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Three strands of good experience
I recently wrote about the integrated experience, talking about the multiple factors that often comprise good experience, and now I take the next step by describing what exactly those factors are.
While it would make good business-book fodder to have just two axes, which would allow the two-by-two matrix favored by consultants who write business books, there really are three strands of good experience, as I see it: aesthetics, meaning, and efficiency.
To clarify:
1. Aesthetics encompasses the artistic side of life; the entertaining, pleasurable, or glamorous. A visual and aural spectacle like Cirque du Soleil, for example, is an experience that relies heavily on aesthetics.
2. Meaning is no easy topic to summarize in 50 words, especially since people find it in different places. Many people attach primary importance to their family, their spiritual discipline, or some other significant activity or community. (Of course, aesthetics often plays a big part in creating meaning.)
3. Efficiency: Also known as usefulness, effectiveness, or practicality. Many popular websites are good examples of this strand: if they quickly and easily deliver an answer, or help you complete a task, you consider it a good experience. Well-run hospitals, banks, and airlines could be other examples of good "efficient experiences".
While these strands often come together to "gel" an experience, making it hard to separate where one ends and another begins, I would argue that they are in fact separate factors. To underline this point, here's a thought experiment:
Consider what happens when organizations, communities, or individuals pursue each of these factors to the near-exclusion of the other two.
• To see "aesthetics at all costs", walk down the Strip, the main street in Las Vegas lined with spectacular hotel facades. Or watch a Hollywood blockbuster action movie, which may bring to mind the "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." It's entertainment with something missing.
• Walk inside a Las Vegas casino, and you'll see efficiency in full swing: lights, sound, floor layout, and "game" design all calibrated to the tiniest detail, intended to elicit the maximum number of dollars per hour from every visitor. Don't look for anything meaningful here, though.
• Keep walking, outside the casino, outside Las Vegas, and into the desert, and you may come across a monastery where ascetics attempt to realize ultimate meaning by stripping away any and all other factors. All major religions include the ritual of fasting, or some discipline of material denial, for the same purpose.
Of course, these are just outstanding examples intended to provoke and make a point. In practice, the three strands of aesthetics, meaning and efficiency are usually woven together in varying degrees - sometimes dominant, sometimes supporting, sometimes creating paradox - to make up an experience.
And in many cases, when one strand is more appropriate to the situation, the "good experience" must rely heavily on it. For example, a well-run bank, airline, or hospital must primarily be efficient. Other factors are only important, secondarily, once the primary factor is fully guaranteed.
As a counterexample, consider one of the major banks here in New York: this bank has cute, aesthetically pleasing advertisements that promise benefits in my family relationships and other meaningful areas. But according to some customers, the bank is inefficient, bureaucratic, and irritating, even in the simplest of transactions. The bank invested in exactly the wrong areas - aesthetics and meaning - and, missing its primary opportunity, created a bad experience and thereby harmed the company's prospects.
This framework - or part of it, anyway - isn't new. The first two strands go all the way back to conversations in ancient Greece, and the third is only recently more important to everyday experience. Perhaps we could call it "truth, beauty, and Google": our modern experiences are often shaped by two very old ideas, and a new one - instant efficiency - which we've come to know and demand from the Web and the rise of digital culture.
I look forward to reading your reactions.
For more reading...
The overdetermined experience (Good Experience - Nov. 2, 2005):
http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000377.php
See those bank ads here (including "Hugs are on a 52-week high"):
http://www.citi.com/citigroup/showcase/liverichly.htm
Slate's review of the ads:
http://www.slate.com/id/2068683/
TIB/37signals on the bank's inefficient experience:
http://www.thisisbroken.com/b/2005/11/citibank_accoun.html
If you really want to explore truth, beauty, and paradox, dive in here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein05/goldstein05_index.html
sounds like a slightly different take on Vitruvius's three elements of great architecture (the building kind, not the software kind). He talked about firmness (it has to stand up), commodity (utility of purpose), and delight (beauty).
Nice.
And from the Greeks to the Hebrews:
"Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. But, a cord of three strands is not quickly broken." - Solomon, Ecclesiates, 4:11-13.
How about "aesthetics", "CONNECTION" and "efficiency"? As you indicated, meaning is fluid from individual to individual. What every person is seeking (besides beauty and efficiency) is connection with others.
