6

Starting with the Experience

In this chapter you will learn about how customers experience products and services, and how you can use this knowledge to design for better experiences. It shows how we act like scenario machines, always being prepared for different scenarios to play out, and how experiences have deep evolutionary roots related to our survival. In this way experiences are impossible to separate from expectations. We have thousands of experiences every day, most of which we do not even notice, but this chapter will show you how to design for experiences that your customers will remember, and share with others.

The customer experience is a co-productive, value-creating act. Without customer action, there is no experience, only an offering. A service creates value only when that offering is experienced by the customer through use. Because of its importance, it’s time to learn more about the customer experience, and how we can innovate to account for it.

Moving from Function to Experience

When I first moved to Scandinavia I did some work for a world-leading toothbrush manufacturer, Jordan. At the time, their claim to fame was the ergonomics of their toothbrushes and the effectiveness of the bristle head. Their ads were all about function, not emotion. Today they have a design approach focusing on experience. One particularly successful product stands out because the whole design is based upon how Jordan wants you to feel (see Figure 6-1). I love these toothbrushes, and so do others; they are incredibly popular in Scandinavia and are desirable to a lot of people.

There are two interesting things about this approach. One is price sensitivity. People do not consider how much these toothbrushes cost; they just want them. When I do executive teaching, I often have a group of about 40 people, and of these, maybe 30 have these toothbrushes. When I ask what they cost, people make wild guesses, usually way over (even double) the actual price. The second is the experience that the toothbrush gives. It breaks with expectations that a toothbrush is purely functional. It is affective—people get pleasure from it when they use it. Why? Because it has an emotional connection that is regularly triggered, each and every time it’s used.

Breaking this down even further, the brand’s success has to do with the fact that there are multiple variants of the toothbrush design, and the customer gets to choose something that appeals to them emotionally. The toothbrushes are very well designed, down to the most minute details, and they are different from almost all other toothbrushes on the market. I appreciate this, and feel a high degree of benevolence toward the company (the feeling that someone has my best interests at heart). I genuinely feel that people have thought of me and my needs when designing the toothbrush I use. Taken together, these factors transform a chore into something pleasant, and I appreciate that someone has done this for me.

I feel that someone has seen me, understood me, designed something beautiful for me, given me a choice, and allowed me to enjoy what previously was a chore. I am thankful to Jordan (the company) and Geir Øxseth (the designer) for giving me something of great value in the little daily rituals of life.

This story highlights the importance of the move from a functionally focused world to an experiential one. Jordan toothbrush ads today don’t talk about the ergonomic grip, or the cleaning efficiency. Instead, they appeal to our emotions and appreciation of beauty. As a consequence of this, customers do not have a buyer/seller, transactional view of buying these toothbrushes. The emotional connection has made this a relationship, a part of everyday life. The toothbrush is a small example that shows how we have left the logical and functional world behind. As we will see in this chapter, our desire and need for good experiences are central to who we are as human beings. The more I research and study customer experience, the more I am aware of how experiences are an existential part of our being.

What Is an Experience?

Brian: “You’re all individuals.”

Crowd (in unison): “We are all individuals.”

Individual: “I’m not.”

—Monty Python: The Life of Brian

First, what is an experience? Answering this can take you deep into psychology and philosophy, but let’s start with the following definition, before delving more deeply into these disciplines: An experience is a happening that leaves an impression on someone. I like this definition because it links what you work with, the “happening,” to the customer, the “someone.” What you need to achieve as an organization is to leave an impression, hopefully a positive one. So, to summarize the key points of this definition:

Happening

Your offering and how it is delivered through touchpoints

Impression

A specific, relevant, and memorable customer experience

Someone

Your customers and your employees

We Are Emotional—Not Rational—Beings

Who was it that introduced the misguided notion that we are rational economic beings? This has been the driving logic in our understanding of behavior for far too long, even though it has never really been a model that sat well with psychology or sociology. It’s difficult to understand how it happened, but we seem to have gone through a dark period of considering people as rational and logical, with strong functional needs, despite seeing evidence of the opposite around us. It’s as if we were trying to imagine ourselves as and mold ourselves in the image of Spock from Star Trek.

Death of the Rational Human Being, 21st October 2015

It is difficult to pinoint when the idea of the rational human being was born, but the national Danish newspaper Politiken marked the date of its death (in Denmark) on the 21st of October 2015.1

The paper proclaimed this due to the publication of a landmark government document describing how people do not always act in their best economic interests, are not always rational, and have identifiable behavioral biases that are irrational. The government acknowledged that people use gut feeling and are spontaneous, intuitive, and biased by social norms in their decisions, and argued that this should have consequences for government economic policy.

This is most likely not news to you, but it is important, given that government policy has been based on the idea of the rational human being for many years, that governments are finally beginning to design it to take into account the biases that we exhibit, either alone or in groups.

