Thursday October 11, 2007

People buy experiences, not things. And experiences are shaped, directly or indirectly by a variety of factors.

This was a central idea from my Classifying Experiences model— that our ‘perceptions’ (rational or not) about a ‘thing’ strongly influence the story we choose to create. I use the word “thing” carefully, since for many people thing equals product, which is rarely the case: people purchase experiences, not things. “Thing,” as I use it, can be a product (iPod) as much as a service (NetFlix) or an experience (Build-a-Bear-Workshop), though even these distinctions seem arbitrary when you consider what people actually buy.

Leisure Travel vs…?
My colleague and mentor Rob Moore got me thinking about this a while back when he suggested that someone spending $2,500 on a leisure vacation might be not deciding between two destinations (the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands), but whether to take a vacation at all, or spend that money on a new flat screen TV. A simple enough concept, but one that is pretty radical to people selling travel (or electronics), as it questions—fundamentally— the ‘thing’ being sold. Does that company sell sunny beaches and winter wonderlands. Or is it happiness, relaxation, and escape that is being sold? This is a subtle but critical difference in focus, as it redefines competition in terms of the ‘experiences’ people are willing to pay for.

Dev Padnaik from Jump Associates presents a similar concept in his paper System Logics: Organizing Your Offerings to Solve People’s Big Needs . He describes a hierarchy of customer needs, the highest of which are ‘common needs’, with common needs being defined as “the most fundamental and universal of all [needs].” These include such things as “the need to socialize, the need to be loved, the need to feel comfortable.”

In design research, we use a tool called ‘Ladders of Abstraction’ (similar to 5 Whys) to peel back the layers and arrive at these ‘common needs’ or motivations— pleasure, fear, whatever they might be. By understanding the motivations governing a person’s actions, we can design for ever better experiences.

Here’s where it gets interesting. (Bear with me as I get a wee bit philosophical!)

Star Wars
I’m a big Star Wars fan. And I have my share of action figures and other miscellany. But what is this, really? From an objective point of view, these 3 and 3/4” figures are nothing more than painted plastic. The meaning comes from the ‘story’ I (and many others) associate with these figures. This story can be the one from the movies, or it can be a story about limited access and collectibility. Could someone really charge $7 for a figure with no such story to back it up?

These plastic objects have value because of something I (and others) project upon them. My ‘satisfaction’ then is not so much in the object itself but in my perceptions of the object. Perception is reality.

So then, why am I getting hung up over spending real money for virtual objects? Read on…

Club Penguin

My 7-year-olds’ latest obsession is… Club Penguin. Think of this as World of Warcraft or Second Life for young children. A giant online world with over 1 million other ‘kids-as-penguin avatars’ doing penguin things.

Playing the game is free. And you can easily ‘earn’ penguin coins through various games and activities. But if you want to spend these virtual coins on something cool — like a tux for your penguin, or a flat screen TV for your igloo, you have to subscribe to Club Penguin. And to subscribe, you have to pay real money.

Real money for what… pixels? This was my initial thinking.

But what is it we actually buy for our children? Is it an object, or joy? (However temporary!) Even more ‘permanent’ things like action figures get tossed away, donated, or shelved. In a sense, they are just as virtual or temporal as a virtual purchase.

Ownership is of value only where it’s part of the story (as with collecting). But in many cases, what’s being purchased is the effect of ownership— a perception, meaning, or story— and not an actual ‘thing’. In this sense, how different then are virtual purchases and ‘real’ purchases if what is really being bought and sold is something reflective— an emotional response.

“Historicity”
And here’s my final thought on this matter, one that I think about from time to time. Years ago, I read Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle. As with many of Dick’s stories, he explores themes of ‘authenticity’ and what makes something ‘real’. This forms the central theme of Bladerunner (aka Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?): what makes someone human?

In this fascinating alternative history, Dick explores authenticity and value with antiquities. One of the characters, Robert Childan ‘discovers that many of his antiques are fakes and becomes paranoid that his entire stock consists of counterfeits. In this case the “counterfeiting” is so good that it calls into question the meaning of “real”. For instance a counterfeit Colt .44 is indistinguishable from a genuine antique by all except an expert.’ (description from Wikipedia)

And elsewhere, perhaps more directly, Dick comments on this theme:

“This whole damn historicity business is nonsense… I’ll prove it.” Getting up, he hurried into his study, returned at once with two cigarette lighters which he set down on the coffee table. “Look at these. Look the same, don’t they? Well listen. On has historicity in it.” He grinned at her. “Pick them up. Go ahead. One’s worth, oh, maybe forty or fifty thousand dollars on the collectors’ market.”
the girl gingerly picked up the two lighters and examined them.
“Don’t you feel it?” he kidded her. “The historicity?”
She said, “What is ‘historicity’?”
“When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it?” He nudged her. “You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.”
“Gee,” the girl said, awed. “Is that really true? That he had one of these on him that day?”
“Sure. And I know which it is. You see my point. It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like Meusse-Argonne, and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.” He tapped his head. “In the mind, not the gun…”
“...I don’t believe either of those two lighters belonged to franklin Roosevelt,” the girl said.
Wyndham-Matson giggled. “That’s my point!”

And my point is…?
So, what makes something valuable? Is it reality or perception? And what can this teach us about product / service / experience design?

In my User Experience Hierarchy of Needs model, ‘meaning’ is the highest level. But I’m quick to caution that meaning is personal and subjective— we can design for meaning, but we can’t manufacture meaning. Neither can we manufacture experiences.

But can we design for experiences? If we rise above the obvious and and focus on ‘experiences’, how much better could our design and business decisions be? Businesses talk a lot about customer focus, but most have little more than a superficial understanding of what customers really want, need, or desire. At best, most companies give customers exactly what they ask for, which creates a whole different set of problems.

It’s this kind of thinking— ‘what is the experience we want to provide?’— that produces something like the iPod. The ‘experience’ being sold is one of simplicity, elegance, belonging, safety, cleanliness… Yes, I said cleanliness. To provide an ‘easy’ experience required more than making a better mp3 player. Apple had to create an entire ecosystem— not only the iPod, but also iTunes and the iTunes store which aligned the record companies and has made Apple the 3rd largest reseller of music, behind Best Buy and Amazon (This ‘business design’ is something I’ll be speaking about further at the upcoming Design Thinking 2007 event.— more on that soon).

Conclusion?
So, why do people use/purchase/recommend your product or service? If you scratch the surface of what you’re working on, you’ll find some interesting motivations floating below the surface. It is precisely these common needs or motivations that we should be designing from and for. It’s this level of understanding that will draw people to the ‘thing’ you are selling—whether they’re aware of it or not.