Brands that connect with their users do so by creating long-term committments on both sides of the exchange.
Hey . . . wait a second.
I messed up. Vitruvius was Roman, wasn't he?
Mark,
This piece should really hit home for those people who know that they need to invest in improving their experience, but don't know what to invest in or how. Success in developing experiences truly lies in the orchestrating of many small details. Well done.
Mike
Hi Mark:
Nicely stated. Our substance must match our appearance for customer delight to take place. And of those two, the substance is more important.
Two axes would only be helpful if you intended to turn business books *into* fodder (and there are a few I wouldn't mind hacking up). Axis, two or three, might be more useful to the normal, stable executive without an axe to grind.
Your crisp paradigm of truth, beauty, and Google could be a helpful shorthand for kicking off a strategic or requirements conversation with a client. It might get the stakeholder into a more interesting discussion without prematurely placing a value judgment on any one of the three strands.
How true and how timely. Just recently I dealt with a national women's clothing chain - let's call it HotMilk River for anonimity's sake. THey have beautiful women's clothing, the type that makes one feel gorgeous just to put it on. The best part is that their prices are reasonable.
Sounds like a winner so far. Now the losing thread - I made an online order and had problem after problem after problem that resulted in an $89 jacket costing me close to $150.
In final frustration, I sent them an email detailing all the frustrations and problems. What I received in reply was a statement of how they did everything the way they always did it and I could send the jacket back if I wanted to!
Hear me, oh customer service gods. All I wanted was for my frustration to be heard, acknowledged, and recognized. I like the jacket - I'm keeping it. On the other hand, I have written off this company as an online retailer. All because they could not recognize when they have a frustrated customer who wants to stay a customer. Thread was doing well until it broke at customer service. Let me remember this lesson for my own business.
I love the inclusion of meaning - and like Matt pointed out I immediately thought of Vitruvius's Ten books.
But I'm not sure how this framework helps any better than similiar ones. The Vegas example is apt, but the reasons for it are telling: it worked. They don't spend millions on neon lights out of a (however misguided) sense of aesthetics, it's out of a sense of profits.
So the inevitable trap is how a business can rationalize the customer's meaning of a thing with their own meanings. These leads down a path to integrity and the argument that it's difficult to have a good experience without involving people with integrity.
The use of the word meaning is also slippery in the pedastrian kinds of design most of us are involved in. What does meaning mean if I'm designing toaster ovens or light switches? I doubt I'd choose meaning as 33% of a general purpose framework for most experiences most of us are hired to design. If we're talking about parties, homes, temples and lives, I'd love to include meaning, but for web, kiosk and software designers it's too philosophical a bucket to be of much use.
Nicely put, Mark.
I like Rob Purdie's restatement of "meaning" to "connection" because it also answers Scott Burkun's point about how much usability is involved in pedestrian design. One may be hard-pressed to see how "meaning" is involved in toaster ovens, but "connection" - maybe it reminds you of something comforting in your childhood (e.g. retro styling) or a place you admire (e.g. Eurostyling).
A few tweaks and you may be ready for that new 3-axis textbook!
Mark, ok - efficiency, meaning, but how do you assess "aesthetics"? - This is the teacher in me asking.
I still like the older version of this from the dot.com period (there were after all good things that happened in that period too) :
Utility - What the thing does
Usability - How easy it is to get to the utility
Pleasurability - How it makes you feel
Each is difficult to measure, and this makes me think it as much as skill as a formula. Thats what design is all about, isnt it, trying to get all three to align in the right proportions?
the article is a pleasure to read, but the problem is the same as always.
The big reason why people don't "get it" (eg, banks have nice posters but their customers hate them) is there is no money in retail banking. They can't afford to hire bright people who care, so they get dullards who can show up and follow a process.
Here in the US, people don't tend to change bank, phone company, energy company. Oh look, these are classically the ones that have horrible service.
Move to another bank (and keep moving until you find the one that you don't hate) and you create the financial incentive for the company to improve. We all complain that the company is too lazy to make the customer experience rewarding. But most of us, the customers, are too lazy exercise the power in our dollars.
If you hate the service, return the jacket or open an account at a different bank, and tell them why you did it.