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Creative Design

Offline, online, in-store and over the phone: We’re all experience designers now

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By Guy Sexty, Head of design

August 5, 2016 | 5 min read

Service Design. Immersive Design. Interaction Design. Experience Design.

Designers

Designers

The 21st Century communications agency is awash with modifying nouns, and it seems like everyone wants to rebrand themselves as a designer. My plumber now offers her services as a liquid flow designer, and my cleaner has just doubled his rates on the back of a rebrand as a hygienic environment designer.

For those us who make a living bringing order to chaos by the application of branding, there is even more confusion. Our job title seems to change from week to week: a ‘UI designer’ today, a ‘visual designer’ tomorrow; a ‘digital designer’ here a ‘graphic designer’ there. And yet ironically enough, despite all the change, the fundamental questions we face with every single project – regardless of media – have remained unchanged for decades: what is the substrate; who is the audience and what is their situation, their motivation; what is the content; what technology are we employing?

Whether on screen or on paper, these are our considerations as we attempt to solve problems with design. So what’s really new, and why all the different titles?

On the surface, it appears as though the design landscape is fragmenting as different technologies and devices lead to more and more specialised disciplines. However, this is not necessarily the case. Let’s have a closer look at one of those modifying nouns that appears to have gained more traction than others: experience design.

Many people seem to believe that experience design is simply another name for UX, a belief compounded by the willingness of many UX practitioners to rebrand themselves as experience designers. But it is actually a much broader field than that. UX tends to be restricted to digital channels, and often to a single channel of a brand experience, whereas experience design orchestrates all touchpoints on and offline. And every customer interaction with a brand can be defined as an experience.

Here’s an example: earlier this year I designed a magazine for a luxury brand. It was a beautiful piece of work, employing different types of stock within, blind embossing on the cover, sumptuous full bleed photography and a layout that enjoyed a generous use of white space. In the end it wasn’t a magazine, it was an experience.

But it’s not just luxury magazines, the humble pizza delivery flyer stuffed through your letterbox is also an experience. Maybe not as enjoyable an experience – for me it tends to manifest itself as revulsion, wincing at the dreadful typography and garish food photography and the cheap feel of the stock as I ferry it from doormat to recycling bin. But it is still an experience. As is every time someone sees an advert (on or offline) or poster, or interacts with a brand on social media. For retail clients, a visit to their store is arguably the most important experience a customer can have.

So experience design has to cover all of these touchpoints. But if we are to call ourselves experience designers it’s not enough to be able to design for screens, we must be able to design for offline communications, whether they are press ads, point of sale communications, billboards, physical environments, whatever. A rigorous understanding of brand design is also required, in order to appreciate how a brand communicates in each different channel, how to measure the level of amplification in each different execution.

What’s more, in many instances, brand experiences don’t involve anything other than a call to customer services. So in this instance the experience design involves script writing and training for call centre or online chat operators. And let us not forget the humble TV ad. In spite of the repeated announcements of the death of TV, many brands still rely on the big, expensive 60-second film to deliver the brand experience to a large audience.

Clearly, no one person would be able to work within all these disciplines simultaneously. To be able to write engaging scripts, design TV commercials, lay out press ads, formulate a three dimensional environment, design websites and apps. No one can do all that and do it all well (no matter how much some people like to think they can). In fact, it is looking increasingly like experience design, rather than a discipline in its own right, is just another phrase for everything that an agency delivers.

So maybe everyone who works in communications should rebrand themselves as an experience designer. Maybe we’re all experience designers now.

Guy Sexty is head of design at Partners Andrews Aldridge

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