Holistic Experience Design and the Importance of Externalization
As the Director of Experience Design at Handsome, it’s always easier to explain what I do over dinner with a quick napkin sketch.
Not because I am the world’s best with a Sharpie, but because of the fundamental power in externalizing— making something tangible — to quickly reduce complexity and communicate more effectively.
Holistic experience design at Handsome is not a franchised 5-step process, nor is it intangible strategy work that lacks practicality. At its core, it’s a small team of experts leveraging context, culture, and agile methodologies to transform business challenges into connected digital and physical experiences across the customer ecosystem.
Collaboration is key, and upfront externalization, or getting data out of our individual minds and up on a shared wall is our catalyst for multidisciplinary problem solving. We’re also deeply integrated with our client teams, leveraging externalization exercises like customer journey mapping, ecosystem modeling, use case generation, data mapping, and S.E.T factors to quickly unlock multi-departmental expertise across marketing, product, IT, UX, design, operations, customer service, business, finance, as well as the executive board to remove bureaucratic barriers and create multi-departmental buy-in.
Ongoing multi-department support and buy-in is crucial. End-customers engage with vast collections of digital and physical experiences across the ecosystem, and each of those distinct slices of the ecosystem is usually owned by a different department. Yet, it is with the brand in its entirety that customers develop meaningful relationships, not individual channels or touchpoints. This is why we deliver not just the tactical designs for development every sprint, but externalized artifacts from research and client co-creation sessions to iteratively create a shared vision for short-, mid-, and longterm solutions — continuously aligning disparate groups in the name of experience.
Makers at every level
At Handsome, we are all makers who value the dirt under our fingernails, and fundamentally believe you stop learning when you stop executing. As the Director of Experience Design at Handsome, I toggle between leading a team of experts and executing personally across traditional UX, business strategy, content direction, and human-centered research and IXD. All of this is balanced with the intention to create connected experiences that provide value at every interaction and bridge the gap between the digital and the physical worlds.
Driven by agile methodologies, including rapid prototyping, testing, and iterative implementation cycles, as well as deep customer, market and technology research, our multidisciplinary teams are able to quickly create and deliver while always keeping an eye on the long-term vision. We don’t waste months theorizing about insights, but instead bring those insights to life through tangible outputs early and often — continuously charging the connections between each point of the ecosystem.
Unlocking unique solutions for clients through ongoing experimental externalization
In addition to ensuring all people, channels, and touchpoints work together within a brand’s ecosystem, our small teams of technologists, designers, and strategists also engage in ongoing experimental externalization to create connections and uncover a future of possibility for the clients we serve.
Experimental externalization allows teams to rapidly make connections across industries, mediums, and technologies that they may not have otherwise made. This avoids just copying what’s out there and, instead, uncovers creative solutions that give brands a unique point of differentiation.
When thinking about the overall value of externalization during the creative process, Christina Wodtke makes a great comparison to gameplay:
“Imagine you are playing Scrabble. What if you couldn’t rearrange the tiles? Would this slow you down? Would you make lower scoring words? Any Scrabble player would tell you yes. Any poker or bridge player would tell you they always arrange the cards in their hands to support their strategy. Anyone doing long division would prefer to do it with a pencil and paper than in their head.”
— Christina Wodtke
Ensuring a path forward by continually externalizing the future as it could be throughout the process
Given the way holistic experience design enables brands to have more powerful relationships with their customers, it’s no surprise experience-driven businesses are increasingly outperforming competitors across the customer life cycle. So why aren’t there more experience-driven businesses?
Enabling a unified experience strategy within a large organization can be extremely challenging. Anyone can say what should be done, but very few can deliver not only the digital and physical products of an experience but the tactical artifacts needed to create a strong connective tissue and enable multi-department success, as well.
At Handsome, we partner with some of the world’s biggest companies to break through bureaucracy and align disparate groups through the ongoing externalization of systems, frameworks, distinct slices of data ownership, customer journeys + stories, feedback loops, short-, mid-, and long-term experience roadmaps, and more.
And just like the dinner napkin, it is in the act of being able to touch and see the future as it could be, not as it is, through tangible models, prototypes and roadmaps that we help our clients see the path forward and take the first step into the future in unison.
I’m Annette, Director of Experience Design at Handsome, in Austin, TX. We’re a holistic experience design agency. In partnership with our clients, we create deeply connected brands, services and products that enable powerful relationships between businesses and people. From research and strategy to design and implementation, clients like FedEx, Audi, Nickelodeon, AMC, Facebook and Keller Williams trust us with the ongoing transformation of their brands and businesses. Hit me up if you want to learn more.
