Experience Is the Product

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What Eastman knew, what Jobs knows, is that you have to go beyond; you have to think about the experience people are having.

Technology, Features, Experience

Products, necessarily, begin with the technology that makes them possible. And the introduction of a new technology is all that is needed to establish oneself in the market. When VCRs came on the consumer market in the late 70s, all that really mattered is that it did something you could never do before—record television shows so that you could play them back at a time of your choosing. It didn't matter that it took up a lot of space and didn't look pretty and wasn't particularly easy to use. It's the talking dog syndrome—the dog doesn't talk well, but all that matters is that it talks at all.

Eventually, though, competitors mimic your technology, and features become the important differentiator. You load your offering with more stuff, and it fills the product's packaging with bullet points. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, VCRs began loading up on functionality, things like VCR Plus, on-screen menus, various playback speeds, child locks, jog wheels, 21-day timers, the ability to record one frame at a time, and more. There's a reason the blinking 12:00 became the icon of poorly designed consumer electronics, and most folks used the VCR as simply a VCP—video cassette player, viewing whatever they rented.

At some point, product categories require a quantum evolution—beyond technology and features—to the satisfaction of a customer experience. The VCR begat the DVR, and TiVo, the leading DVR brand, is successful because they began with an experience mindset, and developed the product to suit that.

In some ways, it's unfair to compare TiVo with earlier VCRs, because the underlying technology is fundamentally different. But, like George Eastman did with his roll film, TiVo took a new technology (hard drive-based digital video recording) and didn't simply copy prior models, but applied an experience mindset that lead to a fundamental rethinking of people's relationship to television.

You Need An Experience Strategy

Now, Kodak, Apple, and Tivo are pretty hoary examples of success in product design. But they keep coming up because so few products work so well. And what unites these three are defining visions to orient their efforts toward.

At best, most product organizations have a list of requirements to meet, and, more typically, they simply have a set of features to develop. Designing and developing to requirements and feature lists leads to unsatisfactory experiences, because you're no longer oriented to the perspective of the user. As you make decisions along the way, your concerns for features, data, and technology trumps serving the customer. This is in large part because you have those requirements and feature lists in front of you, but nothing to represent the experiential point of view.

This is where experience strategy comes into play. As my colleague Jesse James Garrett has commented, experience strategy serves as "a star to sail your ship by." An experience strategy is a clearly articulated touchstone that influences all the decisions made about technology, features, and interfaces. Whether in the initial design process, or as the product is being developed, such a strategy guides the team and ensures that the customer's perspective is maintained throughout.

An experience strategy can take many forms. At heart it is a vision, an expression of the experience you hope customers will have. The ur-experience strategy is George Eastman's slogan for Kodak, "You press the button, we do the rest." As a description of the desired experience, it's not particularly soulful or nuanced—nothing poetic about capturing memories. But it oriented Eastman's delivery for an entire photographic system that supported this simple experiential goal.

Another option is to embody the experience strategy in some kind of prototype. A recent example, quickly becoming a classic, involves Deborah Adler's Masters Thesis in design school. Looking for a suitable subject, she found out that her grandmother had taken her grandfather's medication by mistake. She realized such mix-ups were too easy; prescription bottles used haphazard typefaces on labels affixed to curved surfaces that were hard to read. At first glance, all bottles from the same pharmacy look the same. Research showed her that 60% of people taking prescriptions have committed such errors.