Chapter Four: Experience and Authenticity

Designers are in the unique position to improve all aspects of human life, including the visual, emotional, and experiential. Interaction Design should be desirable—beautiful, elegant, and appropriate—regardless of the medium chosen to embody a solution. Visual form can be considered one of the most basic methods of communicating design solutions, and the associated field of Industrial Design has a relatively long period of formal development that can be directly applied to the creation of Interaction Design solutions.

While the roots of Industrial Design lie in mass production and the Industrial Revolution, the true essence of modern commercial design aesthetics can be traced to the styling exercises of vehicle designers in the 50s. Popularized by Raymond Loewy, the sleek, streamlined style of trains and cars can still be found in today's translucent plastic (and very fast looking) staplers, computer mice, and drinking bottles. Interaction Designers, however, are required to balance issues of form with issues of time: An interaction occurs in the fourth dimension, and simply attending to aesthetics does not take into account the unfolding experience that a user has with a product. Interaction Designers often find themselves in a position of imbalance between aesthetic appropriateness and the user-centeredness described above. Rhetorical issues of form development become increasingly important when considering solutions that embrace technology, as ambiguity of form may negatively impact understanding but may positively affect our experiences.

Basic digital-technological advancements have stabilized and begun to commoditize, resulting in cheaper, faster, and more effective capabilities. To see this influence in semiconductors, we need to look no farther than a $2.99 talking Hallmark greeting card. This product exemplifies the opportunities and problems raised by Gordon Moore's 1965 landmark paper, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.”

Faster and cheaper digital technology has permitted digital experiences that feel less arbitrary (we are no longer urged to “download this driver, move this jumper”) and more cohesive and seamless. The combination of technical quality and usability engineering has produced technology that works fairly well. This directly drives the change from artifact to experience.

From Artifact to Experience

Product or Industrial Design's celebrated history of producing beautiful artifacts is intertwined with the roots of mass production and business. As companies such as Westinghouse and Braun made millions of dollars by producing numerous objects, designers such as Raymond Loewy and Dieter Rams helped to create a sense of human purpose for these objects in the home and workplace. Design as a discipline historically embraced the nature of this work, with product designers expected to envision and help to mass produce the objects. Designers would create prototypes in order to understand how an object existed in the round. An example is the clay 1/5- scale car models, built in half and balanced against a mirror to simulate an entire vehicle.

Farther into the product-development cycle, advertisers would investigate how to position the products in the marketplace. The so-called money shot—the beautiful image of the object, set on a white background and lit from all directions with soft lighting—became a method of elevating a simple mass-produced thing to almost an art object to covet and embrace. The declarative focus, both through the creative process and the sales cycle, was on the static object. The most celebrated designs of the twentieth century were bought, sold, used, and considered as “things.”

This focus on things has changed, as product designers begin to explicitly emphasize both short-term and long-term interactions with the artifacts they make. The entire idea of a product has changed, and product managers or product owners in business find themselves in charge of the development of software goods, things that exist only on the screen, on the net, or in-between. The emphasis in these products is on a larger story of use—on designing to support behavior—and on considerations of usability, time-based flows, and experiences. This change can be seen in all segments of product design, development, sales, and marketing. For example, consumers are enticed to purchase new electronic devices based on the experience of use, with an emphasis on the interface instead of the physical form. Although a television may still be sold primarily based on its price and screen size, more and more manufacturers are emphasizing the menu system, features and functions that a person will attend to during each use. And although product designers continue to examine form and material, they now spend most of the creative process on flow diagrams, use cases, usability, and other elements of interaction.

This change is evident beyond consumer electronics. The push in the marketplace toward innovative experiences has created the common new acronyms of UX and UE—User Experience—with teams of people looking at the intersections between products and users. Equipment producers, sporting goods manufacturers, telephone service providers, and insurance providers and airlines have begun to analyze and describe the user experience of interacting with their products, services, and systems. This is a major change for all businesses, as people who previously focused on sales and marketing or production and logistics may now find themselves faced with the difficult and confusing task of creating pleasurable experiences.

The Challenges of Experience

With such clear successes and value in structured experiences, it seems a likely conclusion to focus on designing experiences rather than designing artifacts (either digital or physical). But in moving from artifacts to experiences, designers face new challenges, challenges that are deeply rooted in psychology and philosophy and that require a more thorough intellectual consideration than may have been necessary in the design of physical objects.

