by Kate O'Neill
Priorities
One of the stages in the Meaningfulness Model is “setting clear priorities and goals.” In terms of meaning-making overall, that effort lends itself toward accountability within the process, so that we’re honest with ourselves about what works and what doesn’t. In a related way, it’s also a component of meaningful human experience design. It’s key to know what the priorities of the system are.
One of the interpretations of meaning, you may recall from “Meaning, and Why It Matters Here,” is that it’s about what matters. Priorities put what matters front and center.
Integrated experiences can become cluttered and crowded with unnecessary prompts for interaction and unnecessary promotions. And the efforts to gather insights can become bogged down by unnecessary data collection.
So it’s important to determine what matters, to set priorities for the interfaces, to set priorities for the marketing, to set priorities through the business operations, and to streamline around those priorities. The experiences will be better for it, and your organization will operate in greater alignment with your priorities and goals.
Relevance to Person, Relevance to Purpose
I often say, “Relevance is a form of respect.” (I usually add: “And so is discretion.”) People generally appreciate being shown that you’ve tried to consider their priorities and context (within reason, hence the addendum about discretion). The experiences you design have to be relevant both to your brand’s purpose and relevant to the person with whom you’re interacting.
To design for human experience, we have to be conscious of context and align the messages and experiences with what is likely to be relevant to someone’s interests and motivations and needs at that moment.
I want to emphasize that true consideration for their needs and where they are in their life journey is the foundational work here, but extending from this, it can be helpful to think about incentives that strengthen their interest in spending time, money, and attention on you. You might consider, say, gamification elements, especially if you’re developing an experience around a system with complexity. You might reward people for engaging with your brand in a way that builds their comfort with the system and provides you with data about their usage so that you can fine-tune accordingly. LinkedIn did this well in their early days. They wanted people to fill out their profiles, which would strengthen other people’s interest in the platform; so they displayed a percentage score on the user interface showing how complete a profile was. If you’d added your current job and title, but hadn’t filled in previous employment history or education, your score (visible only to you) might say 60 percent. If you did everything but add a profile picture, it might say 90 percent. And that last 10 percent could nag just enough for a lot of users to go ahead and add the picture, just to complete the 100 percent.
Loyalty programs often involve a form of this incentive, and with physical-digital integration, you can reward people with whatever they will value—whether that’s a discount, visibility, or whatever it may be—for things like checking into the store on Foursquare or Facebook, posting a picture on Instagram, posting a snap on Snapchat with your geo-filter, etc.
The right approach will vary from context to context; it will depend on your intended outcome—your purpose—from which you can determine priorities. With a better understanding of purpose, it will be easier to accomplish what is relevant both for you and for the people with whom you’re interacting.
Dimensionality
See if you can call to mind a few of the most memorable and meaningful major experiences in your life. I don’t know about you, but for me, these experiences—life changes, decisions, moments of realization, moments of impact—all have a sense of popping out of the timeline, transcending the space where they occurred, having heightened connectedness with other people, with community, with myself.
That’s what meaningful experiences do. They transcend dimensions and appear larger than life.
Meaningful experiences transcend dimensions and appear larger than life.
So when we are in the role of designing human experience, and we aim to create meaningful and memorable interactions, we need to have some awareness of how they’ll weave into the tapestry of the authentic life moments our counterparts are having on the other side of the designed experience. Most marketers, designers, and strategists are probably not working in a domain that will lend itself to a major life-changing memory for their users and customers, but some are; and the experiences any of us create could easily be the backdrop against which major life moments play out. Someone could be having the best or worst day of their lives when they come into contact with our store, website, app, etc. Having some empathy for that possibility allows us to consider the layers of context that may overwhelm seemingly simple interactions.
In addition, of course, when you’re planning integrated physical and digital experiences, there’s a good deal more layered realities to keep up with. What’s powerful about these is that you have a data layer describing them, so the metadata of the experience itself opens dimensional connections with other people throughout time and space who have shared this experience. For example, when a person posts a picture to Instagram of the Brooklyn Bridge, if they use the location tag and select “Brooklyn Bridge,” or add the hashtag “#brooklynbridge” or a related hashtag, they then have the opportunity to click through to the stream of people who have also shared pictures with those tags, and interact with them along that shared dimension. This can become even more meaningful when the place has deep significance for them, and they can see how the place is significant for other people, too.
Whether you’re designing an app like Instagram or you’re the person responsible for the Brooklyn Bridge’s digital presence or public relations, this meaning and metadata dimensionality can help you think in a more sophisticated way about the interests of the people who are your users and visitors; and you can better influence what tools and content you make available.
