What is Experience Design?
I got married five years ago at a summer camp in the Rocky Mountains. It was within a 2–3 hour drive for our families and our hometowns, but we knew our SF friend family (our framily!) could afford the grand adventure of flying in, renting cars and journeying to the mountains. Everyone rented cabins, hiked, drank and spent time bonding and playing away from wifi and urban distractions. Our rehearsal dinner had an impromptu concert, a bonfire and bourbon-fest. Some of us had a little more bourbon than others…
The wedding day itself was all about pulling in little details of our life, from our shared Colorado roots to our life together in San Francisco. Guests waved ribbons the color of the Golden Gate Bridge and my family hand made coasters from downed aspen trees in our yard with the bridge stamped on them. My dad even processed 150 tiny jars of honey from his backyard beehives and my mom and I filled each one and tied a ribbon on top. Instead of cake we had donuts so I could fulfill my dream of everyone hitting the dance floor with a craft beer in one hand and a donut in the other. Every single detail from signage to favors was considered and in the end, we’ve heard it was the best wedding many of our guests had ever been to. It certainly was for us. But for me, something else was born that day (aside from, you know, marriage) and it was a deep obsession with how we gather and plan experiences.
According to my great mentor, Jenny Sauer-Klein, experience design is the art of creating transformational human-to-human experiences built on meaningful connections and collaborative learning. And she would know, she’s a pioneer in this emerging field that people are only lately beginning to understand.
Experience Design vs. Instructional Design
I used to call myself an instructional designer. I can teach people stuff, I thought. I’d been traveling the globe teaching public speaking skills for several years at a previous company, and then became a manager where I adapted our core training for different companies, audiences and cultures around the world. It was the most fun I’d had at work, and yet…I was itching to do more. Create more, learn more, teach more. So I went solo, billing myself as an instructional designer who could adapt content, shine it up, rearrange it and make it better. But that was just it…it stopped at content. What about how people enter? The music? The breaks? The overall connective tissue that drives aha moments, laughter, emotion and makes people walk away with that experience in their bones?
I learned a valuable lesson in billing myself this way: instructional designers are great content shapers. Experience designers, on the other hand, are looking at the big picture and zooming in all tiny details, both. I thought instructional vs. experience design was about semantics, but turns out, it’s like the difference between playing a single instrument vs. conducting the whole orchestra.
Experience Design vs. Event Design
As you might now see, an experience designer has more in common with a wedding planner than they do other L&D roles or instructional design. It’s about using your event or experience to tell a story. In wedding planning, the story is the couple getting married. In experience design, the story is whatever creative intent and purpose of your experience is.
I’ve designed a 3-day manager bootcamp for a military-inspired nonprofit where the creative intent is about helping managers see themselves as leaders and culture carriers. Everything from music to activities to printed materials is in service of that goal: you are more than “just” a manager.
I’ve also designed a 3-hour workshop for the creative team of a globally known outdoor clothing company to help them reconnect and get inspired after a big move and some tough personnel changes. Again, from the location to the snacks to the crazy art supplies on the table, the creative intent was to share this: it’s time to reconnect, create and move forward.
Experience designers and event designers share a common goal in that they’re working on both the visuals and the emotionals. How things look AND how they feel. Both are key.
Experience Design vs. Product Design
As I write about in The Art of the Experience, good design is just good design. From brainstorm to concept to doing the work, true design principles can carry a designer whether they are designing rides and robots or events and people. Like product design, the experience needs to exist for a purpose, have theming and a story, use perspective and motion to draw people in, and make it experiential so people walk away with a wow, not a “whew, glad that’s over.”
A lot of corporate workshops and trainings leave money on the table. And by “money” I mean emotional capital: people’s attention span, ability to focus, engage and care. They also lose the trust of their employees that the training will be worth their time. If you repeatedly design trainings only around the content you want to say, instead of how you want people to feel and experience the content, it’s tough to recover from. I honestly believe that no training is better than a bad one because bad training wastes time and spends down emotional capital a little more each time.
After being married for five years, there are still little tweaks I’d go back and make to our wedding day. And I have to thank that experience, stressful though it was at the time, for teaching me that being obsessed with gathering is not only a useful focus for planning a great party, but it can actually be my life’s work. From bourbon bonfires and donuts, to building kickass workshops for adults, experience is truly everything.
Curious to know more about what an experience designer can do for you? Reach out and say hey!
