Experience Design as Competitive Advantage

Too often, the elements of design are regarded as decorative features: the value of the product is in its functional benefits and designers merely pick what color it should be painted to make it pretty.   Historically, companies could get away with considering design as a cosmetic trifle, but the nature of competition in the present day requires design to be taken far more seriously.

The Evolution of Competition

Many companies seem to acknowledge that the nature of competition is undergoing a significant change, but few seem to fully grasp the nature of this change and the consequences it will have.   In a historical context, we are on the verge of a the third significant shift.

The first shift occurred with the industrial revolution, when many products became available to markets for the first time.   There wasn’t very much competition to speak of.  Producers merely needed to find a need that was not being served and fashion a product to serve it, and the customer’s choice was to buy their product or do without (or more accurately, to continue doing for themselves, as people in that age were capable of getting along without the conveniences and luxuries that we presently consider to be necessary).

The second shift was more subtle.  It occurred in the mid-twentieth century, when multiple firms were providing very similar products.  Competition in this era required a firm to position its product as being better than the others that were available, but the customer’s choice was still essentially binary: to choose a product that had the features they most desired, or make do with one that wasn’t quite as good.   Or when there was no significant difference, "cheaper" became the means of competition.

The third shift is taking place right now.  And while it is on hiatus during the financial crisis that is dampening the world marketplace, it will return with renewed ferocity when that storm has passed.  In this competition, there is no longer a distinction between the products because the negotiation over features has been so thoroughly hashed out that most products are more or less identical and any differentiating feature that has appeal will be cloned quickly by competitors.  As such, competition has moved away from the product itself, and toward the experience of the consumer as a differentiating factor.


Experience as Both Benefit and Cost

The concept of experience is fairly new to most companies: they seem to recognize that the few firms that are evolving ahead of the rest are doing something different to win customer preference, but can't quite grasp what it is, or fathom the rationale behind it.  That is, they may have heard the word “experience” but have only a vague notion of what it means, and it doesn’t help that many of the firms that seem to be getting it right are doing such a haphazard job.

One of the factors that muddles the concept of “experience” is that it does not fall neatly onto one side or the other of the cost-benefit dichotomy, but entails components of both.   As such, firms that consider experience in terms of the benefit of a product overlook its application in terms of cost, and vice-versa.

The experience of a product is not synonymous to the benefit of using a product, though that is a major factor in overall satisfaction.   The benefit of using a product is generally objective and historical, insofar as it can readily be witnessed that the product did the job that was intended to do after using it, and commoditized products are more or less equal in their ability to satisfy the basic functional requirements of the buyer.   The experience of using a product is subjective, and it is more difficult to measure the degree to which the customer (and not the seller) feels that the product to have met their expectations and served their needs while causing them the least inconvenience possible.  The word "feel" is significant - it's not a quantifiable assessment of specific an observable things that the product did or failed to do, but a matter of the emotions that arose within the user, which is a very slippery matter.

In addition to the assessment of benefits, experience also pertains to the cost of acquiring and using a product, in terms of the difficulty of the acquisition process.   This is generally easier to recognize, as the online channel has made firms aware of user behavior on a very granular level – every click or keystroke can be logged and analyzed to determine where the user departed prematurely from an acquisition flow.

Unfortunately, this is a superficial, simplistic, and thoroughly incomplete means of assessing user experience: it fails to measure the difficulty of finding the product in the first place, fails to consider any task aside of the shopping and purchasing phase (the customer must also take delivery of the item and put it to use), and fails to consider the subjective impression of the user, assuming that if they got through the task at all, they are happy about it.


Experience: More Than Paint and Polish

This considered, the user’s experience of a given company’s product is a much broader and deeper concept than the cosmetic elements of the physical appearance – and unless the product is a fashion item that is conspicuously consumed, the customer may be entirely indifferent to the superficial elements of the product’s design.

And so to clarify, the competition over customer experience is not a beauty contest, and experience design is not limited to the superficial aspects of a product’s design: it pertains to subjective impression and intangible qualities – which makes it much more difficult to assess.   But given that it is becoming the sole means why which providers of commoditized products may compete for competitive advantage in the marketplace, the consideration of experience must be more than skin deep.