The words experience, user experience, customer experience get thrown around a lot. Let’s explore them a bit more.
Experience design is built upon a philosophy that for the most part hasn’t been explored or explicated. I’ll try to do that a little more here.
Experience is best covered in phenomenology: the study of the structures of conscious experience. There’s way more to phenomenology than that simple definition can capture but it’s a good starting point.
Orienting Ourselves to “Experience”
Experience is often used in our language without afterthought, caught in sentences like “What was your experience like?” which can be applied to just about anything, however, I want to make a point early on: products are not experiences. Products, in and of themselves, are mere objects, artifacts. They need to be interacted with to produce an experience, that is, experience requires an experiencer, thus, interaction as a process (between object and experiencer) is the principal of experience design.
Immediately, this becomes more complex than thinking of only artifacts. Since interactions and experiences necessarily involve human beings, considerations of relationships must be made: intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, cultural, economic, political, etc.
Let’s pause for a moment. Does our mere defining something as experience constitute an experience? For instance, imagine the following (brief) hypothetical conversation:
“What did you think about that experience?”
“What experience?”
Are we to consider all happenings to be experiences even if they weren’t encoded or categorized as experiences? Again, must we be aware of an experience as an explicit event to appreciate it? Are we venturing too close to Wittgenstein? (If a lion could speak…)
Some have already ventured into this territory. Ian Coxon reminds us that “for this experience to become a unit that can be studied and understood, it must have a defined beginning and end” and that “everyday experience is continuous, seamless, and endless, and that we are simply trying to understand one small unit of it.”
John Dewey also noted the difference between mindful and prosaic experiences, furthering the argument that there is a real difference and that demarcations can be made.
An experience has a unity that gives it its name,[…]. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts.(Dewey, 1934)
I keep getting stuck on words because they’re inherently categorical whereas our experience of conscious awareness is continuous. It may be helpful to introduce Bohm here, especially since we’re actively coding, categorizing, and separating phenomena through the words we use…
…wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole than man, with his fragmentary approach will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response (Bohm, 1980)
Our experience, not our words, is continuous. Language is at least partially to blame for our fragmented approach to the world, however, this may be more of a function of our preconscious categorizing and pattern making (Kant).
So although we talk about experiences as categorical, independent events, they’re really experienced continuously.
Here’s another definition
Experience and the succession of events within experience are thus the substance of which subjective time is generated and measured by the brain.(Rossman and Duerden, 2019)
J. Robert Rossman and Matthew D Duerden, in their book *Designing Experiences, *delineate an experience from a service “in that it requires the customer to be consciously engaged and the engagement is sustained through volitional actions of the participant.”
That is, the experience must be recognized as such and I’ll argue (with the support of Rossman and Duerden) that it doesn’t even have to occur at the same time. Max Van Manen would agree in that he not only considers experience as something that is lived phenomenally but something that is given meaning and “recognize[d] as a particular type of existence.”
We often reflect on experiences later.
Consciousness, Attention, & Experience
This sets up an interesting dichotomy: experiences that kids have at Disney and the experiences individuals have at the DMV are vastly different, not just in how they’re assessed after the fact, but how they are experienced moment-by-moment. I’m proposing that this isn’t just a subtle difference; there are different levels of awareness of experience as a process in each example. Enter engagement: the less an individual is engaged the more of their cognitive capacity can be dedicated to assessing rather than experiencing. All of this begs an interesting question…
Although assessing something is a phenomenological process itself, is it an experience? Here’s what Coxon says…
An experience that we have is always our phenomenal experience, and the meaning we ascribe to an experiential event is always a mental construct that is uniquely ours. When we talk about our phenomenal view we understand that it (including the perceptions we develop out of it) is continually changed (shaped) by our interactions with the world through our experience of it, and so the cycle continues.(in Benz 2015).
(We should also remember that the Latin experiri (to try or to attempt) “denotes active engagement.”). Furthermore…
Experience is a unique interactional phenomenon resulting from conscious awareness and reflective interpretation of experience elements that is sustained by a participant, culminating in personally perceived results and memories (Rossman and Duerden, 2019, my emphasis).
Are health inspectors really experiencing the wonders of Disney? Is the experience a child has at Disney categorically different or is it a matter of degree? Basically, how does presence tie into how we define an experience? Rossman and Duerden help us out by stating that experience, as a phenomenon, usually contains three phases: anticipation, participation, and reflection, and that…
An experience differs [from a service] in that it requires the customer to be consciously engaged and the engagement is sustained through volitional actions of the participant…In its simplest form, experience is consciousness of ongoing interaction.
