How to design experiences with focus, clarity and intention

The experience economy continues to boom as consumers are increasingly investing in experiences over ‘things’. As a result, designers must respond to the ever-growing demand for ‘newer and richer’ experiences. The need to create bigger and better, often with added pressure from clients, can often lead to the design of ‘overloaded’ experiences. New interactive technologies are tempting and the ‘social share opportunity’ seems unavoidable, but do they align with your end goal without distracting from meaning and message?

Outlined below are 4 things to consider when designing an experience, to help ensure that consumers leave with the emotions, motivation and fresh perspective that you intended.

1. Why?

Why are you designing the experience? As Simon Sinek advocates, we should always ‘start with why’. Ensuring you have concise, clear reason for creating the experience will provide you and your team with an end goal and focus.

By answering the following questions (and referring back to them throughout the design process) you can ensure that you don’t divert from your message, providing clarity and direction in all your decision making.

• Why are you creating this experience?
• Who is it for? How many people is it for: one, two, a crowd?
• What do you want people to learn from this experience?

Just as a clear narrative will give you direction during the design process, it can also give your audience a way to navigate your experience, resulting in better engagement and making it more memorable.

2. Nail the story / theme

A strong story will enable you to create a strong experience. Narratives provide your audience with something to follow, identify and engage with as they move through the experience. Our brains love stories; when we have any experience, we instinctively create a narrative behind what is happening around us, in order to make sense of our world and decide upon our reaction to it. This makes stories and themes one of the most effective tools when designing any experience. Aim to have solid answers to the following questions:

• What story are you trying to tell?
• Why are you telling this story? For example, are you trying to educate on a topic, sell something or display a work of art?
• Does it need a specific structure? i.e a beginning, middle and end?

Creating a theme is a great way to provide your audience with identifiable clues to which they can attach their thoughts, resulting in a far more memorable experience. An effective theme should be established early, thoughtfully executed, it should be compelling and succinct. It should stimulate the concept phase of your development, direct the designed and staged elements of the experience and ultimately lead your decision-making.

3. What are the characteristics of your experience?

Once you have outlined the intended narrative direction of your experience, you can decide upon the characteristics of your experience, and therefore the best way for someone to experience it.

2-dimensional experiences: participation and immersion

We can characterise experiences across 2-dimensions. The first dimension refers to customer participation: at one end lies passive participation and at the other is active participation. Passive participation is when the audience does not affect the experience at all, for example at a cinema where the customer is an observer. Active participation refers to experiences where the audience has a key role in creating the experience, for example, a ‘sing-a-long’ movie screening.

The second dimension corresponds to the connection that engages the audience with the experience. At one end of this is absorption, where people observing an event become absorbed in the event that takes place in front of them. At the other end is total immersion, where the audience member is fully immersed in the multi-sensory experience of what is happening around them. For instance, attending a secret cinema event to watch a movie is more immersive than watching it on your sofa at home. Watching the same movie in a cinema with lights, surround sound and popcorn would be somewhere in between the two.

However, there are some grey areas, for example at a theatrical show or sports performance although the audience appears to be passive, they do play a role in creating the environment and atmosphere that contributes to the experience, meaning that they are not completely passive. This is something to take into account when designing an experience that is not for an individual but for a crowd.

The 4 Realms of Experience

The four quadrants created by these axes give us 4 realms of experience, or the 4 ‘E’s. By characterising the experience within the 4Es; Educational, Esthetic, Escapist and Entertainment, we choose which direction we want the design of our experience to take.

To go into a little more detail on the 4Es:

Educational — attending a class or lesson tends to require more active involvement from the audience, yet not quite experiencing total immersion.

Entertainment — generally, we consider entertainment experiences to be more passive and observatory, like watching television or listening to the radio. The audience at a cinema is more likely to be absorbing the action than immersed in it.

Escapist — escapist experiences involve much greater audience immersion and activity. Playing in the sports team, or appearing on television requires both active and immersive roles in the experience.

Esthetic — if we remove the active participation from the escapist experience then we arrive at our fourth realm of experience, esthetic. In this realm, the audience’s experience is immersive, but they have little to no effect on the event or performance taking place. An example of this would be attending a gallery or viewing the Eiffel Tower from its base.

We often find that the richest experiences span all 4 realms of experience. Escape rooms are a great example of how to achieve this ‘sweet spot’ where all four realms of experience meet. They are Educational — encouraging us to make connections, figure out puzzles and decipher codes in order to beat the clock. They are Esthetic, providing an abundance of visual stimuli, taking on themes through set design as we observe the walls of Sherlock Holmes’ office or an ancient temple. They are Escapist, allowing us to step out of the ‘real-world’ to enter an alternate reality for those exciting 60mins. And, ultimately, they are Entertaining.

Perhaps this is why the Escape room industry is booming — there are now around 10,000 escape rooms globally, with around 150 in the UK. The number of escape rooms in the UK has doubled every 6 months since 2013, with London hosting 55 of them, having had only 3 in 2013!

Your experience may not need to touch on every ‘E’ in order for it to be a successful experience, but it is important to consider exactly where you want it to sit to best convey your narrative.

4. How do you want people to feel?

We connect to our environment and those around us through our senses and our feelings. Therefore, to develop a deep connection with your audience and keep them engaged, how you want people to feel before, during and after your experience is a crucial consideration. We can think of this in two parts:

The first is more tangible, consideration of our 5 senses; sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. It is also important to take nuances of these senses into account too, the more ethereal senses that are sometimes more difficult to satisfy. For example; temperature, gravity, balance and vibration. If an experience can trigger any one of these senses, we can consider it an experience.

Often, experiences are designed specifically to give us a new, heightened awareness of certain senses. For example, there is an increasingly popularity for ‘black-out’ restaurants where you eat in the dark. As we close off the experience of one sense, we enhance our other senses. It focuses our attention on a way that we are not used to, causing us to experience something that we do everyday (eating food) in a completely new and memorable way.

The second part refers to the audience’s emotive and atmospheric experience. As emotions, reactions and atmospheric understandings are inherently personal and therefore subjective, as designers it is not possible to have full control over this. However, we can design certain story-lines, themes and elements of design to have certain positive or negative connotations for our audience.

All of these sensory and emotional stimulants of your experience should enhance, not distract from, your ‘why’. Keep in mind that across countries and cultures, the sensory clues you leave may have different meanings depending on where your audience is from.

To summarise this framework:

1. Starting your design process with a strong ‘Why’ will give you a solid base on which to build your experience.

2. Telling a story and designing an engaging theme will make your experience more memorable and give you a good direction for the staging of your experience.

3. Characterising your experience will enable you to ensure you tell your story in the most effective way, defining how much participation is required and which of the 4 realms it touches on.

4. Deep consideration of the audiences sensory experience will be the key to connecting your audience to your story and keeping them engaged.

Careful consideration of each of these elements of experience design will enable you to stay committed to and focused on your initial ‘Why’ and ensure that your audience leaves an experience with the desired feelings, motivation and fresh perspective.

Lead with intention, design with passion, keep a close eye on the details and stay committed to your overarching narrative.

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