Dr. Kees Overbeeke, an associate professor of Industrial Design at TU/Eindhoven, describes this meshing of object and experience:

In our work, we see design for usability and design for aesthetics of interaction as inextricably linked. Much of the Interaction Design community reasons from usability towards aesthetics: poor usability may have a negative impact on the beauty of interaction. This has led to a design process in which usability problems are tackled first and questions about aesthetics are asked later. Yet, we are also interested in reasoning in the other direction: working from aesthetics and using it to improve usability. We consider temptation to form part of an invitation for action, both through aesthetics of appearance and the prospect of aesthetics of interaction.

As aesthetics and experience are so closely related, it is important to evaluate not only the emotional or experiential resonance in the creations but also to understand or contemplate the structure of experiences with artifacts. The most succinct and oft-cited structure for understanding user experience was authored in 2000 by Jodi Forlizzi, of the Human-Computer

Interaction Institute and School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, and Shannon Ford, formerly of Scient Corporation. Forlizzi and Ford, referencing John Dewey, identified the distinction between experience, an experience, and experience as story.

Experience itself occurs (probably continually) during moments of consciousness, as to experience the world or to consider what is occurring in the world at a given moment.

An experience has a beginning, middle, and end and can therefore be discussed and framed as a discrete experience in time.

Experience as story is the vehicle used to transmit, condense, and reflect on an experience.

In creating this distinction, the authors indicate that experience is something that occurs within a person, prompted by the nature of external events. An experience is something that positions less control in the person themselves, as they become more participatory in the process (just along for the ride). Experience as story shifts control back toward the person, as they can control the manner in which the experience is shared after it is over.

In all cases, the authors acknowledge that the creation of an exacting experience is, most likely, impossible in and of itself, and that instead, designers are more fruitful in focusing their efforts on the creation of the structure in which an experience takes place:

We can realize that a good product is one that offers a good or memorable narrative that the user will engage with, and pass on to others, either by sharing the artifact or by talking about it. To create a good product, it is critical to understand our users. The need to involve the user in the design process has made product design a more complex task. However, designers can no longer focus solely on the product: a successful design will take into consideration all of the components in the user-product interaction: user, product, and context of use.

Author, psychologist, and philosopher John Dewey explains that

“Experience does not go on simply inside a person… Every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree the objective conditions under which experiences are had.”

This implies that, while an Interaction Designer may focus on the creation of an artifact or system, much of the meat of the experience of use is left up to the person using the artifact or system.

The writing of Dewey, Forlizzi, and Ford is not simply provocative or theoretical; the philosophical idea of individual has pragmatic, real-world implications. Consider any two people entering Starbucks, on the same day, at the same time. Much of what they will encounter—much of their discrete experience—has been scripted, from what the barista will say to the temperature of the coffee that is brewed. But no matter how careful the designers were in positioning the lights and selecting the music and mandating the flavor of the rich syrup in the Caramel Macchiato, the people who enter the store are unique, do unique things, react in unique ways, and think about the world from unique points of view. The uniqueness will frequently be inconsequential to the particular flow through the store, but sometimes, it will place a large amount of pressure on the designed experiential framework.

It doesn't matter if one of the visitors to the store has black hair and the other blonde, but it matters a great deal if one of the visitors has a food allergy or is unable to see over the counter, is shy, doesn't speak English, or has never been in a Starbucks before. A rigid, fixed experience that considers all people to be the same will clearly not work but neither will a common alternative approach: to try to hypothesize every possible thing that could happen and then design for all possible situations.

Some companies, like McDonalds, have scripts that their employees literally must follow, lest they are reprimanded or fired; some even have subscripts for less frequent interactions, scripts that “direct employees to say they will bend the rules ‘just this once.’”

This may work in commoditized industries or services, where a rough approximation of successful service suffices (the hamburger I got roughly resembles what I wanted, and I only had to pay 99 cents for it, so even though I didn't understand the ordering process and there are onions on the burger and I don't like onions, it's not the end of the world). But for most organizations, a rough approximation of success is not actually success at all. In situations like this, typical ecosystem strategy problems, where corporations desire uniformity in their offerings across but demand excellence in service and quality, designers have realized that control isn't always appropriate, possible, or desired. In these settings, designers find themselves focusing on frameworks, and these frameworks offer users a considerable amount of flexibility and leeway. The company must give up control, and this lack of control in design can be frightening, especially for the designer who is used to thinking of design as an expressive, personal, and highly finite activity (which is true for many trained in formal industrial or graphic design practices). They need to think about how to best design experience frameworks that can bend and flex with the unique needs of each person and the particulars of each situation.

