Experience Thinking™
Experience Thinking™ is founded on User Centered Design (UCD) practises and the notion that an Experience in itself is of customer & user value: not only the aggregated underlying services, software and products.
Experience design thinking provides the blueprint for an organizations' experience-creation strategy that enables product & service innovations to be truly remarkable.
An experience includes these basic elements: Product, Software, Event and Service. All of which happen within a Physical Environment. So when Akendi talks about creation of an End to End experience any and all of these elements are considered and designed.
The first 4 Elements in Experience Thinking™
The first four elements of Experience Thinking™ cover Business, Service, Content and Technology.
The business element of each experience is for companies to deliver customer and user value to the organization, usually monetary, but in case of public service and non-profit organisations it can be fullfilling the mandate or reaching a relevant audience. These customer/user values will have an audience externally and this is where the service aspect of experiences enters. The service experience for customers and clients of products links each touchpoint customers/clients have with the organisation. To understand, design for and optimize this journey is absolutely critical for successful experiences.
Next up is the content aspect of an experience. Included in Content experience is production, governance, editorial guidelines, search engine optimization, retention and metadata of information in products & services. With more and more information around us that is either provided by an organisation or created by users, it becomes increasingly important to have specific governance, strategies and processes around how to work with the information & content. This thinking applies both from an organizational perspective as from an general public, customer and user perspective.
The fourth aspect is the role of technology in experience thinking and usually acts as an enabler of the above three aspects. Here is where boundaries are placed around what technology-wise can be done in the real world with the resources available. It also injects the relevant functionality to, again, enable the other three aspects of an experience.
All four are foundational elements in Experience Thinking™ and failure to give each sufficient attention and resources has a direct impact on the overall value of the experiences you deliver.
Second 4 Elements in Experience Thinking™: Intentional Experience Creation™
The second set of elements of Experience Thinking™ are four phases: Strategy, Research, Design and Testing. They follow our Intentional Experience Creation™ Process:
- create an Experience Strategy (why this product & service, what challenge does it address, envision options and identfiy challenges),
- conduct sufficient Experience Research (what is the customer space, does a customer see value in the solution, what is out there already, how would the solution be used by end users),
- sketch and Design the experience (how to deliver to the challenge) and finally
- validate the Experience through testing the outcome (where did we miss the mark, what needs to happen to meet our success metrics) in an iterative fashion.
So that by the time we go to manufacturing, engineering and finally launch, we will have sufficiently de-risked the end-to-end product & service experiences.
The key thinking at this point is that no matter whether we talk about business, human, content or technology; each strand will have a strategy, research & design component and will be tested before we make a major capital investment in manufacturing and/or (software) engineering.
For organizations that want to create succesful - intentional - experiences an effective process will include the appropriate attention to these elements.
Let's Talk!
Please email Shaun Illingworth, Managing Director, Akendi at contact@akendi.com or 1.866.585.1660 x0 for more information about how we can assist in your experience design innovations with Experience Thinking™.
