If you’re not hanging around in design circles this term might not be familiar to you, but it just stands for “user experience” and is generally used in conjunction with the word “design”. The act of designing a digital product is generally called “user experience design”, with the word “experience” sometimes weirdly being used as a synonym for “software” or “application”.
As you might have guessed from the title, I don’t like this term. It’s weird, misleading and sometimes just plain wrong. I prefer the term “digital product design” or just “product design”, and generally agree with the points made in this article here about the very same topic:
UX vs. Product Design vs. UI: The Never-Ending Battle
So first of all, let’s ask the big question: how do you design an experience?
Robert Hoekman in his book Experience Required says:
A user’s experience can’t be designed. No matter how good you are at planning an intended outcome, an experience is far too complex, nuanced, subjective, and personal to be planned. The experience belongs to the user. No one else.
I fully agree with that. You can design things that will enable, foster, define, influence and enhance an experience, but you can’t really design the experience itself. Whoever uses and interacts with what you have designed will take care of that part and only they can.
My other reason might be more subtle. When we play a video game, we watch a film or we listen to music we are looking for an experience. It’s of course not just about the experience, but it’s an important factor.
When we interact with a piece of software, we often primarily want to do stuff. We want to communicate, organize our time, make notes, create and edit media, etc. Of course we can have a good or bad experience with it, and that is definitely a factor in why we choose to stick with something or not, but that can be said about most things in life.
Part of what makes a movie a great experience is the way it manipulates your brain. How it makes you feel the terror, the closeness to the characters, how it makes you laugh and cry. Movies are highly manipulative experiences, but we know and accept that. Actually, we totally want that, it’s a big part of the so called fictional pact.
When an app manipulates you, it’s different. But one starts to see why they call them “experiences”. The term makes a lot more sense if you are treating software as a product that primarily needs to be consumed, that wants you to spend as much time as possible with it, software that manipulates you in all sorts of ways.