by Tim Brown
CHAPTER FIVE
returning to the surface,
or the design of experiences
I fly between San Francisco and New York too often, but it’s a trip I enjoy making. Coming from Britain, New York represents iconic America for me. It was the first U.S. city that I visited, and I always experience a twinge of excitement at the prospect of a return. Not so long ago, however, the flight was something that just had to be tolerated. The sum total of old airplanes, cramped space, miserable food, poor entertainment systems, inconvenient schedules, and indifferent service stripped away what should be the incomparable magic of flight.
In 2004, still reeling from the aftermath of 9/11, United Airlines introduced a new service on the San Francisco–New York route called p.s. (for “Premium Service”) that attempted to solve some of these issues. In a stroke, United leapfrogged its competitors. Most of the cabin of the 757s was converted to business seats, since the vast majority of the customers on this route are business travelers. Legroom was increased measurably, but the new configuration also created a feeling of roominess in the cabin. United introduced better food service and provided personalized DVD players to its business passengers.
These improvements helped set United p.s. apart from its competitors, but there was one aspect of the new service that particularly transformed the experience for me as a passenger: the added floor space altered the boarding experience. Not only did I now have plenty of space to stow my gear without getting in the way of fellow passengers, but that deadly twenty- or thirty-minute interval between boarding and takeoff became a social experience. On almost every flight I would find myself chatting with my neighbors without impatient passengers trying to squeeze past. Even before the doors closed and our tray tables were “returned to the upright position,” United had managed to make boarding the aircraft a social experience that set my expectations for the remainder of the flight. The net effect reinforced the sense of excitement and anticipation I feel when I travel. The experience makes a connection to my emotions and not just to my schedule.
Buried in my experience with the corporate jet set is one of the most complex challenges facing any organization committed to the principles of design thinking: when we sit on an airplane, shop for groceries, or check into a hotel, we are not only carrying out a function but having an experience. That function can be compromised if the experience attending it is not designed with the same mindfulness a good engineer brings to a product or an architect to a building. This chapter turns to the design of experiences, examining three themes that make experiences meaningful and memorable: First, we now live in what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore christened an “experience economy” in which people shift from passive consumption to active participation. Second, the best experiences are not scripted at corporate headquarters but delivered on the spot by service providers. And third, implementation is everything. An experience must be as finely crafted and precision-engineered as any other product.
a good idea is no longer enough
Innovation has been defined as “a good idea executed well.” This is a good start. Unfortunately, too much emphasis falls on the first half of that proposition. I have seen countless examples of good ideas that never gained traction for the simple reason of poor execution. Most of them never reach the market, and those that do end up littering the stockrooms of electronics stores and supermarkets.
New products or services may be doomed for all sorts of reasons: uneven quality, unimaginative marketing, unreliable distribution, or unrealistic pricing. Even when all the metrics and mechanics of business are in place, however, a poorly executed idea will most likely fail. The problem may lie with the physical design of the product—too big, too heavy, too complex. Likewise, the touchpoints for a new service—the retail space or software interface—may not connect to consumers. These are failures of design, and they can usually be fixed. Increasingly, however, ideas fail because people demand more of them than reliable performance in an acceptable package. The components of a product need to come together to create a great experience. This is a much more complicated proposition.
There have been many explanations for this new level of heightened expectation. Among the most compelling is Daniel Pink’s analysis of what might be called the psychodynamics of affluence. In A Whole New Mind, Pink argues that once our basic needs are met—as they already have been for most people in the affluent societies of the West—we tend to look for meaningful and emotionally satisfying experiences. We need only note the disproportionate growth of the service—entertainment, banking, health care—economies relative to manufacturing. Moreover, these services themselves have gone far beyond the support of basic needs: Hollywood movies, video games, gourmet restaurants, continuing education, ecotourism, and destination shopping have grown dramatically in recent years. Their value lies in the emotional resonance they create.
The Walt Disney Company may be the clearest example of an experience business, and we should not assume that it is only about entertainment. Experiences are deeper and more meaningful. They imply active participation, not passive consumption, which can happen on many different levels. Sitting with your three-year-old daughter as she sings along with The Little Mermaid is an experience that goes well beyond entertainment. A family trip to Disney World may be quite stressful—the food is terrible, the lines are too long, and the youngest sibling will melt down when she’s told that she’s too short to go on Space Mountain—but most visitors remember it as one of the great experiences of family life.