As business owners and designers change to consider user experience, many realize they can imbue deep emotional resonance in their products and services. This desire to produce meaningful products is not new. For most of Industrial Design's history, designers have attempted to evoke emotions through the forms, colors, and materials of their products.

Yet many product designers have become frustrated with the superficial styling that is common in the creation of mass-produced artifacts. After engineering develops some technology and marketing specifies a number of features, the designer is called in to do the plastics or put a pretty face on it before the product goes to market. Designers continually bemoan the lack of integrity in this approach, as the late addition of design is seen as lipstick on a pig, and designers are implicitly viewed as lacking the intellectual capacity to create value in the item being produced. This change toward experience has given hope to designers. They now feel empowered to do what they have always wanted: to produce meaningful products that encourage emotional responses.

Experience, being emotionally resonant and memorable, intrigues designers. Humans are good at intellectually and emotionally remembering intricate details of experiences. Even bad experiences become deeply woven into our memories, as we recall—often with amusement— the time we missed the flight, or dropped the laptop in the pool, or set the microwave oven on fire. Years later, a bad product is not very funny, yet a bad experience, as a method of connectedness between people—experience as narrative—seems to age well with time.

Experiences have the deep meaning that product designers have long searched for, and it seems deceptively simple to change from designing things to designing experiences.

A simple fact has enormous implications for those who seek to design experiences: Human experiences are always unique. Even the most carefully crafted and planned event or interaction will always be slightly and subtly different because each person engaged in it is always slightly and subtly different. He may have awakened sad, for no reason; he may be a bit shorter or taller than was planned; he may do something unexpected, or he may make a mistake. The mass production of a physical product requires careful attention to tolerances, and the goal is efficient replication. Quality engineering methods are established to ensure that the product is exactly the same, time after time. Yet experiences are not the same, time after time. A focus on the mass produced ignores the subtleties of human behavior and human emotion.

To be more specific, and perhaps accusatory, now that product designers have gotten quite good at producing a predictable product, the game is changing: Designers are being asked to produce an experience that is positive and resonant but not necessarily predictable. Obviously, this is a more complicated problem, and to design it well is a more complicated endeavor.

Pragmatic Challenges

In addition to the philosophical issues of semantics (claiming to design an experience may be a fallacy) and the aforementioned issues of control, the push toward digitally enhanced experiences presents new pragmatic challenges in software design and development for businesses familiar with physical product design and development. Many of these businesses may not be prepared for the difficulties introduced when changing from a producer of static artifacts to a supporter of experiences.

Although physical manufacturing enjoys a century-long precedent of trial, error, and exploration, software development is still in its infancy. Companies that intend to produce hybrid goods—both physical and digital—must revisit all of the quality-assurance issues they assumed were bested in the 80s, and relearn what it means to deliver defect-free products. Established but flawed methods for improving digital goods' quality and time to market are the subject of debate even within pure-play software companies (the most common argument is one positioning agile development against waterfall development, with people on both sides making compelling arguments but rarely achieving consensus). Many software companies find themselves using a patch-and-upgrade approach, offering software patches that fix defects found post release and upgrades that allow new levels of functionality. Consumers have gotten fairly used to upgrading their software products, but it remains to be seen whether they have the patience to upgrade their physical products, too. Some entertainment products have given glimpses of this future, as the Nintendo Wii frequently demands an upgrade prior to being used (and delaying game time considerably when the upgrade is large). What will a forced update to a stove feel like? Will dinner have to wait for several hours while an update is installed? What will happen if users ignore the update, which they are sure to do? And what happens when the stove gets a virus?

Product managers, who are used to offering their product as a single, one-time purchase, will need to learn new skills and approaches. The connectedness of digital products implies a longer relationship with a consumer and demands flexible, pervasive, immediate, and friendly support and customer care. Just as consumers may be unwilling to upgrade their appliances, they may be equally unwilling to wait on hold with an offshore service representative when the upgrade to their microwave, blender, doorbell, or thermostat stops working.

