WTF is an Experience?
Experience is that gut feeling you’re left with after a slew of activities and interactions with a particular brand, business, service, person, institution, etc. It is that thing that you can’t quite put your finger on, yet you know if it made you feel good, bad, or maybe frustrated and confused.
Experience happens over a span of undefined time and can change or sway depending on the quality of interactions that you have at any given moment. As Lexie Kane states in her article The Peak-End Rule: How Impressions Become Memories, “our mind quickly average the moments that most stand out in our memories to form an opinion of the past.”
Prior to the internet, the moments or interactions we had with brands, services, business, etc. involved one of the five senses and could be influenced through conversations, tasting before you buy, seeing the color, or feeling the quality of the product. Businesses could easily enhance your experience of these moments through delightful smells and sounds in the environment. Worse case, they could hold your hand and walk you through to ease any confusion of where you need to go.
As our interactions with brands, businesses, services, people, and institutions switch from physical to virtual, it is making it harder to control the overall experience a person has with any of these things. Experiences now are mostly influenced by our impressions and perceptions of our virtual interactions. These nuanced interactions require designers to look through a different lens to create a cohesive experience out of a virtual visits, emails and social media posts.
