Last weekend’s ChangeCamp kicked off a week full of intellectual stimulation. After Saturday’s intense one-day session, I attended a User Experience Design workshop at Ryerson on Wednesday and went to the Jane Fulton Surri Lecture at OCAD on Thursday. Obviously enough the week was really inspiring and got me thinking a lot about design and my career.
I wanted to focus specifically on the Ryerson event, which featured three speakers from the User Experience field Tedde van Gelderen, Steve Mast and Ilona Posner. While the last two speakers gave good talks, Tedde van Gelderen’s talk on “The Importance of Experience Design” was the most insightful in my opinion. The talk gave a good overview of the field and really backed up a lot of my own thinking with more concrete examples and explanations.
The talk emphasized the importance of emotion in experience design and even more so in business. Tedde rightly made the distinction that experience design needs to be defined as a holistic approach, rather than by its isolated elements. I am a firm believer in this definition since it is truly where experience design can make the largest impact. It is no longer enough to design good product experiences, customer experiences and others; the real innovators understand that experience covers absolutely every aspect of a business. This definition is also important because it shows that experience design isn’t something you can bolt on, it lies directly at the core and all through the periphery of a business.
However despite the design community’s understanding, the success of experience design lies partly in the hands of businesses. In this light, Tedde highlighted some of the difficulties that occur when collaborating with businesses. Beside the obvious, one of the main points he alluded to was business’ uneasiness with the converging and diverging methodology, also known as the design process. While designers are fairly adept at focusing and expanding throughout a project, from the outside this process can seem counter-intuitive. And he is right. Without knowing the methodologies of designers, this could really be troublesome to business types. I think the key lesson here is education and understanding. Designers and business people are beginning to communicate, understanding more about each other everyday. This has helped bridge the divide between these two worlds, but we can’t forget that there is still a gap. We need to make sure we can explain design methodology to business and business needs to embrace the qualitative nature of design thinking.
To continue this same point, Tedde explained that organizational structures are one of the key things that makes bridging this gap so difficult. To cope with issues of scale, departmentalization is a necessary evil for most businesses, but it also makes it hard to implement a company wide experience strategy. To illustrate this Tedde used a simple metaphor; a business sees itself as a set of silos, while their user sees them as a long red thread. The user has a long journey of experiences with a company, moving around and changing roles throughout, indifferent to what department handles each aspect. To the user, all their experiences with a business are connected. This simple little analogy is a great way to understand the user’s perspective and gives businesses a clear visualization of why experience design is so crucial to how they should operate.
This interplay between experience design and business is something that seems to be a key issue in the evolution of the field. The two rely on each other as I pointed out above. So while some businesses may not see the need to focus on their users’ experience now, they will miss out on a huge opportunity. Near the end of his presentation Tedde astutely pointed out that expectations are always rising. So if you aren’t focused on experience now, you will have to be soon in order to keep up.
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