What is an experience really?
What is an experience? It sounds like a simple definition but there’s actually so much to it.
We all know what an experience is or at least feels like but it’s not that easy to explain. It’s also not that easy to explain how important they are in our lives. Spoiler – it’s everything, more on that soon.
An experience is a process through which we perceive the world around us. Experiences are accompanied by active awareness on the part of us having an experience, although we need not be.
What that means is that there are two components to an experience – active and inactive awareness, also known as conscious and subconscious.
2 kinds of experiences
We have experiences in all aspects of life. Whether aware or not, businesses provide both conscious and subconscious experiences. However, most are not in control of them.
You can think of a conscious experience more like a rational or logical one. One based on reason. It’s usually around what someone believes, and actions that are taken on those beliefs. Think something like I believe in living a healthy lifestyle, so I am going to exercise regularly. That person may say they experience health when they go to the gym.
You can think of subconscious experiences as ones related to our emotions – excitement, disgust, surprise, boredom, happiness, sadness.
We tend to make most decisions emotionally, even though we try really hard to rationalise them with ‘reasoning’. More often than not our logical or ‘rational’ decisions are arguably always based on emotion.
We also experience experiences with our senses – what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste.
Designing experiences
Design, particularly User Experience Design, is the process whose objective is to design a system that offers a great experience to its users. It’s about designing around people’s emotions and attitudes around using a particular product, system or service.
UX Design is a fantastic problem-solving process and is also used to enhance the objectives a business has.
- For a company like Slack, it may be to generate revenue by creating a platform that makes work simpler, pleasant and productive
- For a company like Facebook, it may be to get users to stay on their platform as long as possible to make as much money from Ads as they can.
Tech start-ups are pioneers in UX Design and have reaped the rewards from the process. But it’s not only for digital products, it’s for everything.
You can say that designers play with people’s emotions in creating an experience and it’s true. Response = emotions. Emotions are created when someone responds to a design – whether it be an interface like a website or app, or something like a service or product.
Designers are here to understand the people they’re designing for and instigate certain emotions to be able to achieve a certain outcome.
Examples of experiences
An experience for a product can be when you
- First discover it
- See it in a store
- Decide to buy it
- Can’t fit it into your car
- Get it home and open the box up
- Have a scary moment when you try to put it together
- Put it together and start to use it
- No longer need it and get rid of it
All of that is user experience. It’s everything that touches upon your experience with a whole business. It’s how you experience a system, a service, an interface, a product, a business, the world, your life. It’s experiencing everything.
Whether you’re thinking about it or not, you’re having an experience right now, reading an explanation of what an experience is. Kind of funny right?
The size of text, the illustration at the top of the article, how many words are on each line, how many headings there are in between paragraphs, the device you’re reading on, the time of the day you’re reading, the distractions you have in your environment. They all add up to the experience you’re having.
Whether experiences are good, average or bad is mostly determined whether or not the business thought about or invested in improving the experience for you. To make your life easy, pleasant, enjoyable or just freaking outstanding while interacting with them.
What does it take to design an experience?
There are so many things to consider when designing experiences. Every touchpoint of an experience needs to be carefully crafted and tailored to the overall experience.
Outstanding experiences are rarely ever coincidental or easy to create. It takes a lot of understanding, research, thinking, prototyping and testing to accomplish.
Following the UX design process is a great way to design great experiences. Here is a quick rundown:
Stage 1: Understand
This is the most important stage of any design process. First you understand what the exact challenge you’re looking to solve and not just a symptom. Here you learn about what you’re trying to solve, your users’ needs and the company’s’ needs.
Stage 2: Research
Once you begin to understand the challenge you’re trying to solve you dive deep into research to discover and unearth insights into the challenge. Here assumptions are challenged, and data is collected to form a picture of the challenge and how to go about solving it.
Stage 3: Ideate
In this many potential ideas are generated and brainstormed to solve the challenge based on initial understanding and research. Here potential solutions start to form.
Stage 4: Design
Here, ideas start to take shape. It’s all about building a representation of the solution in the form of low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. Prototypes are cost-effective ways to see whether a potential solution will work and how it will take shape.
Stage 5: Test
This is a crucial stage in creating outstanding experiences. Here you put prototypes in front of end users to gain further insights into the effectiveness of the design.
Stage 6: Continuous Iteration
UX design is not a one-off band aid fix. Everything changes – business changes, users change, technology changes, etc. Going back and revisiting previous stages is an important part of good design and good user experience.