In many ways, this government document was an admission that earlier policies had not been designed for people, but for an idealized economic being—a design that made life easier for economists, but harder for the government’s customers (its citizens). It is significant that now government policy will, to a greater extent, be citizen-centric, in terms not only of needs but of behavior as well.

This model of rationality has deep roots in the Reformation, several hundred years ago. In the past the focus was on the scientific method, and our capacity for logical reasoning—what distinguished us from other animals in the animal kingdom. It is true that we are different from other animals, yet recent research shows that this is because we are emotional. We are irrational, but according to renowned psychologist and behavioral economist Dan Ariely and many others, we are “predictably irrational;”2 we have inbuilt biases that we have developed over many years. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a leading researcher in and professor of psychology, argues that humans are unique in the way we develop and use our emotions as part of our everyday experience.3 In her book How Emotions Are Made, Barrett summarizes how we have unique emotional responses to the world around us that lead us to view it and respond in highly irrational ways. (Yes, that includes when we’re filing our tax returns.) So, look at the world around you, and notice how emotional it is (and has always been). Embrace it, breathe it in, and consider it the “new” normal.

Interactions Are Central to Who We Are

In one of my very first psychology classes, I remember discussing the classic study by Held and Hein from 1963,4 which aimed to discover how perception developed. They used kittens in their experiment, and had a carousel-like contraption to harness them in pairs. One kitten was allowed to walk around and experience the world in a normal way, through action and exploration. The other was in a raised basket and connected to the first kitten. It moved, but it was steered by the movement of the first kitten. Thus, the second kitten could only observe the experience in a passive way. After a period, the two kittens were tested. The one that had actively experienced the world had developed perception, while the other had not developed adequate perception. This shows that active experience is central to our ability to function in the world. It has existential importance.

Experiences Do Not Mean Disneyfication

I encounter many leaders that believe a good customer experience is somehow a Disneyfied version of what they do today. By this, I mean they think that adding an entertainment layer on top of their service will make it into a fantastic experience. In this chapter I show how this is wrong, and describe how to create memorable ordinary experiences that are not entertainment-based services. It is a widespread myth that experiences have to be entertaining to be memorable (or valuable), and this has unfortunately created a sense of superficiality around customer experience (not that I think Disney is superficial; it is, however, in the entertainment business for a certain user group). As we will see, experiences need to be authentic to your organization and the expectations that you set for your service, and they can also be highly functional. Services such as Uber and Airbnb that offer great user experiences do not offer Disney-like experiences, so why should you?

What Would Your Service Smell Like (If It Had a Smell)?

If this is something that you have discussed in your leadership, then you’re already on your way to having a black belt in experience centricity. If you think this is a stupid or weird question, then please suspend judgment and read on.

When we work with organizations, we find that many leaders find it hard to describe the experience that the customer will have. This is understandable, since as humans we have trouble describing absolute states, and particularly absolute states in the emotional sphere. However, one of the great advantages of being human is our fantastic ability to consider things in relative terms. We can, for example, only distinguish between roughly seven visual stimuli when we see them individually, but we can see thousands when we compare them with others. We also have strong metaphorical abilities—that is, comparing something to something else. So, we often ask leader teams questions such as: If your service were a car, what make would it be? If your service were a supermarket, which one would it be? These questions help to define the experience that is right for an organization to provide, because if you decide that your service should be comparable to an Audi, you already have something strong to develop from. This works all the way down to “If your service had a smell, what would it smell like?” Go on, give it a try. Are you fresh and citrus-based, spicy, or slightly leathery and traditional? See, it works! You are already on your way to describing the experience of your service.

Experience Is a Means of Survival

To explain the existential importance of experience, let’s go back to evolution and childhood. We understand the world through our experiences with it, and we become who we are through the experiences we have as we grow up. This might sound obvious, and it is. However, one thing we know is that things that relate to survival are prioritized by our brains, our bodies, and society. Experiences are central in our lives. They are the basis of our existence. We don’t crave products or services—we crave the experiences they give us. In this way, all is experience. We are designed to experience as a way of surviving, and we carry this instinct with us throughout our lives. It is not surprising, therefore, that the customer experience is an extension of this existential requirement. It is, after all, how we have learned to become who we are.

As a company, you should pay attention to this, because tapping into an existentially important aspect of your customers’ lives gives you access to them at an unprecedented scale. However, in discussions with companies, I repeatedly hear that the customer experience is important, but that the organization does not know how to improve it, and has difficulty understanding exactly what experience they should be delivering. Because of this, initiatives never get off the ground, or become uncoordinated. If this sounds familiar, then read on.