A company that is used to producing physical goods in China in a relatively hands-off fashion will be stunned by the time and resources it takes to offshore the equivalent digital products. And a company that intends to produce a product that is both physical and digital will find an even tougher landscape of incompatibility, bug fixes, security, personalization, tooling, production, distribution, and support.

In addition to these pragmatic challenges related to product stability and quality, strategic challenges must be approached more authoritatively, from the top of the organizational structure. In emphasizing experiences, it becomes quickly evident that a single artifact is not used in isolation and that experiences span across objects and systems. A business unit in a large company cannot focus on a single product or product line any more, as there are experiential connections between one product line and another. The experience of lawn care will switch quickly from mowing to edging to trimming to watering, and while different product teams at a household products company may have traditionally worked on each product line, customers expect products from the same brand to play well together. The people responsible for any given product must regularly communicate with people in other business units to drive alignment around a central, cross-product interaction.

This is easier said than done, as large corporations are commonly organized around narrowly defined product lines, where members of the development team have visibility only within a given product or set of products. If the compensation structure of a company reinforces an internal, siloed approach to product development, an individual has no direct motivator to explore competitive business units. And the same is true at an organizational level: If each business unit is responsible for their own profit and loss reporting, they are incentivized to close their metaphorical borders to other business units. Collaboration is fine as long as it doesn't detract from the bottom line. The result of this deeply verticalized approach to business organization on the visual and semantic experience of use is explicitly negative. The consumer has little chance of enjoying a cohesive and consistent set of interaction and aesthetic paradigms when using multiple products from a single brand and will have difficulty in transferring operational knowledge from one product to another. Most consumers have experienced how the brand breaks down when they try to get their camera to integrate with their printer. Even if both devices are from the same company, rarely is the device connectivity easy or seamless. The obvious and notable exception is Apple, where the organizational structure is autocratic— devices work together because this level of brand continuity has been policed from the top down.

Much as a brand is described and controlled through brand guidelines, interactions must also be unified, yet because interactions are subtle and diverse, a set of interaction guidelines (usually as a simple pattern library or unified taxonomy) is not enough to drive meaningful consistency. This challenge of driving unified and consistent behavior in multiple product lines is one that has few successful precedents, and those (such as Apple or Nike) are increasingly secretive about their internal, cross-vertical development processes. Many attribute these few successes to a heavy-handed creative visionary at the top of the company, which is unrealistic to expect in most of the Fortune 500 or Global 2000.

Owning the Experience

The major leaders of the Fortune 500 have responded to these challenges of experience in various ways and with varying degrees of success. Many have changed their advertisements and brand campaigns to describe their commitment to experiences. For example, Dell intends to control the customer experience, as “Nearly every bulletin board in every office has a sign that reads ‘The Customer Experience: Own It,’ ” and Hulu asks customers which “advertising experience” they would like, prior to displaying movies. Yet clearly the product landscape is not the utopia promised by these companies. Those that have reaped financial benefits from a focus on experience have changed more than just their PR; they've changed both the way their businesses are organized and the way they consider their products, services, and systems. One of the most apparent changes evident in large corporations that are attempting to deliver emotionally resonant and personal interactions is the creation of an empowered UX group. Those who make up such a group may have no formal training in design, yet they have become the voice or the advocate of the user in the development of digital products. They work with external design consultants to balance both technical and business requirements and produce familiar documents: marketing requirements, product requirements, and specifications. The existence of a formalized UX group, and the placement of that group outside of either marketing or engineering, is a positive result of the aforementioned changes.

More important, these groups are engaged closer to the beginning of a development cycle to participate in initial strategic discussions and to drive product development activities. However, this centralized UX model is not perfect, and the strife between various business units is apparent inside even the most well-intentioned companies. UX professionals have been tasked with doing design work, yet they often lack the necessary training to do it well. Equally common, these people may lack the visual vocabulary to present their work in an emotionally resonant manner, so they become only conduits for outside vendors to deliver true design solutions. This is a frustrating position to be in, as it belittles their role within the corporation and may actually position the UX group in a negative light: They may be seen as the “vendor management” organization or “marketing lite.”

