Time well saved or time well spent?
Are you designing with the engineering or the experiential mind?
Some decades ago, the government of Great Britain thought that it would be a good idea to shorten the time of the train trip from London to Paris under the Channel. The challenge was given to architects and engineers. They run away measuring the strength of materials, calculating the pressures, etc. Finally, they gave a verdict: — Yes, it is possible to shorten the trip by approximately half an hour. It will cost so many billions of British pounds.
Rory Sutherland was sitting in the back silent (I still can’t figure out what he was doing there in the first place:) Once the discussion subsided, he spoke up: — Do you realize that there just might be another way? With such a budget we could hire the most famous models and ask them to walk about serving each and every passenger glasses of champagne for over 200 years. Wouldn’t the passengers prefer it to having half an hour of their time saved?
Whenever I tell this story, the reaction is always the same (almost the same;) — people get dreamy eyes and big smiles on their faces. To me it is an amazing illustration of the difference between time well spent and time well saved (following the Time Progression Model proposed by Joe Pine, the co-author of “The experience economy”).
Time well saved
As designers today (particularly UX designers but also service designers) we are being predominantly asked to focus on designing for time-well-saved . I can almost hear your raised voices asking me: — what about building engagement? Isn’t it designing for time-well-spent? I will stick to my guns though.
Why do I think so? Ultimately, the UX designers are asked to, above all, raise the bar on usability. The solutions coming from under their pencils or their keyboards aim to be clean, intuitive and simple. The users are not supposed to spent time figuring out how to pay a bill, buy and insurance or choose a mobile phone. They want such information to be delivered on a silver platter. And rightly so — with the growth of the information overload and the terror of choice, most of the things should get easier not more difficult. I don’t think that any of us wants to dedicate our life to the banking service, right?
Yet, the companies who run such businesses, sometimes seem to think that we really have more time on our hands that we know what to do with and they start talking about engagement. They get us, as designers, to come up with forever new ways to keep the customers’ attention on one’s business. I remember working for a company (many years ago) that was designing printing equipment. When you spend your days working of printing interfaces, printing applications, printing materials somehow you fall into a trap of thinking that printing is as important to all the other people in the world as it is to you. Yet, people don’t care about it. They want their printout in the best possible quality and they want to go along with their lives. Wouldn’t you?
Time well spent
There is, however, a bunch of businesses that operate in the realm of time-well-spent. There are some straightforward examples: tourism and horeca business, conference business, entertainment. There is plenty of space there to design experiences that could have the potential to stay with their users forever. Yet, in so many of these businesses, we as designers seem to be expected to follow the rules of designing for time-well-saved. Things need to stay efficient. No space for models with glasses of champagne. Why is it so?
A small bunch of companies figured out that perhaps there is another way. The iconic examples are, of course, Disney and Lego, but there is plenty more. Have you ever heard about an American fast food Chick-Fil-A that organizes once a year father-daughter night out? Or about Umpqua Bank that opened up their stores to hold business meetings for their clients and also authorship evenings or theatrical performances (all for for free)? Or a British site Horrible Histories that aims to engage (yes, engage) kids to make sense out of history program at school? These companies figured out a way to move from time-well-saved to time-well-spent.
Which one to choose then?
In so many aspects majority of the businesses around the world are in the time-saving business. Which is great, because they help us to be efficient with the mundane aspects of our lives. I strongly believe that pushing engagement at all costs is not a very ethical way to go. Neither it is a long-term exercise in building loyalty. Why?
The same way we managed to develop banner-blindness to get ourselves immune to the flood of online advertisement, I am quite sure that with time we will form mechanisms keeping us away from spending time on social interactions with our banks, telecom providers, doctors or insurance companies. Because we will figure out that these interactions are not about us. They are about them.
Yet, there are other ways to combine designing for time-well-saved while also building value for time-well-spent. Not through Facebook likes or selfies. But by offering value to the customers. Genuine value stemming from the need to do something for them rather than for the business. Is Umpqua Bank doing what they do for the profit? I am sure in the end profit is important. But not as a goal but more as a measure of success. Yet, what they claim is that they are in the community-building business and banking is just their tool. Similarly says Zappos, claiming that they are in the customer experience business and selling shoes is what they do to earn money to do what they love to do, which is making their customers happy. Sure, it is not always 100% true but the consistency of their words and actions makes it easy to believe that such declaration come from the place of values not from the bag of marketing tricks.
As for us as designers, it might be worthwhile to answer to ourselves as we sit to our design process: which kind of time am I designing for? Time well saved or well spent? Neither is good or bad as long and we see that we bring value through solutions we put forward. And if we design for engagement perhaps we should consider: — Is it the best way the people who will use my creation can spend their time? Can I bring more meaning to them? Meaning that will form memories they will want to return to? Like a visit in Disneyland?
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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.