Humans Are Emotional Scenario Machines

It is important to realize that we always evaluate experiences in relation to expectations. Neurocognition teaches us that we are scenario machines, always expecting multiple potential outcomes, predicting what will happen next. Recent research suggests that we are continually creating scenarios about what is likely to happen next in our lives. These scenarios are developed in real time, and continually adapt, based on a complex mix of previous experience (how it was last time we did this), memory of recent events (what has just happened), and cues from the context we are in (what do these touchpoints expect from me?).

These multiple scenarios are not something that we are aware of, but they help us prepare for situations that might occur. In evolutionary terms, they might have been scenarios like an animal rushing out of the bushes, or a fish swimming close to our net. This is something that researchers believe is unique to human beings—continually trying to predict multiple futures so as to be prepared to act on them. And it makes sense, particularly because our ability to respond to events is limited if we are not prepared for them. We simply don’t have the bandwidth or processing power to be totally spontaneous (even though we think we are), so to make it easier on ourselves, we predict what is going to happen and use that as a starting point for our preparedness and actions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett expresses this clearly:

We usually think of predictions as statements about the future, like “It’s going to rain tomorrow” or “The Red Sox will win the World Series.” But here, I’m focusing on predictions at a microscopic scale as millions of neurons talk to one another. These neural conversations try to anticipate every fragment of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch that you will experience, and every action that you will take. These predictions are your brain’s best guesses of what’s going on in the world around you, and how to deal with it to keep you alive and well. [...]

Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.[...] Right now, with each word that you read, your brain is predicting what the next word will be, based on probabilities from your lifetime of reading experience. In short, your experience right now was predicted by your brain a moment ago. Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain’s primary mode of operation.5

Kindness Is Contagious

Why are we generous? We give blood, post reviews online, tip service providers, and donate to charity, even though there is nothing in it for us. Well, kindness rewards the giver by releasing endorphins and oxytocin, and it creates new neural connections. The implications for such plasticity of the brain are that altruism and kindness become self-reinforcing habits requiring less and less effort to exercise. Even the act of imagining compassion and kindness activates the soothing and affiliation component of the emotional regulation system of the brain. So that explains its effect on us, but what about its effect on others? There is evidence that kindness can be contagious. This can be explained by the accepted reciprocal behaviors, for example, showing praise, giving gifts, and returning a favor. A recent anthropological study of generosity shows that we reciprocate generosity, and that we adjust our generosity to the norms within a group.6 This group-wise behavior has strong implications for the design of a service, because it basically says people will treat you as you treat them. Because we perceive services as having human traits, we will reciprocate the personality, behavior, and tone of voice of a service encounter. Treat a customer well, and they not only will see the giver (your staff, for example) in a positive light but also will treat you well in return. This can lead to a positive cycle of customer relationships. Knowing how customers will respond to you is yet another reason for designing your personality, behaviors, and tone of voice with experience-centric intention.

Expectations for Service Are Based on the Scenarios We Construct

If we place this view of scenario making in the context of services, we can see that we as customers are continually running through scenarios or stories that set expectations about what is likely to happen when we encounter a service (the offering) and what will actually occur in the details (interactions with touchpoints). We have all experienced this, particularly in situations where things are new. Newness challenges the mind to run through multiple scenarios and develop the right one for what to expect and what to do. The scenarios help us quickly make sense of a system and determine the right behavioral responses. As a designer you can immediately start to see how to design to make the experience better, reduce stress, and prevent confusion by explaining the concept, creating clarity so that people can immediately understand which of the many scenarios is correct. Prepare the customer beforehand through a carefully crafted experiential offering, and deliver on it through the interactions that are designed to fulfill that promise. The goal is not just to meet expectations, but to exceed them, because that is what makes experiences memorable. Human beings don’t have the capacity to remember each and every experience we have, and to be honest, our memories would be very gray and uninteresting if we did. It is when expectations are exceeded that we take note, because it is a natural way to influence our scenario production for the next time we encounter the service.

We Are Evolutionarily Hardwired to Get Pleasure from Beauty

A beautiful image, a beautiful person, a stunning landscape. Why do we get pleasure from them, and is it something learned, or innate from birth? Neuroscience breakthroughs in recent years are increasingly painting a picture that the brain is hardwired to promote aesthetics, and that this gives us an evolutionary advantage. In his book The Aesthetic Brain (Oxford University Press), Anjan Chatterjee shows that aesthetics are an instinct—that is, inherited rather than learned (although they’re added to through learning). The core message of this interesting book is twofold. First, positive experiences are a key part of our evolutionary survival, and therefore something we fundamentally seek in our lives. Second, beauty is linked in some way to evolutionary advantage. We are simply hardwired to get pleasure from beautiful things. Beauty in an image, a landscape, a person we know, a shared cultural happening, or even a mathematical equation triggers our brains in a positive way. This is not culturally dependent, and it is inborn. So, not only do we have an economic argument for beautiful design,, we also have an evolutionary one. We are hardwired to enjoy beauty.