Additionally, because the members of a UX group typically come from either a marketing or usability engineering background, they lack a formal and methodical creative design process. The design methods utilized may be inconsistent and poorly documented, so they must be reinvented during each project or cycle. Or the methods have been inherited from traditional marketing efforts, and so these UX managers spend their time managing a marketing requirements document, product requirements document, or other flavor of overzealous documentation that defines, in words, what features and functions the product will have or offer. Design certainly has a linguistic side, but a written feature document doesn't offer much in the way of visualizing the temporal qualities of experiences, interactions, or animations and transitions. These demand other representations, such as working prototypes, to be actionable and useful.

Regardless of the quality of the UX offering, however, the mere presence of this group in an organization implies that the organization is working to produce emotionally relevant products and interactions. Working hand-in-hand with a UX group, then, is the strategic push toward ecosystem design or the end-to-end product lifecycle. Companies are considering how brand loyalty can translate to an interconnected home or workplace, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When all products that are developed by a single company can talk to each other, the larger world of those products provides an exponential curve of utility. This interconnectedness becomes a strategic method of ensuring repeat brand purchases (also known as locking in the customer or the more humane sounding switching costs).

Thus, we find ourselves at a place where major changes will likely benefit consumers, through increased emotional resonance of products, and will benefit businesses that are able to leverage the brand value of a cohesive, connected experience across multiple touchpoints. These changes have generated a number of difficult challenges and raise large questions about the nature of our organizational structures, our design processes, and the available talent pool of designers ready to face these challenges. The changes also indicate a lack of proper training, both for novice designers and for staff members who have stumbled into design through a trend toward UX within their corporations.

Authenticity

In the past decade, brand experience has been recognized as a substantial and critical component to the world of product development. The rise of the mega-brands Starbucks and Nike has created a new set of rules for marketers. It is no longer necessary to spend each dollar of a marketing budget on the sale of product. Instead, large amounts of money are spent on raising brand awareness or gaining so-called mind share. Placement, messaging, stickiness, and experience are all marketing terms that have crept into discussions of product design and even into the design of interactive multimedia. Julie Khaslavsky and Nathan Shedroff have discussed the role brand plays in what they have deemed the Seductive Experience: “Ending a seduction successfully is like parting from a romantic relationship on good terms. It should always be viewed as a positive, worthwhile experience—if the creator of the product wants a chance at seducing the same customers again or being held in high regard for having created the experience in the first place.”

Scott Bedbury, author of A New Brand World (and creator of such memorable brand campaigns as Nike's Just Do It) claims several principles to understand and develop this seductive brand awareness. Not surprisingly, he concludes that “Relevance, simplicity, and humanity—not technology—will distinguish brands in the future.”

Recall the last time you enjoyed a cup of coffee at Starbucks. The store probably welcomed you with soft, subdued lighting; the warm and rich colors on the wall set a backdrop for the array of comfortable, oversized chairs and couches that surround the perimeter of the store. Before the barista welcomed you with a smile, the music playing complemented the physical experience with soft and often jazz-inspired rhythms. All of this, however, is trivialized by the rich and delightful scents of freshly brewed coffee and rich pastries.

As you approached the counter, you may not have noticed, and you certainly may not like, that you were being carefully manipulated to feel—and even behave—in a certain way: in the Starbucks Way. The colors, scents, process, procedures, placement, artifacts, heights, weights, materials, curves, transitions, forms, tastes, and products are all carefully orchestrated to ensure that you have a successful experience during your stay at Starbucks. A major theme of this experience is comfortable predictability, as the experience at a Starbucks in Portland, Oregon, is nearly identical to the experience at a Starbucks in New York City. The brand of Starbucks has transcended the simple mark or logo that is usually referenced to delineate a particular company. If prompted, you may even be hard pressed to describe the logo itself. Instead, when you next purchase a tub of Starbucks Ice Cream at the corner grocery store, you will recall the feeling you had when you last enjoyed a Venti Half Caff Latte with a biscotti.

Starbucks Corporation is not selling coffee as much as they are attempting to sell a predefined experience. When considering the actual product that is being consumed, the coffee begins to play a rather inconsequential role. In fact,

Starbucks intends to become your home away from home. The 2004 Starbucks Annual Report explains that the corporation has the goal of becoming a third place for people to go—instead of home or work—where they can feel comfortable and, more important, loyal.