The real meaning of the “experience economy,” then, is not primarily entertainment. The hierarchy of value they describe in their influential book—from commodities to products to services to experiences—corresponds to a fundamental shift in how we experience the world, from the primarily functional to the primarily emotional. Understanding this shift, many companies now invest in the delivery of experiences. Functional benefits alone, it seems, are no longer enough to capture customers or create the brand distinction to retain them.
from consumption to participation
The industrial revolution created not just consumers but a consumer society. The sheer scale required to sustain the economics of industrialization meant that not only did products become standardized but so did the services associated with them. This brought tremendous benefits to society, including lower prices, higher quality, and improved living standards. The downside was that over time the role of consumers became almost entirely passive.
The English reformers who invented modern design at the end of the nineteenth century were acutely aware of this. They foresaw a world in which the torrent of cheap goods pouring out of Britain’s factories no longer held any connection to the workers who made them or meaning for the public that purchased them. William Morris, the larger-than-life force behind the English Arts and Crafts Movement, was the most articulate spokesman for the view that the industrial revolution had ushered in a world of unimaginable riches but one drained of feeling, passion, and deep human engagement: “Think of it!” he thundered at the end of his life. “Was it all to end in a counting house on top of a cinder-heap?”
An unapologetic romantic, Morris believed that industrialization had severed art from utility, had opened up a gulf between “useful work and useless toil,” had contaminated the natural environment in the pursuit of goods, and had degraded what ought to have been a celebration of the human capacity to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Morris died in 1896, feeling that he had failed in his mission to reconcile the seemingly contradictory claims of objects and experiences. He lamented that his fellow craftsmen had become little more than “a tiresome little aristocracy working with high skill for the very rich.” Almost in spite of themselves, however, they set the agenda that would drive design theory in the twentieth century.
Today we still wrestle with creating meaningful experiences out of the sheer glut of products—informational, now, as much as industrial—that threaten to consume us even as we
consume them. Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law and the founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, might be surprised to see himself compared to William Morris, but in his efforts to wrest control of our creative energies in the age of Big Media, he is continuing Morris’s campaign against Big Industry and partaking of the same great tradition of using design as a tool of social reform. In a steady stream of books, lectures, and online discourses, Lessig has shown how we moved from a preindustrial world in which most of us were producers to an industrial world in which we have mostly become consumers of mass-produced media—a reversal traceable in many industries. Unlike his Victorian predecessor, however, who gazed backward toward a hopelessly idealized vision of the medieval craftsman producing his own goods, Lessig looks forward to a postindustrial digital age in which we will once again create our own experiences.
Lessig uses the example of music to show how we are moving back to active participation in our experiences from the passive consumption of the late twentieth century. Prior to the invention of radio and the phonograph, composers sold their scores to publishing houses, which in turn sold them, in the form of sheet music, to customers who played the music themselves—at home, at family gatherings, and so on. With the emergence of the new broadcast media technologies, we stopped playing music at home every evening and started listening to it: first on our radios and phonographs and eventually on stereos, boom boxes, and Walkmans. With the emergence of digital music and the Internet, however, many more of us are once again making music instead of merely consuming it. We now have software tools that enable us to grab music from the Web, create mixes, samples, and mash-ups, and redistribute the results. Applications like Apple’s Garage Band allow us to create music without formal training or even the ability to play instruments, with the result that seven-year-olds can now create unique sound tracks for the PowerPoint presentations they make for their school reports.
The campaigns of William Morris and Lawrence Lessig, separated by a century, an ocean, and another technology revolution, indicate the perceptual shift we will have to make as designers of experiences. Just as Web 1.0 blasted information at prospective customers whereas Web 2.0 is all about engaging them, companies now know they can no longer treat people as passive consumers. We have seen in previous chapters how the shift to participatory design is fast becoming the norm in the development of new products. The same is true of experiences.
Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound, and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.
experience engineering
Though Disney may be the most powerful example of experiences at scale—Disneyland in Anaheim can easily welcome 100,000 visitors in a single day—we now see a growing number of brands whose proposition is also based on participatory experiences. The food industry offers perhaps the most dramatic example of a category being transformed both at the source of production and the point of distribution. Through the 1950s and ’60s, in Europe and America, local stores began to disappear, replaced by inexpensive but sterile supermarkets. The drive to lower prices—through such industrial processes as packaging, chemical preservatives, refrigeration, storage, and long-distance transport—not only removed much of the natural quality from food but also dehumanized an experience that lies close to the origins of human society. The growing popularity of farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, the slow-food movement, and a burgeoning literature ranging from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, suggests that consumers crave a different experience of food shopping.
Earlier on I discussed the popularity of Whole Foods Market, one of the most successful retailers in the United States. Whole Foods Market continues to grow not just because of the growing market for organics but because it appreciates the importance of experience. Every aspect of the stores—the fresh produce displays, the free samples, the wealth of information about the preparation and storage of food, the variety of “healthy lifestyle” products—is designed to draw us in, to invite us to linger and participate. In the flagship store in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods has even experimented with allowing customers to cook.
