Design and Experience

If you seek information about design from professional educators, or read the blogs of the unemployed, you will quickly get the sense that design is about art and experience.  A designer crafts objects that give pleasure to those who use them, either through the aesthetic experience of through ease of use and ideally a combination of both.   

None of this is wrong – but neither does it consider why it is important to deliver a pleasurable experience, or more aptly, the importance of the usage experience in the greater context.   It would seem axiomatic that users would prefer a pleasant experience to an unpleasant one (though there are in fact instances where people actually desire an arduous experience, this situation is atypical), the point of using something is rarely to enjoy the user experience, but to achieve an outcome by means of that experience.   

Where the quality of outcome is diminished to facilitate the pleasure of the user experience, then it undermines the purpose of undertaking the task at all.   In this sense, focusing on experience to the detriment of efficiency and effectiveness leads to ultimate failure: we enjoy the process of performing the task, but fail to achieve the outcome for which the task is undertaken – or at best, we achieve an inferior outcome.   In smaller words, design for experience alone results in an easy way to do a poor job.

There are few instances in which experience is the sole reason for undertaking a task – and these are all leisure activities that are done for the pleasure of doing them, not for the sake of achieving a desired outcome.   That is, they are entertainment activities, that have no value after their performance has ended.  Because there is no outcome, or the outcome is entirely unimportant, the experience is all that matters.  But this encompasses very few activities, and those activities are of very little importance.

Here, consider that value is subjective and that each person may seek a different value from the experience he is performing.  One person may play recreational softball because he enjoys the experience of playing, whereas another may play because he wishes to socialize with his teammates and not care about the game at all, and still a third may be seeking for psychological reasons to win the local league championship.   Whether they are ultimately pleased with a game, or the entire season, depends on whether the value they sought was delivered.

And this is where experience must focus on the user rather than the object: to design a solution that provides value, one must research the users to know what value they seek. For some, it is the value of the experience, but for most it will likely be the value of the outcome.   To claim to “design” without knowing what end is to be achieved is contrary to the basic principles of design itself.