Experiences Require Interactions with Things over Time

Customer experiences come through interactions with your service—specifically interactions with touchpoints along a journey. This means that when you are considering the experience that you want your customers to have, you also need to have in the back of your mind how the customer receives this experience, and how you can design the interactions to give desired and desirable experiences. Experiences are how we learn and understand, and the basis for all knowing. They are how we predict and discover. This means that customer experiences are linked to expectations and historical interactions, so to understand these, you need to deeply understand how a customer will relate to your offering, including in a cultural context. This is the domain of the designer, designing for interactions that fit with the customer’s understanding of the world.

Interactions are central to our understanding of the world, and create our expectations of the experience before we have it. There is always a tension when designing services between doing exactly as people expect (consistency) and doing things differently, but better, than expected (innovation). This is the difference between following and leading and is always a decision you face when designing for experience: the comfortable and safe route, or the challenging novel route. The CD Baby cover letter is a great example of doing something different, but in a way that’s consistent with our learned expectations and with the company’s DNA.

How to Surprise and Delight: The CD Baby Letter

“Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

“Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

“We all had a wonderful celebration afterward and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 18th.

“I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.

“Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year.’ We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Sigh…”

—Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby, “the little store with the best new independent music”7

Brands Are Postboxes in Our Minds

I’m not sure that Lisa Feldman Barrett would totally agree with Al Ries and his daughter and coauthor, Laura, when they use the metaphor of postboxes for branding, but I think she would see the relevance.8 The Rieses liken our understanding of branding to having a series of post-sorting boxes in our heads, each labeled with a different category. They claim that we only have space for a limited number of postboxes, and that each postbox category has limited capacity. Very often these postboxes are full, because there is hypercompetition for almost everything these days. As a new entrant, we can only gain access to these postboxes by ousting something that is already in there, or more radically, by creating a new postbox and being the first in that category. Apple and Nintendo are very good at creating new postboxes in our minds and being the first to fill them. We recognize them for this, and appreciate their boldness. And Virgin, for example, is a master at identifying postboxes that are ripe for change, and goes in and aggressively challenges those within the postbox to oust one or more of the incumbents and take a lead role, primarily by improving the customer experience. If you compare the experience of Virgin Atlantic with British Airways, you see how Virgin has a very different and appealing (to many) experiential value proposition, precisely as a means of cleaning out a dusty postbox and placing themselves inside.

So, How Do We Create Memorable Experiences?

If experiences are the same as expected, then there is a good chance that people won’t remember them, even though it might reinforce the consistency of their scenario. People experience thousands of things a day, but very few make it into their memory as something worth telling others about. That does not mean that they have not noticed the experiences, but it does mean that the goal of creating desirable and memorable experiences has not been met. If you want to become memorable, then you need to differentiate your organization from expectations and innovate the experience. Ironically, in many areas, the existing customer experience is so poor, and so removed from expectation, that just being consistent may be enough to become memorable. Customers would say, “It was great, everything just worked.” However, the number of these comments is decreasing, as many service providers are striving to provide reasonable consistency. Innovation, therefore, requires differentiation from the norm. You have to innovate on what people have as expectations and find ways to do things differently, in a positive way. This means innovating so that people create new concepts in their minds, constructing new understandings of what an offering is and how it is experienced.

Size Matters

When you think back on your summer holiday, a meal at a restaurant, or even a meeting, it is often specific incidents that you recall. In fact, we seem to remember things as snapshots rather than long videos. There are two key factors that imprint experiences on our memories.

First, the intensity of the experience matters—that is, how much it arouses your emotions. Second, the direction of the arousal seems to play a role, with negative arousal being more memorable than positive. This is why particularly bad service is remembered so well, but it applies to surprisingly good service too. The peak intensity of the emotion and its timing are also important. Consider the following quote from a customer about a memorable holiday experience:

When on holiday in Scotland, we missed the ferry back from our trip to an isolated Scottish island. This was a crisis, as it connected with the last bus back to town. Dreading the thought of a very long walk in the rain during our journey on the next ferry, we were amazed to see a bus waiting for the ferry when it docked. The bus driver said that he had remembered us from the morning and that he hadn’t seen us return during the day. So, he drove out specially, just to pick us up. We will never forget that. Never.

Beauty and Love Are Closely Linked

The mOFC is neither a football club nor a political organization, but instead a part of our brains (the medial orbito-frontal cortex), and a significant part when it comes to emotions. The mOFC seems to light up when we perceive beauty, and studies show that beauty, at least beauty through form, also stimulates the part of the brain linked to love. Studies also show that beauty, at least beauty through form, stimulates the part of the brain linked to love.9 Interestingly, it appears that beautiful music and beautiful images stimulate the mOFC equally, but music does not stimulate the part connected to love. Sorry, Ozzy, I don’t love you after all.

