The Experience Stack
Remember that experience stack? I seem to recall that is what this presentation is about.
The aspects of experience I’ve been talking about can be thought of as a stack of 5 types of experience. From the bottom, there’s experience design as human factors; interaction design; product design; service design, and; branding.
Those dots in the bottom right of the slide represent the stack. I’ve included them on all slides in which there are examples.The highlighted points show which levels of the stack are playing their part.
By thinking about these facets as a single thing (experience) we understand that the people using the products don’t make the division that we make into different types of experience. All aspects of the experience matter to them. All aspects influence the other parts.
So this stack is not reductive. The cognitive aspects are the unconscious atoms of experience, but the higher levels of play, sociality and visual affordance cannot be reduced to atoms. The life-cycle of a product and its brand are still other aspects.
And it’s possible to use a kind of checklist, to make sure aspects aren’t being left out, and that we’re using all aspects to the full.
At the bottom, these aspects are about the thing that’s being designed—how it’s built, how the functionality is organised.
So look at things that are important cognitively and check their use matches your intent: remember that people’s attention naturally follows arrows, so ensure they point to particular places. Use shading appropriately. Don’t use groups of things larger than 4 or 5.
For interaction, look for positive emotions and patterns of behaviour that people enjoy, and use these as models for the behaviours you want to encourage.
The top two seem more about about the person or groups of people using the product.
To consider the service design aspect, look at the product life-cycle and the social life of the product: how do people meet it the first time; what stories can they tell their friends; how do they clean it. These are the experience hooks.
And is the implicature right? if your brand is about sharing, do you share; if you’re hand-holding, do you walk people through problems and have a phone number easily findable.
But the middle aspect: how the product and the person are together in the same room, the same mall, the same workplace… that’s what interests me.
My approach with this is to try to understand what surrounds the person and the product. What is the situation in which they meet, and what forces does it impose on them. Knowing that, maybe we can identify user needs or invent product features. [This is a very geographic approach, but the approach of considering constraints that operate equally on the moment of interaction itself is the key point.]
[The images here are representative of different layers of the stack. The service layer is a picture that represents unboxing, and is used under a CC license. It can be found here.
I’ve also written in more detail about the stack itself on the Pulse Laser blog: The Experience Stack revisited.]