by Kate O'Neill
What do I mean by “human experience” and human experience design? I think human experience is the natural successor to the narrower ideas of customer experience, user experience, patient experience, etc.—all of which point to a common need to understand, with equal parts empathy and strategic business-savvy, a person’s ideal path in interacting with a company, brand, product, or service.
Even the concept of service design, while more closely aligned with the principles of being holistic, comprehensive, and integrated, is still slightly askew because the nomenclature subtly suggests a company-centric orientation. Company-centrism isn’t hard to find; it’s all throughout corporate culture and our work processes. If we want to be customer-centric, we have to risk overshooting ever so slightly. So let’s say we’re designing for human experience, making sure our business objectives—the experiences of our service or brand—mesh with what will be meaningful for the humans with whom we want to interact.
Within this book I present a framework for what a meaningful experience is—especially the experience of a place or space—so that human experience can be designed to be meaningful, with intention. When I’m describing concepts at this framework level, I’ll call it Integrated Human Experience Design.
What to expect from this book
We have a lot to cover.
Throughout this book, I will examine the lessons for human experience designers on either side of the blurry divide. Since a great deal of the ground we’ll cover relies on a shared understanding of abstractions, I’ll define and explore the breadth and depth of concepts like experience, place, and meaning, to clarify what we’re trying to build.
We’ll visit the notion of placemaking, and how architects, city planners, and designers work to create a sense of culture, identity, and belonging in a building or urban development. We’ll explore ideas about the cultivation of place, whether it’s a city, a store, a college, a venue, or even a place that’s as conceptual as it is real, like Wall Street, Music Row, or Hollywood.
We’ll look closely at metaphor, and how much of the language we use in describing digital experience has been informed by physical phenomena, as well as the endless dimensions of meaning and associations these metaphors carry, especially in connected experiences.
For history and context, we’ll look at some of the trends that brought us to this point, as well as at some of the possibilities the future may hold.
We’ll even examine some of the elements that are common to the successful and meaningful design of integrated human experiences to give you tools and thought-starters about how to approach your projects.
Finally, we’ll explore some of the patterns and practices of experience creation in physical and digital space across industries and disciplines, and discover how all of us—architects, designers, and strategists of landscape and information, retailers, restaurateurs, and more—can learn from each other.
The Opportunity
We all know elaborate scenarios from science fiction, where physical surroundings adapt themselves in our presence based on our data. Yet the reality isn’t far off. Making some of these stories into reality is just a matter of integrating the data points.
The data points aren’t easy to integrate, though, sometimes by design. We don’t necessarily want the details of our life as a patient to cross over into the details of our life as a shopper or a traveler or a diner or a homeowner, and so on. Yet the conveniences some crossover could offer us are fairly undeniable.
Many of us make the choice to give up our personal information in exchange for convenience, or access to something interesting. The bargain we make is: “As long as you keep my data safe, you can have it; and you can make me offers that may entice me to spend my money on you, thus paying off whatever value you initially gave me.” That’s been at the heart of both the “freemium” model (previously known as the “shareware” model) and the free trial model (or, as some call it, the drug pusher’s model where the “first one’s free”) for quite some time.
What’s changing is that every service is collecting its own set of rich data. Some of it becomes publicly available, such as the data “firehose” (note the metaphor borrowed from the physical world) of tweets on Twitter, or the check-ins firehose on Foursquare. This data can be harvested, mined, cross-referenced, and targeted back to us with location awareness; and while the possibilities are exciting, they also can be terrifying for people. At the very least, it can be off-putting when a company reveals the source of their data too overtly.
We all spend our lives in roles—as employees, as consumers, as users, as patients, as students—and we know there are disconnects between them. That’s what’s happening here: There’s a disconnect between the data we’re giving up, and the opportunities we’re not being given in exchange. There’s a disconnect between what we think could be happening to make our lives easier and more fulfilled, and what mostly isn’t happening.
Then there’s the physical realm in which we live and move, and the digital realm in which we spend time, energy, and money—and there are arbitrary gaps between them. Within these gaps are opportunities for meaningful interaction that haven’t been developed yet. (There are also opportunities to overreach people’s trust and comfort levels, but we’ll get into that as we go.)
I work with enough large, well-established companies to know that few have this figured out. In my consulting work with top retail and food brands and with leading universities, I see every client struggling to put the pieces in place, to make sense of the data they’re collecting, and to make it meaningful in the context of their digital presence and physical spaces. And I see a lot of the other extreme, too: They aren’t collecting the data they could be, which would give them the visibility they need to improve their business and the customer’s experience.