Experience brands raise the bar when it comes to engaging with the customer at every possible opportunity. Virgin America is an experience brand, as attested by its Web site, its service interactions, and its advertising, all of which ease us into the check-in experience and the actual in-flight service. United is not. Though the p.s. service may be great, no other aspect of the airline reinforces the experience proposition. Experiments abound, however, and we may find them in some unexpected places.
The famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is an experience brand of an entirely different nature than Whole Foods Market, Virgin America, or Disney. Like many great hospitals, the Mayo is known worldwide for the expertise of its staff and the skill of its physicians at treating complex diseases. One way the institution sets itself apart from its competitors, however, is the manner in which it has extended its reputation for leading-edge research to innovation around the patient experience.
In 2002 a team of physicians headed by Drs. Nicholas LaRusso and Michael Brennan, the chair and associate chair of the Department of Medicine, respectively, approached IDEO with an idea for a laboratory of clinical experience. Might it be possible to construct an environment—an actual wing of the existing hospital facility—in which new approaches to patient care might be conceived, visualized, and prototyped? Using a set of principles that could have been lifted from a how-to manual of design thinking, we adapted our process to a methodology of “See-Plan-Act-Refine-Communicate” and embodied them in the state-of-the-art SPARC Innovation Program, which opened in 2004. We brought our process to the Mayo Clinic and left it there.
The SPARC laboratory is a design studio embedded in a clinical hospital (the former urology department, to be precise) in which designers, business strategists, medical and health professionals, and patients work in close proximity to develop ideas for improving the patient-provider experience. It operates in part like an experimental clinic, in part like an independent design consultancy for other units in the hospital. Half a dozen projects are going on at SPARC at any given time—from rethinking the traditional examination room to prototyping the interface of an electronic check-in kiosk. The work of the SPARC staff and affiliates seems destined to transform the patient experience throughout the institution.
From Disneyland to the Mayo Clinic, experiences can be created in the most playful and the most serious of categories. The example of SPARC suggests that design thinking can not only be applied to products and experiences but can be extended to the process of innovation itself.
to change behaviors—or not to change
Many a frustrated brand manager (or politician or health advocate) has been heard venting that if only consumers (or voters or patients) would just change their behavior, everything would be okay. Unfortunately, getting people to change is difficult under the best of circumstances and all but impossible in the face of resistance.
One way to get people to try something new is to build on behaviors that are familiar to them, as we did when we tapped into the childhood memories of American adults to create a new cycling experience—coasting—for Shimano. An equally compelling story began when Bank of America came to IDEO to help generate product ideas that would help them retain current customers while at the same time bringing in new ones. The team generated about a dozen concepts—service ideas oriented toward boomer moms, educational tools to help parents teach their kids about responsible money management—but one seemed particularly to stick: a service that would help customers to save more. The first order of business was to understand people’s prevailing behavior, so we donned our anthropologis
ts’ pith helmets and headed out into the field—to Baltimore, Atlanta, and San Francisco—to understand how saving figured in the lives of ordinary Americans.
We found that all people want to save more but only a few have strategies for doing so. At the same time, many people perform unconscious acts that suggest a promising direction. Some people, for example, routinely overpay their utility bills, either out of a love of round numbers or to make sure they are never surprised by a fee for a late payment. Another type of “invisible saving” is the habit of tossing our spare change into a jar at the end of the day (to the delight of the kids, who find it a bottomless source of allowance payments, and the dismay of bank tellers who have to count it out in exchange for a couple of dollars). The project team reasoned that it might be possible to build on these behavioral clues to encourage more saving.
The result, after numerous iterations, validations, and prototypes, was a new service launched by Bank of America in October 2005, called “Keep the Change.” Keep the Change automatically rounds up debit card purchases to the nearest dollar and transfers the difference into the customer’s savings account. Now when I buy my morning latte at Peet’s and pay my $3.50 with my debit card, the 50 cents change that I would have received if I had handed over $4.00 in cash is deposited in my savings account. With all the coffee I drink, the savings add up pretty quickly. I am not the only one to find this to be an easy way of saving. In its first year, Keep the Change attracted 2.5 million customers, which translates into more than 700,000 new checking accounts and 1 million new savings accounts. It is doubtful that results on this scale could have been achieved by asking profligate spenders to change their ways with pedantic lessons about compound interest or moralizing about the true value of money. By grafting the new service onto existing behavior, however, IDEO designed an experience both reassuringly familiar and invitingly new. Before they knew it, BofA’s customers were achieving results they never had before and possibly never thought they would.
