Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Saiful Nasir

“Do you also look at other experiences, not just the experience of the customer?”

I was asked this whilst interviewing a potential candidate to come on board my company. What struck me was throughout the interview, I mentioned the customer’s experience as a pillar, however not once did I mention that in order to deliver a great customer experience, we needed to look at all other experiences to deliver it.

Although the question at that interview was a turning point, it has been a challenge I’ve thought of throughout my career: yes, the customer experience is important, but what about the other experiences? In essence, I was thinking about Experience Design, where Customer Experience is just one dimension.

But what are the other dimensions in “Experience Design”? Does everything really just revolve around the customer? I don’t believe so and in an effort to explain this, let’s go through it visually.

The Customer Experience and User Experience

(Hope you like stick figures — more of that to come)

Nothing new here — a company exists to deliver something of value to their customers, and the aim here is to receive something of perceived value in return from the customer (e.g. money). Most of my colleagues in the CX community understand this and we work towards creating experiences that supplements the delivery of the product and/or service, working both on tangible and intangible experiences. User Experience (UX) works here too, especially in the digital domain and how the user experiences digital offerings from the company. Both CX and UX complements each other: from the interactions when purchasing the product / service, to using the product / service until end of life.

Is that all? Are they all the experiences you should consider? Well, not quite. If you look carefully at the “Your Company” box, do you see those people in your company (the one smiling in the picture above)? What if they were not smiling? What if they feel like crap and slip up? Would that impact the CX and UX?

This leads to the next dimension for Experience Designers to consider…

The Employee Experience

(For those who didn’t notice, I just added “Employee Experience” bubble :D)

Let’s face it: unless you run a business completely devoid of other humans running it (you’ve managed to outsource your work to a bunch of robots), chances are you have a person working for you. If you don’t take care of your employees and provide them with a good experience working for your company, you’ll see that resentment flow through both your customer and user experience.

Experience Designers need to also highlight the Employee Experience component, to ensure whatever product or services designed for the customer can be delivered by the employees, they have all the right levels of support and empowerment to deliver it, they believe in the product or service, and they enjoy working for your company at the same time.

At this stage, I can say that getting at least these 3 elements right (Customer Experience, User Experience and Employee Experience) is a great start and even suffice to say it is a great foundation begin with in the area of Experience Design. However, there are other dimensions to consider if an Experience Designer wants to be holistic…

The Partner Experience

Most organisations have Partners / Suppliers providing them with either the necessary inputs to help the company deliver value, or in some cases deliver the product / services to the customers directly on behalf of the company.

Experience Designers need to factor Partners / Suppliers since they have potentially both a direct or indirect impact on the customer. For example, if the experience of doing business with your company is difficult (e.g. missed invoice payments), then your Partners / Suppliers may look else where to do business or deliver a poor experience to your customer. Or if you have a Recruitment Partner to get talent into your organisation and you don’t take care of their experience doing business with you, you’ll soon see that the recruits you’re getting will be sub par. If your Partners / Suppliers have a bad time, they may leave to go to your competitors, and ultimately that will impact the experience you’ve worked hard to design for your customers.

Now, there is one final dimension to consider, and of late it is starting to become prominent due to the strength of social perception of brands…

The Public Experience

As a society, we often look at the way products and services are being developed and delivered, and see if they have a positive or negative impact on society as a whole. Here is where designing a great customer experience, user experience, employee experience and partner experience is important as the public is assessing the way your company deliver these experiences. But Public Experience also looks at how your product and services impact society as a whole. Is it ethical? Does it promote good societal values? Is it going to impact the environment negatively? Are you treating your employees right?

Experience Designers looking at the whole ecosystem of “experiences” need to consider the Public Experience for the product / services they design. This encompasses the brand experience as a whole, and with that Experience Designers should consider designing the Collective Experience.

This is just an exploration of what Experience Designs means to me and my company, as I believe that although Customer Experience is important, the other dimensions of experiences also warrants focus. Although I haven’t gone through the methods of achieving this, most Experience Designers can use existing tools and techniques to define the other experience dimensions of the Collective Experience.

So next time you’re designing that interface, or the ergonomics of a new product, think about the other experiences surrounding that product / service you’re designing, and you’ll find that by considering them you’re designing something of greater value to more people other than just your customer.

What the heck is Experience Design? was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What the heck is Experience Design?

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles