properly. Any other approach, he reasons, risks treating this person as an instrumental component, not as someone capable of fully participatory co-creation.

You can read the full article here.

Why do I blog this? Reading articles like this shows me that I am right on track with my research activities to develop a method to understand and model consumers and to use this information for the development of new services.

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