And it is not rare for a company to consider their business as a third place to go.

Gap, Inc.'s Forth & Towne stores intended to create a welcoming place for middle-aged women to relax and unwind, and Apple has also made an effort to sell experience: “One thing completely obscured from view as you enter the store: the cash registers. It feels more like walking into a hands-on museum than walking into a retail store. Sure, Apple wants to sell products, but their first priority is to make you want the products. And that desire has to begin with your experience of the products in the store.”

Starbucks also understands the importance of the seductive experience in generating return business. After creating the framework for a compelling and predictable experience, the product itself—coffee—is consistently top quality and unique, communicating the message that Starbucks is focused on the highest standard of excellence. This is communicated in totality, through happy employees (or so-called partners, who are eligible for such impressive benefits as a 401K plan for part-timers and full health insurance) and through total immersion of the Starbucks experience in the United States.

Designers at Starbucks, Forth & Towne, and Apple have explored the nature of experience and the role it plays in the creation of sales—they have focused their efforts on the experiences people have when they shop. The designed product is ambiguous, and it becomes difficult to understand the relationship between the physical and formal qualities of a product and the experience in which it is bought, used, or discarded. In fact, this distinction may be irrelevant. Interaction Designers do not consider a designed artifact as tremendously distinct from the context in which it is found.

Companies try to tap into an emotional desire for resonance and try to appeal to the less logical sides of our decision-making abilities. The authenticity of the designed artifacts we encounter depends entirely on their craftsmanship and their intent and ability to evoke emotion. For mass-produced artifacts, these qualities become the substantiation of a claim by a company or brand. It's easy to see through an object that is false: The wood veneer will start to pull away from the cheap particle board beneath, the paint will scratch, and the finish will discolor. Age seems to highlight the charade of mass production, calling attention to inadequate production, cheap materials, and degrees of planned obsolescence. Unfortunately, we've grown accustomed to these inauthentic design choices. When the harsh reality of poor assembly rears its ugly head, we simply discard the object and buy a new one. Materialism and a consumptive culture have not just made a fool of our environment. It's become an easy way for us to avoid acknowledgment of the joke that's been played on us by the very companies that enticed us in the first place.

Some have become wise to the farce, and no amount of decoration can lure these consumers into the trap. They select only handcrafted objects of beauty, and they've learned to judge good design and honest labor. The physical is no challenge for these educated consumers, as they inspect the tightness of the joinery and marvel at the rubber coatings.

The authenticity problem is harder to acknowledge, however, when considering digital products, services, and the design of large-scale systems. What's been deemed the total experience of product, interface, environment, and service is the next frontier in the charade of authenticity. No longer is it enough to produce an artifact; it is argued that there is little intellectual depth to these items as compared to the design of a complicated and multifaceted system or service. Yet how can a consumer judge authenticity in something that isn't physical in the experiences they have?

Designers seek to support rich, compelling, and repeatable experiences, as this seems to be financially valuable and appears ripe with potential for innovation stewardship. Yet increasingly, it's becoming clear that mass-produced experiences can only rarely be consumed while maintaining any sense of realism: as the level of control over the experience becomes greater, the likelihood of the experience resonating with people decreases. This is the authenticity problem: Consumers see cracks in the designed façade of the experience touchpoints and begin to question the entirety of the branded experience. The authenticity problem rears its ugly head when the flight attendant is having a bad day, or the expensive meal is overcooked, or the football player is found guilty of using steroids. The mirage of beauty and perfection and predictability is gone, and all that is left is the raw scaffold of an experience. With notable exceptions—the Apple Store or Starbucks—“lifestyle brands as experience” is generally a fallacy, and attempts to position brands as integral within culture are seen as less authentic than DIY, underground, or one-off experience scaffolding.

Truly authentic and rich experiences, however, occur every day. People's lives are filled with sorrow, ecstasy, serendipity, and other emotions that are drawn directly from the powerful narratives that intertwine in culture. These authentic experiences are supported by design but almost always in an indirect manner: A chance meeting between two long-lost friends in an airport is facilitated via the waiting area, but the waiting area is only ancillary to the meeting and certainly wasn't designed explicitly to connect long-lost friends.

