Happy vs. Not Unhappy

A consideration: what we most often do in designing user experiences or customer service is not focused on making customers happy, but on reducing the degree to which they are made to be unhappy in the course of performing tasks necessary to select, obtain, and service a product.   That statement might seem like playing with words, but I have the sense there's more to it than that.

Western philosophy, going back to Aristotle and perhaps his predecessors, tends to prefer dichotomy: we define the phenomenon of "A" and begin with the perspective that all things are either "A" or "not A" and assume a continuum to exist between them - likened to magnetic charges where we can create a positive by reducing the negative, but things are not always thus.  In terms of happiness, this leads us to the perspective that there are two states of being - "happy" and "unhappy" - and that the way to influence another person's attitude and influence them to become happy can be achieved by negating their unhappiness.

Set aside the assumption of continuum for a moment to consider happiness and unhappiness as two distinct things, each unto themselves.  Rather than happy and unhappy representing the extremes of a continuum, such as the on/off states of a bulb or the degree to which a dimmer causes the bulb to shine, consider instead that the relationship of happiness and unhappiness is more akin to two separate bulbs, and the one that is brighter illuminates our perspective.   That is, it does not make the other one more or less bright, it simply outshines it.

Stretching the metaphor of the bulbs further: consider happiness to be a red bulb and unhappiness to be a blue one.  Our perspective, illuminate by these bulbs, is a shade of purple.   Decreasing current to the blue "unhappy" bulb causes our perspective to be rosier by decreasing its brightness but it does not cause the red "happy" bulb to be any brighter.

Increasing electricity to the red bulb has the same effect, but again without causing the blue bulb to be any dimmer - but it strikes me that, in terms of customer experience, this is not a common practice.  We presume that the customer's red bulb will be lit merely by obtaining the product (good or service) that we provide, and our work is focused on dimming the blue bulb or at the very least being attentive to the things that might brighten that bulb so that we might avoid doing them.

This begs the question as to whether the product we provide is, in fact, the red bulb, or merely a source of power to it.   For example, no-one who purchases an airline ticket is happy simply because they have a ticket, or the seat on the plane, or even the experience of travelling.  The red bulb they seek to light is being at their destination and the product we are selling is the means to achieve that end - and there appears to be nothing we can do to make them happier with the outcome, so we can only decrease the unhappiness they feel with the process.

However, it's also worth considering that happiness often pertains to the emotional experience of achieving a goal rather than the emotional state as a result of having achieved it.   Consider another example: a person who has won a thousand dollars at gambling.  The "high" they feel while they are playing the game and winning is substantially stronger than the emotions they might have after cashing in their chips and holding a stack of fifty twenty-dollar bills.

I'd posit that if they derive any pleasure at all in having the money, it is because they are imagining what they can obtain from spending it - which is to say that such a person is still in the process of goal-achievement, not at the destination.   So if she were to spend that money on a piece of jewelry, the happiness she feels in owning it is significantly less than that she felt in the pursuit.  In fact, after a few years, she might find that she very seldom wears the item - it has ceased to give her happiness.

In such instances, we find the notion that material things do not create happiness - that we enjoyed the idea of obtaining it, and derived happiness from the process of obtaining it, and our possession of it is merely a by-product of this activity.  While the product may have initially given us some happiness of ownership, that fades quickly.  And it may well be that the happiness we derive from material things is merely a remembrance of the emotional state we were in during the act of pursuit - just as the gambler in this example might enjoy wearing the jewelry because it reminds her of the thrill of winning the cash she then used to purchase it.

But I think I've gone a little too far down this rabbit-hole, and need to drag myself back to the intended topic: whether what we do as customer experience practitioners is focused on increasing happiness or decreasing unhappiness - and I think I can stand firmly on the earlier point.  As practitioners we seek to make customers happy, but were are in fact merely decreasing the influence of the factors that make them unhappy.

I'm not yet ready to meditate the topic of how to create happiness, as I must admit that the preponderance of my training and experience has focused on "reducing unhappiness."   I've got some studying to do, likely quite a bit.