Experience Is the Product

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Her thesis project, named SafeRX, reconceptualized the pharmacy bottle, incorporating modern typefaces, visual hierarchy, color coding, and improved bottle design. Shopping it around after graduation, she found an interested suitor in Target. Working with Klaus Rosburg at Sonic Design, the initial concepts turned into ClearRX.

You've probably heard this story before, but what's rarely stressed is the importance of the vision embedded in her original SafeRX design. It served as an experience strategy—a guiding light for all those developing the systems that would eventually make the bottle work. When changes needed to be made, it was always with an eye to how to maintain the experience. For instance, Adler's initial concept involved color-coding the labels, to distinguish the medication of each family member. When color printing proved too costly, the idea was maintained through colored rings affixed to the bottle's neck.

Experience strategies also come in the form of mission statements. Mission statements don't have to be dreadful—it's just that most are. The photo sharing service Flickr arrived in 2004, at a moment of surprising complexity in the world of digital photography. Sales of digital cameras had surpassed film cameras, hard drives were loading up with images, cameraphones were everywhere, some people wanted prints, others just wanted to email, others wanted to start photo blogs.

Flickr emerged as an interface to this complex system, coordinating components that had been built separately, tying them together in its giant database.

Flickr's meteoric rise is now legendary. But, given the potential chaos that surrounds the service, it offers remarkable coherence in its experience. How does it not fracture?

Flickr is driven by explicit experience strategy. Two in fact, written right there on its About Page:

1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.

2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.

In support of the first goal is this very telling sentence: "To do this, we want to get photos into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users' home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their photos." Flickr understands that you have a collection of tools that you're using, and has no desire to replicate their functionality—it wants to capitalize on their functionality to offer new opportunities for sharing.

Actually, Flickr does want to replicate, or rather, surpass, the functionality of one kind of existing tool—photo management software. Flickr recognized that existing management tools are stuck in outmoded ways of considering pictures—rolls and albums. When faced with hundreds or thousands of photos, new means are necessary. And since no one else was stepping up, they did. Their experience strategy drove new offerings, such as tagging, photo sets, groups, and maps.

Stop Designing Products

When you start with the idea of making a thing, you're artificially limiting what you can deliver. The reason that many of these exemplar's forward-thinking product design succeed is explicitly because they don't design products. Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about.

Provided by Core77—The Industrial Design Supersite