It seems, therefore, that beautiful form has more potential in terms of eliciting love-like experiences than beautiful music. The key to all of these studies is that of perceived beauty, since the research only studied music and images that the subjects themselves had categorized as beautiful beforehand. This is why people’s perceptions of good design can elicit love-like responses in the brain, and why as a society we are becoming design-aware. However, the question of whether a universal beauty exists, one that everyone agrees on (and falls in love with), remains unanswered—beauty is still in the eye of the beholder, at least until further work is carried out. An interesting additional study showed that beauty in mathematical equations had the same effect, for those who understood them, as beauty in music or in form.10 Thus, beauty in mathematics may be closely related to beauty in the wider world. The authors cannot explain why, but suggest that it has to do with some realization that beauty is related to something making sense to us. This potentially takes the perception of beauty into other areas, such as biology, chemistry, or anything that is considered well designed. And by well designed, I mean more than visual form, which I’ve already described as central, including a process or a construction if it makes sense to us.

How We Remember Experiences Is Key for Design

Given the choice between two medical procedures—a painful procedure that lasts 8 minutes or a painful procedure that lasts 25 minutes—which would you choose? Sounds like a simple choice, doesn’t it? You’d pick the short painful procedure rather than the long one, of course. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier asked this question, however, and found a startling result.11 When asked about their experience afterward, patients who had undergone a longer procedure rated the experience as less uncomfortable than patients who had the shorter procedure. How come? Well, the patients’ experiences ended differently. The longer procedure ended with a period of low pain, rather than intense pain, while the shorter experience ended at a painful high point. Changing the ending, Kahneman and Redelmeier found, causes us to remember the whole experience differently. As they put it, what we experience in the moment and what we remember about the experience are very different. Their key findings were that the peak and the end were the most important when patients recollected their experiences.

Desirability and Passion Are Part of Our Culture

We burn and are aflame with desire; we are pierced by or riddled with desire, we are sick or ache with desire; we are tormented, and racked by desire; we are possessed, seized, ravished, and overcome by desire; we are mad, crazy, insane, giddy, blinded, or delirious with desire. Our desire is fierce, hot, intense, passionate, incandescent, and irresistible; and we pine, languish, waste away, or die of unfulfilled desire.

“The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer Passion”12

Desire has an interesting relevance to the customer experience: it drives much of our behavior, due to extremely high expectations of an expected future payoff. Desirability creates a strong scenario in our minds about how we will feel when we actually achieve the target of our desire. It is especially interesting in this context, since it drives us to action.

Desire has many definitions; however, the definition that comes closest to describing consumer behavior is the following from Webster’s:

The natural longing that is excited by the enjoyment or the thought of any good, and impels to action or effort its continuance or possession; an eager wish to obtain or enjoy.

From this definition, three elements of desirability can be identified:

• A longing for something
• A motivation that is embodied through action or effort
• The strong need to obtain or possess

Individual desire and collective desire are nothing new. For example, in the 1600s there was such a desire for tulips (yes, tulip bulbs and flowers), that one type of tulip, the Admiral Liejken, was priced equivalent to 180 tons of cheese. In the same period, nutmeg was such a rare and desired spice that people made their fortunes from shipping it. Indeed in 1667, the Dutch valued it so highly that they swapped the whole of Manhattan with the British to gain a tiny, tiny island called Run, where it grew. At this time, desire was often linked to scarcity, so in many situations desire was never fulfilled, except by the wealthy.

Although desirability has always existed, it has now become a global phenomenon and part of our collective culture. We see desire in terms of mass-produced objects, which in today’s globalized market become not only desirable, but also attainable. There is sometimes, but not always, a degree of scarcity connected to objects, and desire is now predominantly symbolic. That is, it is the symbolic value that makes things desirable, particularly in terms of supporting personal identity construction. Beats headphones are an example of desirability in a symbolic sense. To buy them is to say something about yourself. The Apple iPhone is a good but well-used example that we all recognize. At times, the PlayStation and the Nintendo gaming consoles were also desirable, creating a socially fired enthusiasm to obtain them. The Harry Potter books, Marvel films, and every now and again, various musicians have all been seen as desirable, and this has become a part of our culture as we look for the “next big thing.” The mechanisms for this seem unclear, but desirability feeds off a customer experience base, while also being spread by media and word of mouth to create blockbuster successes. But how does this play out in services? In the services world, the examples are not as frequent, since until recently we have not been able to use the self-identity aspects of services to promote ourselves. However, this has changed due to social media, so we can now broadcast our service use; services are now becoming desirable. Starbucks, for example, Virgin Atlantic, the Body Shop, the early Google search page, and even Uber have all had traits of desirability in which people actively expended energy to find and use them. More recently, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram have all been desirable to the extent that people put considerable effort into getting and using them.

