Experience equation
What does an experience constitute of? Why should we design for memories rather than moment to moment experiences? Why should we under-promise?
What do we talk about when we talk about designing for experiences? How is the result of our work assessed by the people who use what we put forward? Is it a moment of purchase? Is it the so-called moment of truth when a customer encounters a problem and recovers from it? Are they touch points? Is it an NPS (Net Promoter Score)? Or perhaps there is a different way to look at what experience is all about.
Experiencing — self and remembering — self
The word: experience has two different meanings for people. There is the: experiencing — self (as Daniel Kahnman calls it) — the part of us that is intimately connected with the present moment perceiving all the sensory inputs in 3-second intervals. I am, for example, hearing the cars passing by my house in a heavy rain, feeling my fingers on the keyboard and experiencing the movement of the air from the open window. I will not remember these momentary impressions in 5 minutes, they will be overwritten by other ones that I am about to experience.
There is also a different meaning of experience that stems from the notion of remembering — self, the part of us that creates stories about what has happened to us. This is the part of us that reflects by the end of the day and recalls what has happened and which puts a judgement call regarding the flavour of these experiences.
The remembering — self is a powerful storyteller, which determines how we assess the events that occur in our lives, including our interactions with numerous companies and brands. This is the part of ourselves that ultimately determines whether we are happy about a given service or product or not.
I have a Siemens dishwasher at home, which my remembering — self hates to the bone. It was a rather expensive model that was supposed to be both energy-saving and quiet. The problem is that it saves so much energy that not enough is left to properly clean the dishes. We constantly use the heavy washing program as it is the one that gets our dishes maybe not to the shining clean but to the acceptable-level clean. And it doesn’t matter today whether the last wash was ok or not. My remembering — self vividly remembers all these times when things went wrong and tells a story of a product that is faulty and overpriced.
A similar story my remembering — self tells about booking.com. My experiencing-self and my remembering-self were both in love with that service for years. Told stories how awesome it was. Until it wasn’t. We got disappointed and decided to keep our cool distance. Today I use booking.com every now and then but the relationship is strictly transactional. If they offer the best price I will take it but I am not faithful to them as I used to be. My remembering-self told a story of booking.com not caring about their clients anymore and this is a story I live by today.
There is also a story told by my remembering-self about AirB&B — an the story is awesome. It tells about a platform that helps people earn money from their properties while offering affordable accommodation for travelers. It tells a story of having unique local experiences with people from a given place, experiences that would be unavailable or extremely hard to find otherwise. It is a story that propels me to use the service over and over again.
Anticipating memories
Our remembering — self is not acting based only on the moment to moment reporting from the experiencing — self though. It sort of decides even before an anything happens, what sort of experience it anticipates. In other words: we humans tend to, often subconsciously, envision what kind of memory we are going to have at the end of a certain experience. If I mention WholeFoods or Amazon, or the airline you are thinking to use to fly for your next holiday break to you, you will immediately imagine what sort of possible interaction you might have with them.
It is impossible for us not to imagine the possible interaction that we will have in the future with a given brand. Even if we have never had experiences with that brand before. Even if we only heard about it from others. Still we do exactly that: envision a possible future experience with it. If there is no information from anybody about a particular brand, we will still do our best to create a story based on contrasting that service with anything that sounds even remotely similar to it.
Experience equation
So, in fact, there is quite a simple equation we as designers might consider thinking about when designing for experiences:
experiencing / expectations = memory of an experience
You might wonder, how these memories of experiences are created? Let me share two examples of hotels I have re4cently booked.
One hotel’s description said: “Situated in xxx, hotel xxx provides a terrace. All rooms boast a flat-screen TV with cable channels and a private bathroom. Both free WiFi and private parking are accessible on site. All rooms in the hotel are fitted with a coffee machine. All units include a desk. A continental breakfast is served each morning at the property.” The description was supported with pictures of a contemporary space giving an impression of a boutique hotel hidden away from the main tourist area.
To our surprise we found ourselves landing at a motel rather than a hotel, with the terrace being practically an entry to the rooms, no breakfast and no dedicated parking place. Imagine the story our remembering-self started immediately creating based on these unmatched expectations. Although the place in itself was not bad, we felt almost cheated and left the first thing in the morning (looking for the breakfast that was never served).
We then ended up is a different place called Flor. We were, actually, considering whether we should choose this place or another as the promise given through the description and the pictures was somewhat too factual. Our expectations were mitigated: we knew that the place will be nice but we have never expected how nice it would turn out. When we entered and saw the space, we were blown away.
During breakfast (which was served as promised:) we asked the owners why they don’t put more representative pictures on the site. Lisa, the owner said: — If we over-promise, people will come and in the best case scenario will see that the place is matching the pictures. In the worst case, they will be disappointed because they imagined more. I’d rather under-promise and over-deliver that the other way around.
In this simple statement she has summarized the quintessence of the experience equation: if we as designers over-promise from the beginning we can only hope to live up to that promise. If we under-promise, we give ourselves the space to exceed expectations and create a memory for the remembering-selves of our customers, that will create the narrative we will be happy to hear.
However, if we look around we can see the opposite attitude. The marketing campaigns flashing at us from every corner, promise more, more and more. It seems that in this battle for attention, we need to lock the client as fast as possible. And often, later on, we have a hard time living up to that promise. Not because we don’t want to but because the anticipated memory is for grandiose experience and we have insufficient resources to make it happen. And this is the moment when customers get disappointed.
I know it is super important to be noticed in our noisy world. But if you had a chance to under-promise on something, something that is a secret power of your project, what would you choose?
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Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.