Three spaces of experience design
Are you designing for saving time, spending or investing it?
The average human life span today is approximately 72 years. That constitutes of 864 months, 26,297 days, 631,139 hours and 37,868,342 minutes. This time is the most powerful resource we, as designers, have on our hands. Because when you get to the bottom of what design is all about, it is about helping people fill up their time.
Wasting time by design (or lack thereof)
The worst thing that can happen is to waste that time. Unfortunately, many companies seem not to pay enough attention to that aspect. They offer solutions that make people burn hours doing things that serve a selfish organizational stand point.
Governments seem to excel in such an approach. For example, a letter from the Social Security Office stating that you forgot to pay your social security insurance is three pages long, full of legislative jargon and illegible for a layman. You need to spend at least an hour trying to understand what it says and then another one trying to figure out how to resolve it. In the end, all it asks is to pay the delayed amount with interest. If it was written in a simple form, you would have spent 10 minutes on it — paid the money and go on with your life. But somehow the government designed it in a way to made you lose 120 minutes on it.
Such an approach is not exclusive to public organizations. Many companies, perhaps unintentionally, cause their customers to waste time. If you, for example, try to send a package from Poland to Mexico, you will find yourself in the horns of dilemma. For no particular reason majority of delivery companies decided to restrict the number of symbols you can put into the address field. And, unfortunately, the Mexican addresses are surprisingly long. So, as a customer you go from one website to another trying to find the one that allows you to enter the full address. It is not only a waste of your time, it is also a waste of business for the company.
I believe that most solutions that waste our time were, in fact, never truly designed. Often, it is a propagation of something created a long time ago or non-reflexively copied from the competition. As it was never truly thought through, it has pretty high chances to waste time of everybody involved.
Saving time
Our lives today get seriously complex and having as much help to reduce this complexity is more than welcome. Banks, insurances, telecoms and most of other big businesses of this world are in the center of saving-time design space. They should be out there to support us in dealing with the mundane tasks as smoothly and speedily as possible.
The need for saving time becomes strongly visible when you design for user groups that truly lack that resource: doctors, architects, etc. They are brutally honest about the value they are seeking in solutions offered to them: — Let me do my job in the best possible way and don’t bother me with anything that I don’t need to be bothered with. Although not as elaborately expressed many of us would say something in the similar vein to many service providers we interact with.
This particular design space seems to be the biggest because as our lives get busier and busier, there is an ever increasing need to simplify the daily tasks that help us focus on the things we truly want to spend our time on. It is our pragmatic need to manage our schedule in the most efficient manner. Some designers might think that such jobs are less worthy that other design challenges. I believe the opposite: having the challenge of helping people have more time at their disposal is like paving a road for your lives to fluidly go on. The value of saving time is measurable and objective — it frees up our lives to do things we would prefer to be busy with. It’s a pretty amazing way to help, isn’t it?
Spending time
Once time is freed for people to do things they like, another design space opens up: designing for spending time. The question appears though: what does it mean to spend time (and spend it well)? As designers we move from the realm of objectivity to the world of subjective perceptions. My idea of spending time can (and for sure it) different from yours. Some of us like to be relaxing, others want to be active. Some prefer socializing, others would rather be solitary. The list is endless. And that is good.
If a designer is able to detect a need that perpetuates a certain group of customers, she is there for a win. Exhibitions, musea, theaters, cinema, any sorts of entertainment, travel, horeca — all offer various opportunities. One of my personal favorites is The Museum of Pop Culture where you can spend a day trying out music, feeling like a rock star or making choices as if you were a crew member of Battle Star Galactica.
The ultimate challenge for such an experience is to make it truly memorable. To make people close their eyes and be able to recall the emotions they were experiencing while being at the location. After a year. And two. And a decade. These memories will vary from one person to another. But the level of vividness could remain similar. Building such memories is something people are keen to dedicate their time for.
Such a design space offers a designer an opportunity to express her interests and values. When designing for spending time, designers have space to shine with their creativity. Which is both an opportunity and responsibility. Because spending time doesn’t always mean spending time well. It can as easily become a hidden way of wasting it.
Investing time
A tiny design space remains for designing transformative experiences. Experiences that aim to cause change. That encourage you to question status quo. Experiences that leave the participant a different person. That are like hero journeys. Adventures. Bringing the unexpected to the front stage. Such a design space is not small because people do not have the need to change. But because true change rarely happens. People need to be ready for it: join in with open mind and open heart. Such an experience is not a “push” activity. It is a “pull” action.
Take the AltMBA workshop by Seth Godin as an example. Not everybody is ready to dedicate an entire month of their lives to learn how to take decisions and dance with fear. In order to be willing to do so, you need to be at a specific moment of your life and really look for such a training.
Another example is The College of Extraordinary Experiences. In order to participate in this unique conference, you need to set aside an entire week, travel to the remote corner of Poland and choose to live in a 13th century castle. Will it change your perspective on experience design? I am sure it will. But only when you are willing to embrace the unique setup proposed over there.
It remains a question whether transformative experiences are a unique exemplification of designing for time well spent or are they a separate category. Such a design space seems to border between design and art. It allows to go deep into your dreams and make them reality. But such projects come with an enormous responsibility. Setting out to transform people’s minds and lives is not trivial. And it could be easily abused.
Designing for happiness
Aristotle said that there is nothing more important for people than to pursue happiness. He differentiated among four types of happiness:
— Laetus: sensual gratification from material objects.
— Felix: ego gratification from being better, more admired than others.
— Beatitudo: happiness from doing good for others and making the world a better place.
— Sublime Beatitudo: happiness stemming from a connection to the universe or a kind of transcendence.
Perhaps, when designing for time-well-spent a happiness framework could be applied. I can imagine that the first two types of happiness stem from just having good time while the latter two might more likely originate from living though transformative moments. Thus, if a designer sets up to create something for spending time, it might be worthwhile to ask: in what way am I helping people to feel happy? Am I creating good memories or am I altering the way people think and act?
________________________________________________________________
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.
