Experiences play a significant role in our lives, whether it's a vacation or a meal. Designing experiences is a multidisciplinary art that revolves around understanding human needs, emotions, and contexts. By crafting engaging and meaningful encounters, we can create memorable moments that leave a lasting impact on individuals. It requires careful consideration of the audience, their expectations, and a dedication to going beyond the ordinary to deliver extraordinary experiences.
An experience is a piece of time associated with sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings that leave an impression. A powerful experience draws on our needs, feelings, contexts, and mindsets to create a compelling sense of engagement that provides relevance and value. Designing experiences brings together a variety of disciplines such as interaction design, graphic design, knowledge of cognitive psychology, and more, all the while keeping focus on human needs and concerns. It keeps the human experience at the center of every detail.
Experiences can have positive or negative valence. Some experiences can be thought-provoking or pleasant or they can be boring or annoying. A good experience designer marshals a wide range of tools to craft compelling, refreshing, and surprising experiences for their audience. These tools include techniques like getting to know your audience, listening to their needs, and considering their contexts and environments, and then converting this knowledge into an experience that truly engages them.
For instance, think about the experience of going to a fast food restaurant versus a restaurant serving high-end cuisine. These differences go beyond the price-point of the food. Our experience of eating at a restaurant starts from the moment we choose one to go to and it encompasses every aspect of our interaction and engagement with the organization - from the design of the menu, the behavior of the staff and waiters, to the quality of the food and how it was plated and delivered, till the end of the meal and how (and how much) we pay for it.
A good experience is difficult to pull together due to the wide range of contextual factors that play a role in making it happen. In fact, it can be argued that designing a good experience requires a whole list of things to go just right, and it can be easily destroyed by one piece not working right. A thoughtfully designed restaurant experience can be completely derailed and spoiled by the behavior of the person at the table next to us.
Experience plays a critical role in learning and education. Scholars from Dewey onward have argued that all learning comes from experience - though they also add that this does not mean that all experiences are equally educational. The nature of learner experience has rarely been factored into the design of educational systems. Learners often find themselves bored or frustrated by the quality of instruction, and the lack of agency in what they are expected to learn. The standard grammar of schooling in attempting to meet the needs of masses or the mythical “average learner” loses sight of the individual. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the design and implementation of high-stakes testing regimes. These tests, that purport to evaluate student learning, are often top-down mandates, and are conducted in spaces and through processes that can be deeply alienating to most students. In fact, the experience of testing - which is often dehumanizing and certainly restrictive - reveals that tests are not primarily designed for the test-takers. Instead, the carefully designed experience of high-stakes testing regimes often lies in the experience of people who use the test scores, like policy makers and admissions committees. The scores must be easily and quickly interpretable by these decision-makers and they must differentiate test-takers. The experience of the learners who interact with the test directly is, at best, a secondary consideration.
