Experience Design

The tangibility criteria is sometimes used to distinguish services from goods. While services are obviously intangible, goods can be both tangible and intangible. In the case of software, a High Court case in 2016 held that software was indeed goods, although it was intangible [Rezai 2016].

When buying a word processor package from a software vendor, a client makes the software available to some users (including themself) to act upon this software. They use the various software features (spelling features, formatting features, printing features, etc.) to achieve the outcome of a text document. When printing, user satisfaction comes from experiencing both the printing process and the quality of the printed document.

The reasoning is not different when the word processor is an online word processor. Users still act upon the online word processor to get their printed documents. However new software-enabled services have been added to the word processor product: automated upgrade, cloud backup, etc.

The case of online banking applications is different. They are software resources used by banks to deliver web-exposed account management services. Such applications are part of the account management service provision; they are not goods. Another example is “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)”. The main outcome of IaaS is computing resources (similar to rented computers). They are goods as there is a need to act upon these resources to install and run software on servers. Of course, IaaS products go beyond server goods as they also embed online services, such as the dynamic provisioning of resources.

Consequently, the distinctive characteristic between goods and services is that goods are acted upon to deliver outcomes while services are delegated acts that deliver outcomes. The distinctive characteristic is not tangibility.

Market research identifies customer segments and analyzes customer needs and behavior. It explores current and potential customers to identify unmet customer needs and/or opportunities for business growth.

Market research can focus on simple demographics of an existing or potential customer group, defined by age, gender, geography, or income level. Customer research also seeks to understand customer behavior and motivation.

The goal is to understand who is – or will be – using a product as well as the reasons behind their doing so and how they go about using it (including the contextual areas of “where” and “when”).

Customer research may be conducted via a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic field studies. It also commonly involves doing desk research of online reviews, forums, and social media to explore what customers are saying about a product.

Examples of customer research outcomes are:

The “job-to-be-done” framework was created by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, in part as a reaction against conventional techniques that: “frame customers by attributes – using age ranges, race, marital status, and other categories that ultimately create products and entire categories too focused on what companies want to sell, rather than on what customers actually need” [Christensen 2016].

Jobs-to-be-done analysis complements classical market research techniques by shifting the focus from the customer to what the customer aspires to achieve in some context.

“Some products are better defined by the job they do than the customers they serve” [Traynor 2016]. This is in contrast to many kinds of business and requirements analysis that focus on identifying different user personas (e.g., 45-55 married woman with children in the house). The job-to-be-done framework advocates that “the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis” and that customers “hire” products to do a certain job [Christensen 2016].

To apply the job-to-be-done approach, Des Traynor suggests filling in the blanks in the following:
People hire your product to do the job of ------— every --------— when ----------. The other applicants for this job are --------, --------, and --------, but your product will always get the job because of --------.

Understanding the alternatives that people have is key. It is possible that the job can be fulfilled in multiple ways. For example, people may want certain software to be run. This job can be undertaken through owning a computer (e.g., having a data center). It can also be managed by hiring someone else’s computer (e.g., using a cloud provider). Not being attentive and creative in thinking about the diverse ways jobs can be done places you at risk of disruption [DPBoK 2020].

Experience shall be considered holistically as the sum of all interactions between a customer or user and the enterprise. Experience maps are made of all the stories which, together, describe the end-to-end customer or user experience.

Each customer/user map is defined by:

In the insurance claim story below, the initial event is a car accident. The persona is Diana, the policy owner and driver. John is a participant with whom Diana had an accident. The final desired outcome is a repaired car. The events represented in Claim Experience Events are:

As much as possible, each event should be connected to an intermediate outcome that is necessary to reach the final outcome. All intermediate steps should be left out for clarity. Too often, detailed steps tend to pollute the problem space with solution concerns. For instance, the fulfillment/repair event could be described as such: Diana selects a repair appointment with a nearby repair shop; Diana’s car is picked up at her office for repair. Actually, the hidden product features are: car-repair shop selection (outcome: a car repair shop close to Diana’s home) and repair service organization (outcome: repaired car). There are different ways to achieve these outcomes, ranging from an automated selection of the provider to bringing the repaired car to Diana’s parking lot.