You might see value in thinking of these layers the way urban planners do site analysis, in cutaways that reveal the elements contributing to the overall experience.
Image source: An Camas Mór
The image above shows a diagram from a community project in Scotland designed by Gehl Architects. As I’ve mentioned, the Danish architect Jan Gehl has been one of the key voices on human-centered city life in the last few decades. This approach to planning shows how people and the human experience can come first, with the built environment then being designed around human needs and public life.
The layers you consider in integrating physical and digital experiences may include more conceptual, more abstract, and perhaps more subjective ideas—for example, values, capabilities, and so on, as well as elements that are demonstrable and objective, such as proximity and time or frequency.
Even thinking about a website experience with cutaway layers reveals the opportunity to design for dimensionality, to make sure that the needs of varying users can be met
Then the study of dimensionality comes back to metaphor, and movement. What is the metaphor for the progress of your users or constituents through their journey? Are they moving through time? Does their history in some way figure into their current experience? Are they learning, as in a graduation?
How will you connect them to their present surroundings, while in a sense freeing them of those surroundings at the same time?
Value and Emotional Load
In the most primitive form of business, I am a baker and you are a carpenter. You need my bread to eat, and I need the furniture you build to prepare bread and eat it on. We can barter, but one loaf of bread will probably not have the same value as one table. So we can trade unequal amounts to establish a placeholder of relative value. Within a few trades, we will probably have established currency. (But not Bitcoin, yet.)
Either way, in determining the value of the goods, we assess their meaning to us. We consider our need of them. We assess the
ir quality—the craftsmanship that went into the baking of the bread or the building of the table—and we ascribe meaning to that time and skill. We note the aesthetics: the sensory experiences of the bread, the quality of the ingredients. The shaping of the table legs, the strength of the joints. Maybe we are reminded of the aroma of freshly baked bread in our grandmother’s kitchen. We remember the worn old table she leaned over, dusting it with flour, kneading the dough.
The meaning is emotional and unintentional. It is intrinsic. We are not purely objective; we cannot distance ourselves from our experiences.
Value in business is inseparable from meaning, yet we often talk about value as if it were simply a price point—as if you can take the jumbled landscape of sense memories, beauty, irrational fears, prized beliefs, aspirations, accomplishments, and everything else, roll it into a snowball of whatever size, and call it “price.” Only to watch it melt.
Meaning does not melt or shrink; meaning grows. When you start from an understanding of meaning, you can operate on wholly different dimensions. You can assess the value of a thing to someone based on what you understand of their desires. Based on they want and need, based on what they cherish, based on what they will fight for, walk away from, laugh at, cry at, share with strangers, and hide from friends. You can begin to see opportunities to add value to a thing based on how you deliver it, where you make it available, when you communicate about it, what you add to it, what you leave out, what color you make it, what you call it, etc.
This is also where it helps to recognize an underlying idea that frames the interactions and transactions, such as Third Place for Starbucks, or how Southwest lets its passengers share in their playful quest for operational efficiencies. (As discussed in the earlier section on “Starbucks, “Third Place,” and the Power of Strategic Framing.”) This is using meaning in its most powerful way: to align what matters and achieve greater resonance and a sense of truth among everyone involved.
Integrated physical and digital experiences have incredible potential for this kind of intentional design around value. People bring so many layered associations into how they interact in a given place: sense memories, cultural and subcultural interpretations, family history, their personal narrative and aspirational self, the context of their present circumstances, and so on. As you anticipate the evolution of their relationship with you, the journey through stages and touchpoints, the life cycle of their role as your customer or patient or student, it can be vividly clarifying to think about what they value so that you can align your objectives with theirs.
Achieving meaning is holistically both reactive and predictive. If I listen closely to what you tell me, I can adjust what I offer you accordingly. In the primitive transaction, this was a manual and physical process, both verbal and nonverbal. Today, digital listening is both possible and necessary. And with integrated physical and digital experiences, if the data model allows it, that “digital listening” has a lot to say about movement through place, too, and it all ties back together to enrich the understanding of what’s meaningful. Every opportunity to hear—deeply hear—what someone communicates about what they value, however they communicate it as it relates to our offering, is an invitation to create meaning together.
If we listen, people constantly tell us what they value. It’s not the free shipping that a person values; it’s often something a level higher and more intrinsic, like the freedom and delight they feel because now that extra errand there was no time for isn’t necessary. People don’t value curtains, per se; they value that the curtains make their homes feel cozier, more complete, and sometimes a little more private.
