Designing Experience for the “Me, Me, Me, Generation”
After coming back home from years abroad, there is one thing that sparked my attention — I was quite intrigued to discover that Jakartans are highly obsessed with ‘polkadots’. For someone who is not fond of fine arts (only God knows why I’m calling myself a designer), I was amazed by its Insta-worthiness. So, after a series of the so-called internet research, I finally discovered that the phe actually Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition, which was held at Museum MACAN, Jakarta. One article about the exhibition mentioned that the marvelous “Kusuma Experience” is equivalent to the Mecca experience.
People who know that I have had the Kusama experience look at me as though I have been to Mecca.
- Sarah Boxer- in “An Artist for the Instagram Age”, The Atlantic, 2017.
Fast forward to september, I finally got a chance to visit the exhibition myself. At first, I was amazed by the enthusiasms at the ticket booth. The queue was extremely long for Indonesian-museum-o’meter standards. My excitement didn’t last long though, upon entering the exhibition hall, the rumours came into life. The internet uproar about how visitors broke the installation art for the sake of Insta-slaving suddenly became a reality, as I witnessed the picture-taking frenzy among the visitors which mostly consist of youngsters. Instead of blaming that visitor’s behaviour, something triggered my curiosity — I started to wonder what in the world makes this exhibition notorious in the first place?
How Should We Design For The “ME, ME, ME Generation”?
After hours of contemplations, I hypothesise that Kusama has managed to capture younger Jakartan’s heart to enjoy her art.
In May 2013 cover story, Time Magazine mentioned millenials as the “Me, Me, Me Generation”. As stated in the article by American Journalist, Joel Stein, “according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.” Narcissistic personality disorder almost 3 times higher for people in their 20s compared to people in their 60s. Moreover, Generation Y embodies confident, tolerant, yet narcissistic personality. Based on the article, Generation Y also seeks constant feedbacks and very demanding.
Therefore, Generation Y members prefer to keep their time and commitments flexible, including when using a product.
These characteristics influence a lot of our living aspects, like art, technology, etc. as we are now witnessing major changes in today’s culture. I believe, Kusama’s trait in absorbing and utilising those aspects in her artworks is astounding. Her-so-called fine arts was turned into something that could be ‘digest’ by a broader group of people — especially millennials. The exhibition was able to let millennial viewers emerge into the art itself by letting them be part of her ‘universe’. The installation turns into a central stage for my own universe, where I have the power to be the main character.
Then here’s the biggest question. How might we design a better product for this so-called millennial target group?
I would like to borrow a content from a book about branding, “Designing Brand Identity”(2009), which I found quite similar and useful in designing an experience. In her book, Alina Wheeler illustrates brand experience from the view of tourist visiting a hotel.
From the image above, it appears that marketing & branding efforts lead tourist to gain brand awareness and make their first purchase. However, it is the process after that, which is mentioned as “The Moment of Truth”(inside dotted circle) plays the biggest role in making the whole visit irreplaceable and unforgettable — leading to a retention.
Experience is a common aspect of product design –whatever your product is, it’s highly important to understand our users by looking through their eyes and developing a good experience during this moment of truth. Millennials want themselves to be taken seriously and they need to be in charge of this moment of truth — they want to be heard and require instant gratification.
Being a member of Tokopedia’s product design team, I’ve come to realize that Millennial definitely has the capability in driving our product strategy since they are one of our main target markets, and yet sometimes we still struggle to understand their goals and needs. We’ve initiated several business models that could cater to those target groups and not all of them end up being successful. That sums up how impactful their self-centered behaviour is in driving the market direction. In order to cater their self-centeredness, we believe that our product needs to have as many personalisation and customisation features as possible to meet their consistently changing needs, interests and tastes.
Since personalisation is highly associated with “Wishlist”, a feature allowing users to save their purchase intention, we created price drop alert/reminder aiming to decrease Wishlist average kept time (the period from when the item was added into the wish list and when the item was eventually purchased) and increase Wishlist to paid order conversion. Surprisingly, the feature successfully converted 25.73% users to purchase the product in their Wishlist on the first month of its release.
From this case, I believe the impact of utilising personalisation could provide the user with a product experience by placing them in the center of the ‘universe’.