Your goal as an organization is to understand what could make your service or product desirable, and design that into your solution. It usually involves a degree of innovation, some highly emotional return on investment, coupled with high symbolic value. As we will see in Chapter 9, it is often the underlying meaning that we find desirable, and understanding meaning and designing for it is vital to creating desirable experiences.

Design for Experience, and Why You Cannot Design Experiences

Now that you understand more about experience, this section describes how you can design for what defines an experience. Since this is a book about organizational structure, and not a book about designing experiences, the section is brief. However, I describe some key aspects of translating knowledge about experience into service offerings such as staging, orchestrating experiences, and storytelling. If this gives you an appetite for more, check out the Further Reading section in the Conclusion.

Only the Customer Can Tell You About Their Experiences

Experiences are personal and unique to each customer and experienced through mind and body. This sounds obvious, but it is a key point. Only by listening to customers can you understand their experiences. You cannot design experiences, but you can design for experiences. You might consider this a trivial difference, but from a design point of view, it is significant. Experiences are personal and lie within the customer. They may be collective and shared, but you can only design the context for where they happen and how they happen; you cannot design the experience itself. This has important implications for your innovation projects. First, you have to have some means to understand the experience from the customer perspective, which means having contact with customers. Second, you have to have an understanding of customer behavior, why customers do what they do, and why they experience what they experience. Finally, you have to be able to translate these pieces of knowledge for the customer’s context through design.

Customers Are Primed Through a Precise and Relevant Offering

Earlier in this chapter, one of the main themes was that humans act like scenario machines, producing multiple scenarios all the time about what might happen. In other words, we create expectations of the experiences we will have when we use a service. This allows us to assess the potential value of the service, and to be prepared for an expected experience when we come to use it. When designing services, you need to develop a precise and relevant offering to assist people with this scenario production—precise in terms of giving them experiential cues about how the service will feel, and relevant in terms of having a good fit with what they need and what they know about your organization (for example, from earlier interactions with you). Your offering therefore needs to be designed to help customers imagine scenarios regarding the experiential value that they should expect. It also should be designed so that during use, as they experience your service (through its touchpoints over time), they feel that they already know the service, thanks to this priming. Designing for the experience, then, means being able to clearly prime a customer and to precisely deliver on this priming through use.

We Tell Others Stories About Our Service Experiences

Since services are not tangible, we cannot show someone the service experience we’ve had. It is not like a car, a chair, a cup, or another physical product that we can present to people to admire its form, materials, and construction. There are plenty of magazines about furnishing a home, full of lovely photos, but few about services—because what would you be able to illustrate visually? It is difficult to show how uncomfortable my last flight was with Ryanair or how nice my trip was on the 14 bus in Copenhagen. But I can tell others about it as a story, in which I accentuate the emotions, the people, and what stood out (good or bad). So, when designing your service, you need to look for aspects that will make a good story: a dramaturgic curve, a cast, and carefully designed events that stick in the memory. If you design your service as prompts for a story, you will find that people use these cues to tell a story about it, and you then create a positive circle of experiences.

Pine and Gilmore use the phrase staging of experiences in their book The Experience Economy (Harvard Business Review Press), and I think this is a good metaphor for designing for experience. Think about it in a theatrical sense and you can design a stage for experiences, employ relevant actors, set the scene, and influence expectations­—but it is only at the moment of truth, the service delivery, that it is experienced by the customers.

Using Storytelling as Part of Experience Design

In the book This is Service Design Doing, by Marc Stickdorn et al. (O’Reilly), theatrical methods and the dramatic curve are described as design tools for experience design.

One company that subscribes to this idea is workplayexperience, which uses theatrical knowledge as a design tool. Formed by theatre personnel, it works to help develop storytelling as an approach to designing for memorable service experiences.

Giving Your Service Needs a Personality

Jennifer Aaker, daughter of brand guru David Aaker, has followed in her father’s footsteps and become a branding expert in her own right. She has spent a lot of time researching brand personality, and shown that services can be described as having a personality.13 We create meaning by giving human traits to services, and this helps us understand them.

In fact, services always have a personality, whether intended or not, and we often describe a service encounter using personality terms. As an organization you need to choose that personality beforehand, and implement it through the offering and the touchpoints.

Discussing the personality of a service is not common; many organizations just let it appear on its own, risking brand dilution and customer confusion. Take a few moments now and think about the personality of your service, and then consider whether your customers would agree with your description. If you don’t know how your customers view your personality, then go out and ask them. You will probably be surprised.

A personality makes it easier for a customer to adjust their expectations to the service, since it allows them to make connections to concepts and personalities they have encountered during their lives, which helps them navigate and use the service. It also helps members of a project team design service interactions, and it helps frontline employees understand how they should relate to customers. Chapter 7 goes into more detail about how the experience value proposition and your DNA can be translated into personality traits, personality, behavior, and tone of voice. These are key aspects that you can communicate in your offering and follow up on by designing for experience. A service personality allows us to create expectations, makes it easier and more comfortable for us to interact (since we already “know” part of the service), and makes it easier to communicate about the service afterward.