Listening gives us the data to understand meaning and value, and empathy gives us the ability to make something with it. We have the opportunity to create meaningful relationships between our businesses and our customers with every interaction. The more you try to understand what your product means to your customer, the more you can build upon its value.
Emotional Load
In addition to emotional associations that comprise the value people assign to certain interactions, some types of interactions between customer and business take place when the customer is amid some sort of crisis or distress. These distress purchases are often driven by different priorities in the decision-making process. Price, for example, may still be an important consideration in such a moment, but the evaluation of price may be at a cursory comparative level—just making sure they’re not getting overcharged before they opt for your service. Whatever the specifics of the shift as it plays out in your marketplace and with the prospective customers for your business, people make different decisions when in distress. They are carrying an emotional load.
When you plan and design for a meaningful experience, you have to know what kind of emotional load a customer is likely carrying. It will color the experience from the beginning on their end, which means you need to anticipate it at the beginning of the interaction.
There must be an understanding of what value is created or exchanged in the designing of the place for humans. In retail, the value is usually something to do with ease and perhaps enjoyment of the purchase process itself; in hospitals, the value is generally security and reassurance that you or your loved one is in good hands and will be better soon.
Designing for integrated experiences means being aware of the ways in which physical space can interact with the emotional load they’re already carrying. Hospitals can often be big and daunting and impersonal, and considering how many people walking through the front doors are there under some kind of distressing circumstances—due to their own medical condition or that of someone they love—the already overwhelming experience is amplified.
Technology and connected experiences can’t solve all the problems related to this, but done well, they can be a start. If a hospital were to conceptualize the experience as an empowering one rather than an overwhelming one, they could work through all the ways they would need to put power in the hands of the patient and visitor in order to fulfill that idea. How might wayfinding be different? How might, dare I say, billing be different? How the organization interacts with the human can be built out through the integrated experience in some way, and the more aligned the components are, the more successful the experience will be.
Metaphors and Cognitive Associations
If the earlier chapter on metaphors (“Chapter Seven - Metaphors: Digital Experience Through the Lens of Place”) hasn’t made the point already, allow me to be clear: Using the right metaphors can be a key part of success.
What cognitive associations are users and constituents likely to have about the brand, the process, and/or the experience?
The framework of metaphors and cognitive associations exist in a layer of abstraction that isn’t usually exposed directly. But the experience will also have a semantic or communication layer, where the messaging occurs, and you convey the ideas underlying the system to the user of the system. The semantic layer is where the metaphor rubber meets the messaging road. There’s always some kind of communication layer, even if it’s nonverbal/nonwritten. (Think of IKEA’s assembly instructions, done entirely in cartoonish diagrams, which saves them having to provide translations.) Even integrated physical-digital experiences have communication layers, some of which may happen through a digital device and some of which may happen in the physical surroundings through signage, wayfinding design, aesthetics, the arrangement of elements in the space, etc. In any case, these formative ideas of metaphor and cognitive associations need at least one more layer to communicate well with people experiencing them, which is usually where narrative and story come in.
Narrative and Story
How do you weave metaphor and cognitive associations into both your understanding of the user’s experience and the user’s understanding of the intended experience? Metaphorical associations are codified through visual cues, such as the overused magnifying glass to represent “Search.” But another layer of that communication ha
ppens through narrative, and this brings with it the opportunity to develop a history—of the story created by the place, of the user’s experience of the place—and to connect the metaphors the place brings with it in a cohesive way.
You can dig into this by asking some questions:
What story are you trying to tell with your interactions? What story is the person using your product or service going through?
What kinds of narrative will you need to construct, and how will you measure the customer journey through that narrative?
How can you reinforce that narrative regardless of context?
Story has a natural place in thinking about metaphor and cognitive associations, but it’s also another way of dimensionalizing the experience for the people who engage with your brand, service, product, or place. There are many books and guides that have explored the components of story in great detail, so I won’t attempt to reproduce that knowledge here; but by using the classic elements of story (such as hero, goal, conflict, and so on), you have a chance at humanizing the brand for the user and humanizing the user for the brand.
Alignment and Effectiveness
In order to create meaningful or memorable experiences, there has to be a sense of alignment between the entity that governs a physical or digital space and the humans who use it, inhabit it, buy in it, and travel through it. This effort to align the needs and motives of the players involved emphasizes similarity and brings strength.