Experience Design
The design community at my current employer Thoughtworks was formalised over 10 years ago. Prior to that, much of the design work involved in software development such as specifying interfaces and running user acceptance testing had been undertaken by Business Analysis (BA). The need for design as a specialised role resulted from raised expectations of digital experiences alongside the persistent need to specify and deliver the required software to support this, which remained a primary focus for business analysts.
The choice of “Experience Design” was a deliberate one, building on the concept of design for “user experience” as first coined by Don Norman. At the time, much of the debate was focused on dropping the “user” part, much of this driven by Norman himself who feared that describing people as “users” risked limiting the ability to do good design. Hence Experience Design (XD) was adopted by Thoughtworks despite the popularity of the term UX. As you can imagine, this has been a source of confusion for many over the years who are not familiar with these debates!
The adoption of XD was quickly followed by a book called Agile Experience Design, authored by Thoughtworks designers Marc McNeil and Lindsay Ratcliffe. The intention of the book was to further contextualise XD within the context of agile software delivery, an approach that Thoughtworks had pioneered since the Agile Manifesto was written in 2001.
“Agile Experience Design is an inclusive, emergent and collaborative approach to Experience Design that integrates customer, business and technology needs.”
The core elements of Experience Design broadly followed those that were identified as core to user experience design, gradually becoming simplified into three key areas: user research, interaction design and visual design that helped recruit “T-shaped” designers. This “core” was extended to include User Interface Engineering (UIE), as many practitioners worked closely with software engineers, and Product Strategy, to reflect the fact that more senior designers were often consulting more broadly with clients. This loose “core and more” categorisation was referred to as the “5 buckets” and was in place for several years before a standalone product community of practice was established and UIE became more absorbed into “full stack development”. It is now quite common for designers to belong to multiple communities of practice as well as non-designers belonging to the design community.
The growing market for design
As we have matured and client’s missions have become more ambitious, we have had to look at new ways to orchestrate capabilities effectively to meet demand. The establishment of a product community of practice five years ago was one such initiative. This has now grown into a global community of comparable size to the design community.
In addition to new communities of practice, digital design practices themselves have become more pervasive leading to new classifications of design beyond that of UX and XD. Product Design and Service Design are common ways to designate design within modern organisations, along with increasing segmentation and focus on specific capabilities such as User Research and Design Operations (DesignOps).
These terms seem to make perfect sense to practitioners but can be a source of confusion for clients who are more concerned with design outcomes than design organisation. When you dig a little deeper with designers themselves, it’s clear that they often don’t understand the differences or similarities either - they just work here and do design!
There have been many attempts to address the understanding of design at the organisational level, from the internal perspective outlined in Org Design for Design Orgs or the external assessment offered by the McKinsey Design Index. These are all useful but don’t get around the fact that every organisation is unique and complex and therefore needs some degree of situational understanding so that new capabilities can be integrated successfully. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Design perspectives in organisations
Practising design typically requires one to be open to adjacent possibilities. A core responsibility for any designer is the timeliness and quality of options in the same way that the timeliness and quality of decisions is the core responsibility of a product manager. Creating options under the constraints of time and availability of evidence requires a particular type of thinking that is common to design - abductive reasoning.
This pursuit of design options from limited evidence and following a design solution wherever it leads you, is what one might characterise as a “design attitude” (to borrow Alice Rawsthorn’s ideas).
Design attitude resists easy categorisation into defined roles as it is intrinsic to the thinking and doing of design. Design roles are needed within organisations however to give confidence when buying skills for use in ambiguous circumstances where outcomes are uncertain and future-oriented. Over time, roles can come to mean different things in terms of desired capabilities.
Specific designations or roles within organisations - such as UX design, product design or service design - when coupled with this design attitude, can naturally result in one thinking that your particular flavour of design is the most important of all.
The boundaries between different types of design are necessarily fluid but exploiting this fluidity within a given design role is not the same as intentionally adopting a particular perspective, which may be necessary to correctly frame a problem. Rather than defending a particular type of design, it is more useful to be able to choose the most appropriate perspective to match the context in which the design activity will take place.
For example, if the design activity is focussed around improvements to an existing product then of course some version of UX or Product Design makes sense as the object of design is the product experience. If the design activity is focussed on the enabling capabilities needed to operate a service for end users (often via an intermediary product) then Service Design makes sense as the object of design is an end-to-end service. If the object of concern is the experience itself regardless of how it is mediated but inclusive of intangible aspects such as concept and brand, then Experience Design (XD) may provide a more useful perspective.
Switching perspectives
Navigating between different design perspectives is a challenge in its own right of course. Orienting oneself towards the right perspective requires a measure of situational awareness and an understanding of how to get there. This is where it is useful to have a high level structure that connects the key elements together. In terms of the different design perspectives mentioned above, there are two structures related to “experience” that allow us to move usefully between different concepts and categories - the Experience Design Framework and Customer Experience Strategy.
Experience Design framework
The Experience Design framework was proposed by Patrick Newbury and Kevin Farnham in their 2013 book Experience Design: A Framework for Integrating Brand, Experience, and Value. It consists of four key components
Brand concept and value
Brand attributes
Products and services
Customer journey
Brand concept and value
How a proposition is communicated to customers in a way that describes recognisable value. This encompasses concept, communication and strategy.
Brand attributes
Ways in which qualities of the brand are brought to life through artifacts and behaviors that deliver real value to customers. This encompasses what the organisation visibly provides in terms of content and interactions.
Products and services
How the organisation meets the needs of customers in ways that provide real value. At a highest-level this of course involves all the products and services that the organisation provides.
Customer journey
Representing the stages of connection and qualities of touchpoints that customers experience while trying to engage with an organisation in order to receive value and satisfy their needs.
The usefulness of this framework is that it provides overlapping concepts that are shared between UX, product and service design (as well as content, communication and visual design) that connect without competing as well as extending consideration to those aspects of marketing and communication that are often integral to the overall customer experience but considered somewhat tangential to product or service design.
Customer Experience strategy
The second of these structures is Customer Experience (CX) strategy. Although CX strategy and Experience Design (XD) share the word experience, they are quite different in their focus and outcomes. As mentioned above the object of concern for XD is experience itself (as opposed to the mediation of experience via digital products or services in UX) and ensuring that the experience is good from the recipient’s perspective. CX strategy is concerned with the relationship between an organisation, it's market, the products and services it offers and the resulting customer experience that encompasses those relations. The outcome of CX strategy is the successful delivery of a business outcome defined by the business strategy.
There are different view on the components parts of a a CX strategy however in summary, they will typically comprise the following
A compelling vision
Priorities and initiatives
Strategy and stakeholder input
Measures of success
A compelling vision
Needed to steer the organisation towards a future direction and inspire everyone to be part of something bigger and how to behave to contribute to success.
Priorities and initiatives
Demonstrate the specific ways that an organisation is putting customers first and delivering on the strategy. These can be a blend of quick wins and a roadmap for outlining long-term initiatives in order of priority.
Strategy and stakeholder input
Ensuring that the CX strategy flows directly from your business goals and that customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders understand and are involved in shaping the outcomes.
Measures of success
Correlating customer and employee success, derived from key touchpoints or moments of truth, are needed to assess your progress over time and show a return on your investment.
In conclusion
CX strategy provides a meaningful connection between business strategy and design activities by defining how business outcomes will be achieved from the perpective of customer experience. It provides an outline for delivering customer-oriented goals without prescribing exactly what design perspectives may be needed.