Give a Nudge and a Wink

When you are designing for experience, you need to combine the elements of nudging and winking. Nudging can be described as using behavioral insights to develop the way you present your offering through touchpoints.14 Winking, however, can be applied to the offering itself, in terms of developing an offering, personality, and tone of voice that together seduce the customer with experiences that they find desirable. This can be achieved through radical improvements in usability, utility, or pleasurability.

Both nudging and winking can and should be incorporated in the design of an offering, and they offer contrasting ways to provide memorable experiences. I will not go into great detail about nudging here, since there are many people better skilled than me who have written about it. What is important is that during the design phase, your team is aware of the potential of nudging to improve the customer experience.

Design for the Now and Then

When designing services, you need to design for the experience as it is being delivered and, at the same time, for how the service will be remembered afterward. The healthcare example modeled in Figure 6-3, shows how they are related, yet different. As you can see, the experience that the patient recounts during the journey is different from the ones later remembered. This is only natural, since during a medical procedure there is a high degree of uncertainty about the outcome, while afterward that uncertainty is generally resolved.

How we view the experience of withdrawing cash from an automatic teller machine will be different from the experience we recall afterward. Experiences during the journey can often relate to ease and pleasure of use, whereas before use, they relate to the desirability or attractiveness of the service offering, and afterward reflect the sum of experiences in relation to expectation. It is as if after an experience we do some form of emotional accounting about the service in which expectation, use, and result are integrated and stored away for later use (this, by the way, is why the Net Promoter Score is quite a useful measure, even though it has many weaknesses).

Mix Yourself to Some Desirability

Desire, as we have discussed, turns marketing on its head, since people seek you out, they talk about you, and they follow you. Designing for a desirable customer experience requires a unique mix of:

• Utility—what the service does
• Usability—how easy it is to do it
• Pleasurability—how it feels before, during, and after use

Desirability is the combination of these three basic ingredients that fits the unique characteristics of your organization—that is, your experiential DNA (see Figure 6-4). All products and services are a combination of these three aspects, and designing an offering demands an understanding of each. Utility focuses on the functional value that your service can give a customer. Usability focuses on ease of use. Pleasurability focuses on the feelings customers have before, during, and after they use a product or service.

Again, each project requires a unique combination of all three components, and it is necessary during the design process to discuss the mix that fits the project and your organization’s experiential DNA. This is fundamental to the project and should be settled at the start to avoid drift.

Look and Feel Are Important

Earlier I mentioned a book by Anjan Chatterjee called The Aesthetic Brain. It describes how getting pleasure from beauty is a universal trait we have from birth, and therefore the importance of beautiful design to experience should not be underestimated. Good design translates to memorable experiences, through the integration of utility, usability, and pleasurability. It primes us beforehand in terms of expectations, it helps us during use, and it weaves a red thread of beauty through everything we experience.

Strive for the Extraordinary Ordinary Experience

Good experiences deliver on an experiential promise. They do not have a superficial top layer, and they fit with the brand and the heritage of the organization. A memorable experience does not always mean entertainment. Let me introduce the “extraordinary ordinary” experience (Figure 6-5).

In their breakthrough book The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore discuss the entertainment value of experiences and how entertaining experiences contribute to a new kind of economic offering. Readers of the book unfortunately assumes that all experiences have to have entertainment value. While they were right to focus on the importance of experiences for the market, they were wrong to imply that experiences had to have entertainment value. This led to a huge surge in attempts to add some entertainment icing atop an ordinary service cake, rather than increasing efforts to understand what was the right experience for the service in question. Entertainment add-ons initiated a wave of advertising, often using text such as “enjoy the (product name) experience.” Common to all these services was an implied unique and memorable entertaining experience, and an inability to deliver on them. When you used these services, you were usually disappointed to find some uncoordinated design on top of a very average product.

This was the period of “premium mediocre experiences,” where a little icing on a very mediocre cake was sold as a premium or exciting experience. Customers saw through the hype, promises, and let downs. This resulted in customers questioning the very term experiential and realizing that delivery, not promise, is the key to value. So, do not ever, ever, ever consider adding entertainment as a top layer to your offering unless it fits well with your DNA. It doesn’t work, and it damages your reputation for longer than the short-term benefit it can give.

Researcher Mauricy Filho and I coined the term extraordinary ordinary experience to describe service experiences that have a high functional value but not necessarily entertainment value. Have you ever been to a garage to get your car repaired, and it all went so smoothly that you told others about it? Well, that’s an example of the extraordinary ordinary experience. These experiences just work, and work so well that they exceed your expectations. They deliver a little more, a little better, or a little more consistently because of their design. The little more is not entertainment, but perhaps functional benefits and ease of use. You remember such experiences because they just work really well.

