Last night, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path spoke inspiringly to a group of user experience professionals, CHI-Atlanta, about “Experience Strategies.”  Not any ordinary presentation. It reminded me why I care so deeply about user experience and rekindled my vision for it to be not just good but innovative—for it to not just compete but leapfrog competition.  I’m sharing a few high points here and will share more in another post.

Take an Experience-Based Approach
Peter talked extensively about what this means, especially for products–applications, websites, devices, etc.  It’s easy to get mired in technology and features without truly understanding the problem we’re trying to solve and envisioning the experience we’re trying to design.  In the words of Steve Jobs:

When you start looking at a problem and see a simple solution you don’t understand the problem. You keep looking and see how complicated it really is and you are halfway there. The really great person will keep going to find the key underlying principle and create a beautiful, elegant solution that works.

The stage of looking at the problem is one of the most critical and often the most overlooked.  Looking at the problem takes research with real customers/users, understanding the competitive landscape, understanding the brand’s system of customer touchpoints (channels, etc.), and more.  Reflecting thoughtfully on all these considerations helps us find that key underlying principle.  And all this takes time.  (I’m reminded of the CHI 2006 keynote address given by Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, where he discussed the culture of innovation.  He views every touchpoint with customers as an opportunity for innovation.)  One of the most compelling examples Peter mentioned was the Nintendo Wii.  Rather than staying in the same features and graphics game as PS3 and XBox, Wii changed the game by introducing physicality—and has outsold the competition in huge numbers ever since.

Employ Experience Strategy
So how do we apply an experience-based approach?  Largely by articulating an experiential goal and sticking to it. Peter also noted it tends to be where business value and experience opportunities align.  This doesn’t have to be expressed in reams of documentation.  It can be a few paragraphs or a few words.  Its purpose is to remind everyone what the end experience should be.  Peter artfully described many examples, but I am simply noting a few here:

• Kodak camera (in 1884): You press the button, we do the rest.
• Flickr: Articulated on their About page. 
• Google Calendar: Shown on the AdaptivePath blog.

Think Systems—And Leverage Them
Perhaps my favorite part of the presentation, Peter described how a customer experiences not just a product but a system.  The system is comprised of the brand/company’s processes, or channels (web, paper, IVR / call center, store, etc.), or more.  The product is just an interface to access the system.  For example, the iPod itself doesn’t have much functionality.  It’s the iPod device (to access the media) and iTunes software (to manage and buy the media) together that make the system, albeit a system Apple tightly controls.  A more complicated but still tightly controlled system is Target’s prescription bottle and communication system.

More complicated still are the multiple channels of a financial services company he encountered when designing its website.  The danger there, Peter warned, is treating the channels as silos, not as a system.  This partitioned view results in a fractured experience for the customer. It burdens the customer to figure out the system, rather than burdening the system to help the customer.  I cannot stress how important this point is for large companies and big brands, especially those offering services.  Designing the experience for a single website or application is good.  Designing the experience across channels is what leapfrogs competition.