So we, as strategists, designers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and anyone who creates experiences for a living, need to be mindful of our opportunity to make the most of this moment in time and not be left behind. Most companies may not have figured this out for themselves, but the ones that do will soar ahead in the coming years. The public’s expectations will adjust. Integrating these experiences will soon become table stakes in business.
Who Is This Written For?
I think I recognize you: You’re responsible for building a business. Maybe you’re a marketing executive; maybe you’re an entrepreneur. You’re smart, you’ve done well, and you want to stay current on technology trends. At heart, you might be a salesperson or a strategist; either way, you read articles every day about the Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, and so on, and you know there’s something big going on.
What I want you to know going forward is that this is about your work and your business, but it’s also about your family and your friends. And you: your data, your activities. Everyone is affected by the trends in this book. I want us to have a conversation about this. Picture your mom or dad or sister or brother or son or daughter, and imagine companies monitoring and analyzing their activities so that they can sell them more stuff. On some level, of course, it happens in so many ways we’re inured to it; but it’s important that we really step back and consider that.
I’m not here to say that analytics are bad. I’m here to say that analytics are human. Or at least, they represent the real needs and genuine interests of actual human beings; they’re proxies for people. And as such, we are honor bound to be respectful with them, to consider them with nuance and care, to let them guide us toward creating experiences of delight or at least outcomes that fulfill mutual needs, not to use them, manipulate them, and exploit them.
I’m not here to say that analytics are bad. I’m here to say that analytics are human.
The integration of online and offline experience through our personal data truly affects us all, but business leaders are in the best positions to make ethical and responsible decisions in how they use our data. So I’m primarily writing this for you, leaders at larger c
ompanies, cities, and institutions, since you are the ones who decide what will be allowed and what won’t. You are the ones who determine the allocation of resources to designing for brand experience. You want your companies to be successful, and you also want to create something of value for the people who buy and use your products and services. I’ve helped many companies achieve those integrated objectives, and I want the same for you.
I see you, too, brand designers. You want your work to resonate. And you, information architects, strategists, and marketers, who want to develop effective and relevant products and services. I thought about those of you working in retail, healthcare, education, and entertainment, and there’s something for each of you here. During my school years, my mother rose to become CEO of a chamber of commerce that served five of our neighboring communities, and I spent many of my formative years helping her organize events that connected small business owners with civic leaders and planners. So believe me, I thought a lot about you, local leaders and placemakers, and I have pulled together insights and knowledge that can help you. And I definitely remembered you, entrepreneurs. You want your product or service to have the greatest impact and potential, and there’s a great deal to gain from the framework and the various industry patterns I’ve outlined.
This book is not so much written for the average layperson, although of course they’re welcome to read it. This book is really about the fact that companies are going to collect people’s data, and we need to talk about why it’s important to think about human rights and customer rights and privacy as they’re collecting customer data. We need to think not only about the effectiveness of our projects and our campaigns, but also about the future our projects are building. We need to envision what that world will look like for our kids and grandkids.
Calling my fellow Corporate Idealists
Years ago, I started a blog called Corporate Idealist, dedicated to the idea that business could be a creative and meaningful endeavor. I got to interview exemplary leaders like Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and along the way I collected and chronicled ideas about fostering a respectful culture for employees and a meaningful relationship with customers. I managed the blog for about a year, bringing in collaborators, sponsors, and a steady following of readers who shared the vision and wanted inspiration to do it right. The whole experience of building a community of people who wanted to focus on the value in business left me with the strong sense that people want their work to matter, and they want to do the right thing.
Business isn’t only about making money. A corporations is, by nature; but humans are the ones doing the work (for now), and by our nature we need more purpose than that. So for us, it’s about creating something of value, and building out that value through interaction with people. My belief is that there is a subculture in business of the people who recognize the opportunity to create value. These people are interested in being rewarded for their work and their ideas, but they’re also interested in building something great.
In short, if your work involves designing, developing, or delivering an experience to people, whether online or offline (but especially if you do both), you will want to think about this integrated approach.
