Experience Design

Let’s start by defining experience. Experience is a collection of events and/or activities from which an individual or group can gather knowledge, opinions, and skills. Within an experience is an event, occurrence or interaction that leaves an impression on your customer or employee. 

The impressions left by an experience can trigger an array of emotions, causing the experience to become ever more memorable. Whether this experience meets an individual’s expectations or not will determine the specific emotions that are evoked and that will be forever associated with it.

Delivering a positive experience for each individual customer means moving away from using generic customer journey mapping to a more personalized system that considers customer needs, habits, and economic value. When you understand the customer’s particular needs and behaviors, you can create a personalized experience. This is a vast improvement on the one-size-fits-all approach. Equipped with customer data and intelligence, your team can design experiences tailored specifically to customer needs and values.  [Check my article -      

The importance of personalized experience in CX] 

Achieving this level of detail and illustrating the steps customers take to interact with your organization through physical, digital and virtual channels can be a daunting task. You need to manage all the different, multi-layer hierarchies' journeys and episodes and the interconnecting pieces of the experience(s). Marc Stickdorn describes this as the operationalized journey in his latest workshops. 

An important part of experience design is accurately knowing your customers and using other collected data points to allow you to design experiences that meet and exceed their expectations. As technology and customer experiences change, customers have the power to dictate the experiences or the expectations that they want from their brands. Therefore, the experience design work is not a one-time act. Rather, it's a journey of continuous improvement and maintenance to ensure the experiences are executed as designed and success is measured. According to Kerry Bodine, roles like dedicated Journey Managers, whose sole responsibility is to manage these specific journeys, are trending in the market.