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Classifying Experiences
Posted Wednesday February 22, 2006

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be presenting at the 2006 IA Summit in Vancouver Canada. While it’s not a formal lecture style presentation (maybe next year?), I’m very grateful to have been asked to convert my proposal into a poster presentation (you can view the 2005 presentations here). In hindsight, my model is certainly more suited to this format. And, I’ll have a chance to get feedback from some of the really smart people in the IA community.

So, the topic?

“Sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences”

First, some background that led to this…

From ‘user experiences’ to ‘The Experience Economy’ to ‘designing for experiences,” not to mention “brand experiences,” “customer experience management,” and “experiential marketing”— experiences are definitely the topic du jour. But with so many different perspectives, each with substantial merit, I found myself asking what creates a great experience…?

For example:

• Is an experience defined solely by how easily one accomplishes a task (as with Google or Craig’s List)? Is all else just nonsense?

• What about the “entertainment experience” that Pine and Gilmore describe, when they say we’ve moved beyond a services economy into a new experience economy?

• What about advertising? While companies can no longer rely on image alone to sell products, there is an undeniably powerful role that advertising can—and does—play in affecting our emotions and possibly even our perceptions of a thing.

• Packaging—is it or isn’t it part of the experience Is it even possible to separate the ‘packaging’ from the product when evaluating a person’s satisfaction with a given thing.

• And what of our backgrounds and perceptions. We can have a great product that suffers due to personal issues, such as buyer’s remorse. Or conversely, a merely ‘good’ product where people tolerate faults because of cognitive “confirmation bias”. Or even great products that are generally ill-received due to unfavorable branding.

Intent on resolving these various perspectives, I began exploring how it is that these different elements work together to complement each other. The resulting framework structures all the elements that contribute to a good (or bad!) experience, and provides a context for the various activities (both internal and external to an organization) that play a role in defining a person’s perception of a product or service.

Check it out! Let me know what you think:

Sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences poster (pdf, 3 megs)

One caveat: This IS a poster. A very large poster. So while it is viewable on a monitor, it won’t exactly print very well.

UPDATE: As promised, here is the much smaller, printable version of the ‘Classifying Experiences’ model:

Sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences letter sized (pdf, 450k)

Unlike the poster, this version builds narratively offering a more detailed explanation of the model.