Experience Thinking™
Experience Thinking™, XT or X Thinking™ is founded on User Centered Design (UCD) practises and the notion that an Experience in itself is of customer & user value: not only the aggregated underlying services, software and products.
XT provides the blueprint for an organisations' experience-creation strategy and design cultures that enables product & service innovations to be truly remarkable.
An experience includes these basic elements: Product, Software, Event and Service. All of which happen within a Physical Environment. So when Akendi talks about creation of an intentional experience any and all of these elements are considered and designed.
The first 4 Elements in X Thinking™
The first four elements of X Thinking™ cover Business, Service, Content and Technology.
The business element of each experience is for companies to deliver customer and user value to the organisation, usually monetary, but in case of public service and non-profit organisations it can be fullfilling the mandate or reaching a relevant audience. These customer/user values will have an audience externally and this is where the service aspect of experiences enters. The service experience for customers and clients of products links each touchpoint customers/clients have with the organisation. To understand, design for and optimize this journey is absolutely critical for successful experiences.
Next up is the content aspect of an experience. Included in Content experience is production, governance, editorial guidelines, search engine optimization, retention and metadata of information in products & services. With more and more information around us that is either provided by an organisation or created by users, it becomes increasingly important to have specific governance, strategies and processes around how to work with the information & content. This X thinking™ applies both from an organisational perspective as from an general public, customer and user perspective.
The fourth aspect is the role of technology in experience thinking and usually acts as an enabler of the above three aspects. Here is where boundaries are placed around what technology-wise can be done in the real world with the resources available. It also injects the relevant functionality to, again, enable the other three aspects of an experience.
All four are foundational elements in X thinking and failing to give them sufficient attention and resources has a direct impact on the overall value of the experience you deliver.
Second 4 Elements in X Thinking™: Intentional Experience Creation
The second set of elements of X Thinking are four phases: Strategy, Research, Design and Testing. They follow our Intentional Experience Creation Process™:
- create an Experience Strategy (why this product & service, what challenge does it address, envision options and identfiy challenges),
- conduct sufficient Experience Research (what is the customer space, does a customer see value in the solution, what is out there already, how would the solution be used by end users),
- sketch and Design the experience (how to deliver to the challenge) and finally
- Experience Test the outcome (where did we miss the mark, what needs to happen to meet our success metrics) in an iterative fashion.
So that by the time we go to manufacturing, engineering and finally launch, we will have sufficiently de-risked the product & service experiences.
The key thinking at this point is that no matter whether we talk about business, human, content or technology; each strand will have a strategy, research & design component and will be tested before we make a major capital investment in manufacturing and/or (software) engineering.
For organisations that want to create succesful, intentional experiences, a good process will include the appropriate attention to these elements.
Let's Talk!
Reach us at contact@akendi.com or 01223 853907 for questions and more information about how we help optimize your user experience design, customer experiences, digital product design or wayfinding design.