I briefly touched on reflection previously. For Rossman and Duerden, they include reflection into their definition of experience, however, their verbiage isn’t as clear. Take, for instance, the sentence “The reflection phase is especially relevant after you experience something very negative or very positive.” This suggests that reflection happens (as I noted earlier) after an experience. I would make the argument that reflection is part and parcel to experience but differs from the phenomenological experience itself.
We both conclude that reflection is a necessity, that is, we have to subjectively distinguish between normal happenings and experiences. An experience I have at a coffee shop must be encoded as unique so that I can talk about it.
Let’s bypass this philosophical spider’s web for a moment.
Actor-Network Theory & the Composition of Experiences
Actor-network theory is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans…it can more technically be described as a “material-semiotic” method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic.
This theory provides a very interesting and appropriate lens to view human experiences. As I hinted above, we have to consider the many aspects of human experience when designing commercial/practical experiences. (This seems particularly daunting given that in all scientific disciplines, our goal has been to understand, describe, and predict causality and relationships; as experience designers — as human beings — we aren’t equipped to map out all of these relationships between humans and objects/institutions/processes, much less at a level of personalization.)
The part I would like to focus on is the “constantly shifting networks of relationships.” We should not look at designing experiences as putting human beings into different contexts while expecting them to behave the same as if they are isolated individuals, where their behavior can be understood in a vacuum; behavior can only be understood in context, therefore we should understand how our customers (users, consumers, etc.) respond to the constructed environment and experience.
Central to this process is understanding how the customer is orienting themselves to the problem/product/service/experience. Indeed, “interactions between the participant and the elements of the experience co-create a variety of potential results-driven largely by the participant's perceptions and reactions in the experience. Moreover…
[Designing experiences] requires more than simply giving lip service to the importance of customer service. [It] requires an intentional, tested process to create experiences that will lead participants through a sequence of interactions across all three experience phases, interactions that produce results desired by the participant and intended by the experience designer.
What if you had planned and created an experience assuming that your customers had the same orientation to the problem (or solution) as you did. What if you thought that everyone wanted to be greeted by a professional salesperson who was going to help guide them on their denim-buying adventure but instead everyone was much happier if you left them alone but provided them with support that wasn’t overbearing or salesy?
Objectivity/Subjectivity, Phenomenology, & Ontology
What we can’t escape is the individuality of subjectivity. Both the child and health inspector are having an experience, however, they’re obviously not the same. This ultimately leads to arguments between ontology and phenomenology, phenomenology arguing that any knowledge must recognize a knower thus introducing a relationship between knower, object, and “objective knowledge.” (See Varela, Thompson, Rosch).
If experience is subject to our ontological view of it, then how we understand it will also be subject to the epistemological framework we apply to understanding it. (Coxon in Benz, 2015)
The best metaphor I have comes from quantum physics.
We cannot isolate subatomic particles and see their “objective nature” because their environment includes us as an observer; our observation affects the environment.
There is no getting around this.
Similarly, we cannot “objectively” know human nature void of context; behavior can only exist, indeed even make sense within a context. I no longer view human behavior as static. Instead, I think of human behavior (species) as a range of possibilities that are more or less likely depending on the context and environment. Going even further, I see individual behavior taking up a subset of the range of all potential human behaviors, our actions ultimately determined by the environment, the individual actor, and phylogeny.
So in regards to consciousness and experience…
“…consciousness and the interactions inherent to achieving it are fundamental to understanding how we related to the world we know…there are varying degrees of consciousness; these varying degrees of attention and resulting variations of engagement with objects and events influence the intensity of the resulting experience. This variation provides a continuum of consciousness (Rossman & Duerden, 2019).
This makes sense. Consciousness is fundamental to knowledge: you have to have a knower for something to be known. Therefore, truth depends on who knows it. Coxon echoes this…
We contend[…]that experience is always phenomenal and therefore co-experience is literally and theoretically unattainable. What we are really describing is an episode of interaction or communication between two people about or in a similar event space. That is not the same thing and really cannot be described as “co-experiencing.”
We would not understand the lion.
References
Benz, Peter. (2015). Experience Design: Concepts and Case Studies. London; New York: Bloomsbury.
Bohm, David. (1980). *Wholeness and the Implicate Order. *London; New York: Routledge
Dewy, John. (1934). Art as Experience. New York, NY: Berkley Publishing Group.
van Manen, Max. (1997). *Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. *2nd edition. London; Ontario: Althouse Press.
Rossman, J. Robert., Duerden, Matthew D. (2019). *Designing Experiences. *New York: Columbia University Press.