Lately, due in large part to what Karl Long's been writing about, I've been thinking about the connection between brand and experience design.
On Sunday, Karl proposed what I think is a great definition of strategic Experience Design:
Strategic Experience Design is the orchestration of a company's (and partners') behaviors, communications, environments and products to serve a customer across multiple tasks/activities/contexts.
The behaviors, communications, environments and products bit comes from Wally Olins, who proposed that those are the four ways a stakeholder can experience an organization's brand.
So, having seen Hugh Dubberly speak at BayCHI earlier this month, I set to sticking Ollins' four aspects into Dubberly's model and came up with this:
I like Karl's definition because it avoids the oh-so-problematic issue of not being able to design experiences because experiencing is in people. By which, I mean that experiences are shaped by perceptions and vice versa.
I also like that it separates tactical from strategic Experience Design.
Since Karl's post to Paula Thornton's experience design group on Yahoo this Sunday, it's now clear that Experience Design is an appropriate name for the strategic orchestration of a company's behaviors, communications, environments and products.
Tactical Experience Design is no different than User-Centered Design and since we can't actually design experiences, we should only use Experience Design to refer to the work of "strategic orchestration." We should use User-Centered Design to refer to all that other wonderful stuff we do.
I think this is important, so let me be perfectly clear that all the ideas in this post came from Hugh Dubberly, Wally Olins and especially from Karl Long. I just stuck them together.
I hope this is useful. Let me know what you think.
Comments (10)
1. jess had this to say on April 22, 2003:
Hey Brad,
I like it, but I'm not sure about the relegation of "Name" to Brand and little else. Branding practitioners I've worked with are far more concerned about image, personality, communication etc. than just naming or logotypes.
Now, I'm assuming that this separation comes from Hugh's model...but any thoughts yourself?
2. karl had this to say on April 22, 2003:
I agree, the one thing that I was thinking about was that brand actually represents "promise", it is experience that fulfills that promise and builds equity in a brand. One problem is how that promise is communicated, you could also say that happens through product, communication, behaviour and environment.
I did some edits to the diagram as this is hard to explain extending-dubberly-v02.png
3. Brad Lauster had this to say on April 22, 2003:
Hi Jess,
You're right, in the full poster of Hugh's model, symbols represent the name, which represents the brand, which is built through perception, so, there is quite a bit more feeding into brand than just the name.
Your mention of branding practitioners is interesting though because, if I remember correctly, Hugh made a distinction between Brand and Branding in his BayCHI presentation. Obviously, there is more to brand than name, but allow me to suggest that the correlation between Brand and Branding is the analogue of the correlation between Experience Design and User-Centered Design (as I suggested above, in the original entry).
Maybe I'm reaching and the relationship isn't as analogous as I want it to be?
I should also mention that just after I made the original entry, Karl posted some more thoughts suggesting differences between User-Centered Design and (tactical) Experience Design that seemed to make sense, so I'll have to ponder this a bit more.
I hope it doesn't keep me up all night. :-)
4. experience curve had this to say on April 24, 2003:
When is it experience design? When is it user centered design? When is it design? Strategic Experience design: the process used to define the overarching strategy that would drive or inform the orchestration of the organizations products, behaviors, co...
Read more in defining experience design »
5. Jonathan had this to say on April 28, 2003:
Brad, great thoughts on a topic that is not easy to sort out to be sure. I have made some comments is reaction to your post on my site that I hope you will check out...
Diary of a Superfluous Man
6. George Olsen had this to say on April 28, 2003:
Actually, if you substitute "brand identity" for "name" you get pretty close to the aspects of Hugh's model, in terms that are familiar to most people.
I like Karl's notion of the promise, but I'm not sure it works as diagrammed because brands are _both_ promises and experience one has in the delivery of that promise.
But if we substitute "branding" (brand identity plus other promise-making stuff, i.e. advertising, PR campaigns, sponsorships, etc. -- in other words the "conventional" view of branding) instead of "brand" then Karl's diagram starts working.
Brand folks do still tend to focus on branding vs. the larger notion of brand (even when they give lip service to it), largely I suspect because most brand thinking comes from consumer products.
The ideas about how to brand services are much less developed -- and what we do with UX/ED has a lot more to do with services. (Even if we make products, since they're much more interactive than a box of detergent, they act more like services.)
7. karl had this to say on April 28, 2003:
Thanks George,
yes i think Branding is a good distinction and is exactly how I was thinking about it when I stuck brand in the diagram. I actually think about brand mostly as symbolizing promise, but I think your branding distinction works well to clarify, branding has become such a behemoth it's hard to see where it begins and where it ends.
One of my major stands is that branding should be about communicating promise and (Strategic) Experience Design should be about delivering that promise.
8. Andrew had this to say on May 1, 2003:
Two points: I wonder if "orchestrating" is really the term I'd want to use to describe my work. The person who ordinarily "orchestrates" is the conductor: a person who is largely directing the creative work of others, and whose contribution is largely one of interpretation. I don't want to manage, I want to make. Does this definition of Experience Design include only the senior level, decision-making, orchestrators in a company, or does it include those of us in the trenches?
Second, the question I practically have in an auto-responder: where are the examples? Can anyone please use a real-world example when discussing these ideas? Any company or place or product you'd care to mention? One that you've *worked on.*? This whole ED scene is getting to be the worst kind of academic theorizing, totally wrapped up in definitions and abstractions, and rarely seems to be able to give concrete, existing examples of actual experience design.
This is extremely worrying, not because there aren't great examples all around us, but because I think it means that *none of us are involved in creating those real examples.*
9. karl had this to say on May 5, 2003:
Good questions Andrew, I would totally agree with your first point, that is the purpose of trying to seperate different types of experience design. You practice Experience Design at a a hands on implimentation/tactical level, When I was talking about orchestration I was talking about *Strategic* Experience Design, where the over all direction might be set for multiple products and services.
As for examples of companies that succesfully practice *strategic* Experience Design I would suggest you think about Apple, Amazon, Google, Virgin, W-hotels, Gap.
It is unlikely that these companies call it Strategic Experience Design, it's probably a combination of brand management being closly linked with design mangement and operations.
10. Noel Green had this to say on May 8, 2003:
As a designer who does a lot of branding and identity work this was a fantastic post! I will totally share this with the others in our agency! And as a "representational thinker" it was a fabulous post as well! (I'm aware I'm using all exclamation marks btw... I mean them is all.) How true that our perceptions tint our experiences and vice versa. It's very "Matrix" sounding (now-a-days at least) but it's true.
We only know what something is because we've defined it that way, and our definitions are based solely on our experiences. There are very few "mass" or even less "global" experiences. Being born... having relationships... fear, love, emotions in general, but many of these are completely different for each and every person! Not to sound "churchy" but Jesus was the best representational thinker ever. (I wonder why?