In my first post, I talked about a travel experience and about ensuring all parts of a person’s experience work together to create a high quality experience. Most articles on experience use examples that make it seem like only expensive or luxury brands can achieve great experience. Starbucks and Nordstrom are often provided as examples – and they are good ones. But, great experiences aren’t limited only to the high end. Designing a great experience is about understanding the person who will be having the experience and what they are looking for. So, different kinds of experiences can be provided for different people in different contexts.
Maybe another travel example can help illustrate what I mean. Thousands of people every year travel to Disney World. Disney has many places for guests to stay, ranging in price from the Fort Wilderness campground to the Grand Floridian. While the atmosphere and theme of each resort is different, the same type of attention to detail is used to design and deliver the lodging portion of a person’s Disney experience.
Not every business wants or needs to focus on experience design. There are other strategies available. Choosing to deliver great experiences is a strategic business decision. The goal of creating a better experience is to have customers that are more loyal; more willing to come back for more and to recommend us to their friends, family, and co-workers. By providing a great experience, a company’s brand may be strengthened. The brand doesn’t make the experience but experiences can make the brand.
To achieve a great experience requires people to work together toward a common purpose, to have a process in place that helps them achieve that goal, to design every element from a person-centric point of view, to be able to measure and improve the experience, and to be well trained, able, and eager to deliver.
So, when we talk about designing an experience, we are talking about creating the elements that come together to hopefully engage people in a positive way; enabling them to achieve something they want to need to do. We are enabling people to enter an interactive story. For a travel company, the story might be ‘I am the person who makes our family’s dreams come true by arranging a vacation to somewhere exciting.’ A software security company might enable the story of ‘I am the one who ensures the business runs smoothly by keeping computers available and protected.’
Experience design is focused on providing an appropriate and engaging experience that is appropriate to what people want and need. They key isn’t the price point, but the approach of designing each aspect and attention to detail to get them to hold together as one experience rather than a collection of independent pieces.
What examples have you seen where great experience has been provided at different price points? I would love to hear your story.