Consider, then, that designers can focus on supporting authentic human experiences with their work in a less forceful, controlling manner. Rather than striving to control every aspect of a time-based set of interactions, and rather than attempting to shepherd people through a contrived set of experience gates, designers can support the authenticity that occurs naturally in life by producing incomplete or partially produced design artifacts. When these artifacts (both digital and physical) are encountered by people in the context of an experience, they will complete them, and this completion process is creative. Through this creative, time-based process comes a sense of temporal aesthetics.

Temporal aesthetics in experiences

The role of time in experiences, particularly in experiences that occur over an extended length (a week, a month, or even years) is difficult to track and understand, much less support through forms of design. However, anticipating key points of interaction that are likely to occur during those experiences can offer opportunities for interventions that establish a rhythm of design value. This rhythm comes from anticipating things a person might do, want, need, or desire throughout their relationship with a product, service, or system—and proactively servicing these wants, needs, and desires. For example, a company might anticipate the moment a customer is most likely to share her experience with someone else through a story or blog post. Or they may predict when a customer is most likely to have trouble with a service, such as when upgrading, downgrading, or moving. In both situations, design can be used to map and examine how customers might emotionally react to changes in designed artifacts due to product aging and obsolescence, and provocative stimulus can be offered to change the shift of a product experience.

Zappos, a company well known for its shoe delivery service, offers “surprise” free upgrades to overnight shipping for some customers and likely systematically plans these upgrades to be offered at the appropriate moments to delight a customer or to help improve a strained customer relationship. Many hotel chains frequently call customers after their stay to inquire about the level of service they received. These customer-service interventions need to occur at planned intervals in order to have the most appropriate and intended effect, and so they begin to establish the rhythm of the temporal interaction.

A holistic view of product interactions recognizes that there are touchpoints throughout the lifecycle of use, and while not all of these touchpoints immediately generate new profit, in aggregate they define the emotional response a person has to a design. While many consumer electronics manufacturers have recently focused on the out-of-the-box experience as a key point in the timeline of product interactions, there are other equally as critical moments to consider. Though not comprehensive, these include:

The point at which a product is most likely to fail. Car manufacturers are well aware of how long analog components, such as the timing belt, will last in a vehicle, and consumers are encouraged to have their vehicles serviced at certain points (10,000 miles, 20,000 miles, etc.) to best identify components that may be facing their demise. All products can benefit from this form of anticipatory analysis, and cheap computing and networking capabilities make it much easier for technological products to phone home to the original manufacturer and alert them of usage patterns or potential failure points. Known as back-haul data, the data gathered from usage describe actual behavior rather than expected or hypothetical behavior—as is the case with “data submitted by users through emails, phone calls, forum posts, and surveys.”

The point at which a user gains enough confidence to utilize advanced functionality. This is a moment where a user transitions from a novice state, and where his advanced usage of a product is likely to translate to a feeling of ownership and loyalty or, if his transition is negative, to rejection. The fragility of this moment can't be overstated, as the user is taking a personal risk by performing a complex function or trying a nonstandard feature or setting, and in doing so, she is exposing herself to feeling dumb or naïve. Consider if the product were able to predict when this type of change might occur, and act in a supportive and encouraging but not pedantic fashion; how might various language, affordances, and interactions change?

The point at which a person is most likely to share his personal experiences with other people, through stories, anecdotes, reviews, or even casual conversation. What if a device could sense that it was the topic of conversation and subtly remind a user of the value it has provided?

The point at which a person is most likely to upgrade the product (add functionality), downgrade the product (remove functionality), or maintain the product (perform a regular required, but tedious, operation). When a printer is out of ink, it could present more than just a blinking red light—it could explain where to purchase ink, offer specific ink model numbers, and give instructions on how to recycle old cartridges. While these are commonly opportunities to generate additional revenue, it's important to think of these moments as points in a conversation rather than points in a sales cycle. A long view of a customer relationship implies that it's OK if the user wants to downgrade the product or service or even disconnect it entirely. The conversation isn't over simply because the user has made a financial decision to part ways with the product.

Designers are in the unique position to improve all aspects of human life, including the visual, emotional, and experiential. Interaction Design should be desirable—beautiful, elegant, and appropriate—regardless of the medium chosen to visualize a solution. And while the aesthetic refinement is important to the success of a product, the ability of that product to resonate in an experiential manner will allow it to remain embedded in and positively affect society and culture.

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