Organizational implications of integrating experiences
A consequence of this integration of online and offline experiences is the organizational implication in business that if you hire or bring in a human experience design role or consultant, the scope of that role needs to supersede the increasingly arbitrary distinctions of “online” and “offline” in order to be effective. I’m thinking specifically of the architects of digital place: user experience professionals, strategists, designers, marketers, or anyone who is engaged in the business of making a digital landscape more people-friendly. As strategist Chris Buettner writes:
To create exceptional place-based digital experiences, you need wizards in architecture, technology, storytelling, experience design, engineering, and data science. When done well, the resulting fusion connects, inspires, and immerses us in ways that other types of digital experiences can’t. 3
It’s difficult to separate marketing from user experience, and user experience from information architecture, and information architecture from data science, and data science from marketing. And content strategy, and branding, and front end design, and web development, and operations, and so on. Around and around it goes. These fields overlap because in practice, they must all integrate seamlessly to create meaningful, memorable, effective, and ultimately profitable customer experiences.
CHAPTER TWO
Defining the Undefinable: Place, Experience, and How We Create Meaning
If we’re going to create meaningful human experiences through the integration of our digital and physical lives, we need to clarify what constitutes an experience, and what makes it meaningful.
Experience
The definition of experience has to be broad.
For our purposes, let’s say that in marketing and design terms, experience is any of a set of perceptions or interactions a person has with an entity, which could be a brand, a place, or even another person.
The term has to be used that broadly because we have to encompass many possibilities.
Place
Place is almost more complicated to define than experience.
There’s the idea of place as a geographical area—a location with boundaries either explicit or loosely understood.
There’s place as part of identity, which is an important facet of urban planning and urban design. Anyone who follows discussions on the development and redevelopment of cities is familiar with the ways in which place-based identity is invoked.
There’s place as in “sense of place,” an esoteric characteristic that a place may have, perceptible to many or to one. This idea is something Yi-Fu Tuan has explored.4 If a place lacks a sense of place, it may be described as placeless or inauthentic.
As a side note, isn’t it interesting how place can refer to social position or rank, as in “knowing one’s place”?
For the sake of simplicity, where the place is more a shared, communal experience, I’ll talk about communities associated with a place. Where the place is more a private, entity-owned experience, usually driven by profit, I’ll talk about the “owners” of that place. These usages are bound to be blurry, though. Privately-owned spaces intended for the public fall into a gray area, such as zoos or even government-managed squares and parks. But we’ll do the best we can.
Meaning, and Why It Matters Here
The world is full of noise, and we are constantly struggling to make sense of it.
From the busyness of our daily lives, we seek clarity of purpose that can help us better understand our priorities. Amid the chaos of the marketing messages we receive, we seek alignment with our existing needs and motivations.
What do we even mean by meaning?
Meaning in this case has depth and dimensions of significance, relevance, connection to purpose. It’s what matters. There are many ideas related to meaning in its many variations: alignment, mindfulness, intention, fulfillment, holism, happiness, contentment, resilience, and many more. If we want to create effective, even transcendent experiences, we need to understand the nature of what is meaningful. And to do that we need to understand a bit of the multifaceted nature of meaning.
There are fundamental ways that meaning informs our lives and work, if we are conscious of it and recognize its shape. The shape meaning takes in marketing is empathy: All relevant customer understanding and communications flow from being aware of and aligned with the customer’s needs and motivations. In business in a broader sense, the shape meaning takes is strategy. It guides every decision and action. In technology and data science, meaning can drive the pursuit of applied knowledge toward that which improves our experiences and our lives. Creative work becomes more meaningful the more it conveys truth. And in our lives overall, an understanding of what is meaningful to us provides us with purpose, clarity,
and intention.
To consider meaning at any level implies a search for the depth and dimensions of what is significant, what truly matters. How any given decision relates to a larger purpose. To consider meaning at a communications level is to ponder relevance. Meaning at an existential level surfaces what brings fulfillment, happiness, or contentment. Meaning in our lives fosters resilience.
To consider meaning at any level implies a search for the depth and dimensions of what is significant, what truly matters.
Meaning is clearly a vast subject with lots of layers. But the more rigorous our thinking about it is, the more clearly we can communicate our intentions and achieve our objectives.
In terms of the relationship between brand and consumer, the need for meaning goes both ways, underlying both the corporate/brand-centric world and the humanistic/consumer-centric world. From a marketer’s perspective, we need to find meaningful patterns in the data we collect, or there’s no point in collecting it. A framework that determines what is likely to be most meaningful is important before we ever embark on campaigns and data collection.
The role of meaning in the integrated design of physical and digital experiences is at once a technological question, because of the integration, and a marketing question, because of the design. The technology and integration parts of the equation, due to their relationship to applied knowledge, aren’t likely to cause resistance. But I often hear feedback from people that marketing and design imply a level of control, of one party exerting influence over another.