The Experience Stack
To answer that, let’s get back to the original a-b-c.
- People want customisation.
- Products are adapted in simple and deep ways, and the job of the designer is to allow and help with that.
The question is how. What is the designer designing?
Buttons give us a clue: the way a button looks, to tell us it can be pressed. The cognitive feedback in approaching it, in engaging it, and committing it. The feedback communication we receive there about doing the correct thing, and also about the wider system.
It’s not enough to have a house which can be adapted at any of Stewart Brand’s layers—you have to know what you can do, that you’re doing the thing you meant, and that you’ve had the effect you want. experience is what you, a user, rely on.
If somebody does the wrong thing, can’t figure out how to do what they want to do, or don’t realise the feature is there in the first place, then the only reason the functionality is there is to pad out the list in the Argos catalogue. Better to have 10 features that are 100% known about than 50 with 10% knowledge (though better still to have 12 with 80% knowledge and the potential for learning and discussion).
Experience is what we have at our disposal to help. It’s what’s beyond the stuff of a product – be it a physical thing or software – and how it bridges into the human lives of yourself and others.
But it’s also something that happens whether we like it or not. People will have cognitive and social experiences with what we build, directly and contextually. This talk is about some of the different facets of experience I’ve run across.
So here are a couple more illustration of those facet, both about the beginning of relationships. The second is about starting a dialogue with a complex system. The first is about the social context of a product. Let’s see it.