The extraordinary ordinary experience is a memorable experience for an everyday product or service. We can plot experiences on a scale from the extraordinary ordinary experience to the extraordinary experience, which is a “wham bam wow” experience, highly experiential and emotional. But both types differentiate themselves by doing things exceptionally well.

Your job as an organization is to know yourself and your experiential DNA well enough to be able to place yourself on that continuum with confidence. Then, consider in which direction it is right for you to move along the scale. Should you add more richness to the experience, or should you pare it down to be more functional? This positioning is key for your future development and success, and does not always mean moving up the scale. As we have shown, many companies have great success from the extraordinary ordinary experience.

The Art of War/Love by Sun Tzu

Bear with me on this one: it’s one of those thoughts that take a bit of time to follow. When I was studying for my MBA, The Art of War was a text that many leaders related to. This was a time of hard business, after all, and the applicability of Sun Tzu’s wisdom was clear. One particular quote has stuck with me since then, because I have always been surprised by how many companies do not know themselves very well and it struck a chord with me:

If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

This morning, I was writing that hate and love are actually very close to each other, and how easy it can be for bad customer experiences to turn a customer against you. This made we wonder whether Sun Tzu’s wisdom could apply to something other than war, namely experience design. If, by extension, we can say war and love are closely connected, maybe his work could give insights into the art of love (because we know good experiences stimulate the same parts of the brain as love) If so, then he would probably have formulated that thought this way:

If you know the experience you want to give, and know yourself as an organization, you will never be imperiled from customers’ interactions; if you do not know the experience you want to give, but know yourself, you win some customers and lose some; if you do not know the experience you want to give, and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single interaction with a customer.

This makes sense to me, and it embodies the core elements of the wheel of experience centricity: knowing yourself (your experiential DNA) and the experience you want to give. Hopefully it makes sense to you too, and I can only hope that Sun Tzu is not turning in his grave at my attempt at making love, not war.

Avoid the Trap of the “Mediocre Premium” and “Premium Mediocre” Experience

We have all experienced these kinds of services, and they both underperform on experience. Premium mediocre services promise something over and above the mediocre, but do not deliver. Mediocre premium services deliberately position themselves in a premium category, charge a premium, and may superficially look like an exclusive service, but they basically just charge more and do not deliver on that promise. Both of these inhabit an unhappy valley of experience in which the promise does not add up to a better experience: one talks up a mediocre service, and the other positions a mediocre service in a category it does not belong in. What you get is really just a bad service with a few experiential aspects added. You might be tempted to do a quick makeover of a poorly functioning service to “add a bit of experience,” but don’t do it. Not only are you eroding your brand, but you are also creating unhappy customers. And, as I have already mentioned, unhappy customers leave you and tell many others about their disappointment. You are destroying value for what looks like a quick win, and it will take you a long time to come back from it.

Support Off-Script Experiences

If after reading about how we experience the world as scenarios, you thought about scripting your experiences as a way to create consistently good experiences, you’re thinking correctly, but you might still be on the wrong track if you script too tightly. Scripting the interaction with a customer is more common in the US than it is in the rest of the world, and as we discussed earlier, McDonald’s is probably the best example. There, the dialogue is carefully scripted, including the upsell to extra fries and the like. The advantages of this approach are that you gain strong consistency and the expectation/experience loop is carefully honed and steady. The disadvantage is that life is not a play, and many situations occur that require going off-script. When such occasions arise, following a script can detract from the experience.

But, as in many situations, a strength is also a weakness, since such a high degree of consistency does not make the experience memorable or delightful for the customer (Figure 6-6). To remain memorable organizations must continually update their offerings, so, over time, sticking to scripted consistency makes you vulnerable to other, more experiential opponents.

Succeeding with the Extraordinary Ordinary Experience

Two companies have achieved great success by designing, sticking to, and refining their extraordinary ordinary experiences: Amazon and easyJet. They just work, thanks to a conscious organizational effort to provide exactly the experience they do. We all know Amazon, and you would not judge their offering as high design or entertaining, but it works and it works well—each and every time.

easyJet is a large European budget airline that often competes with the lowest-price airline, Ryanair. But they compete using experience, and have worked relentlessly for years to fine-tune their extraordinary ordinary experience. Everything from easyJet’s advertising, through the email confirmation, to the pilot announcements supports the company’s experiential value proposition: youthful, free, and easy travel. Again, it works, and it works well. And the results show that it is paying off. Ryanair, their major competitor, issued two profit warnings in autumn 2017, and admitted last year that customers wanted not only low fares, but a decent flying experience as well. Ryanair’s outspoken chief executive Michael O’Leary admitted in November 2017 that easyJet “wiped the floor with us on the customer service front.”15 O’Leary doesn’t realize how much work he has ahead of him.