Each experience map is made of a set of touchpoints through which the persona interacts with the enterprise or with external parties; see Claim Experience Map. Each touchpoint gives an opportunity to wrap product features that can provide valuable experience to users and make them more engaged and satisfied. The aspects of experience below shall be analyzed at each touchpoint:

A single event often involves several touchpoints. For instance, fulfillment and repair in the claim journey involves car-repair provider selection (outcome: a provider close to Diana’s home) and repair service organization (outcome: repaired car). Pain points or gains can be identified for each of the product features involved at a touchpoint. For instance, a long waiting time is only felt for the repair product feature but not for the service provider selection.

“Goods” includes all man and machine-made objects (artifacts), whether tangible or intangible, that are offered to clients. Goods expose features through which users interact. For instance, a word processor application provides editing and printing features; refrigerators provide storage and freezing features.

The experience or value of goods comes from clients directly acting upon features. Food is properly preserved (outcome) if it is stored at the right place (acted upon) in a fridge: eggs and butter in the door, vegetables in the vegetable tray, etc. People willing to have room temperature butter (job-to-be-done) may store it in the warmest part of the fridge.

The shared experience between providers and consumers is mediated by the functional form of goods (temperature) and the physical manifestations (various trays in the fridge) upon which clients act.

“Service” is work done by one person or group that benefits another. A service involves at least two parties. One applies competence (a provider) and the other experiences an outcome (a consumer). For example, a taxi ride is a service used by a person to travel (outcome) and is delivered by a taxi driver (provider).

Clients delegate some acts to the provider to get the desired outcomes. Banks provide consumer-credit, which allows clients to defer payments. A mechanic fixes a car to provide the outcome of a repaired car. Barbers provide a haircut service, applying their competence to perform acts clients would otherwise have to perform for themselves.

Service features are the functionalities of a service. For example, beyond the basic car wash, a car cleaning service could also propose wheel cleaning or rust protection.

Service provision may include the mediation of some artifacts, such as an ATM machine used to retrieve cash. However, such artifacts are not goods per se but instruments used to provision the service.

A feature should not be confused with a service benefit. For example, for a few more dollars car washing companies offer to spray a solution on the vehicle’s exterior that washes off in short order. Given its lack of durability, this feature does not protect the car from rusting.

A better rust protection feature would include opening up body panels, door panels, getting under the hood and into trunk areas, and finally accessing the boxed areas of the vehicle frame or unibody construction. This improved feature delivers a lasting benefit but costs between $100 to $250 per vehicle.

A benefit is an outcome that a client or a user values. For example, spraying a solution on the vehicle exterior could deliver peace of mind (first benefit) to clients who do not know better. On the other hand, delivering true rust protection (second benefit) is valued by knowledgeable clients. Two equivalent product features (two types of rust protection) deliver results valued differently depending on the client’s knowledge. For example, spraying a solution on the vehicle will not deliver the peace-of-mind benefit to knowledgeable clients.

Digital technologies have provided the ability to embed software in objects. They range from traditional ATM machines, connected wearables, connected cars, to healthcare devices.

When goods become connected, a direct experience can be established between providers and consumers beyond the mediation of users acting upon goods. Goods become agents through which consumers and providers can interact. Through sensors, connected goods provide a wealth of information to providers, with an increased ability to reach customers at various touchpoints. When service provision includes connected resources, these new mediating agents can enrich service delivery by offering self-care features. Services come closer to their consumers; they become fingertip services, bringing product features to sight: smart cars can learn about their passengers to provide tailored entertainment experiences, smart locks can open based on face recognition, smart lighting can adjust brightness and colour hue based on both the weather outside and the user’s mood.

Product features and their outcomes are not completely defined until measurable properties are specified. Altogether, they help define the purpose of products. Purposes shall not be confused with objectives or goals. For instance, the purpose of a chair (its main feature) is sitting. Chairs have other features such as the ability to be carried by a single person. Providing better sitting and/or easier lifting is setting improvement objectives. They do not change the purpose of the chair product.

The various quantitative and qualitative properties of product features are often named -ilities after the suffix most of the words share (availability, maintainability, scalability, etc.). The term “Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs)” is also used, but it is vague and belongs to traditional requirement-driven approaches.

A quality property is a measurable, testable, and experienceable property that indicates how well a product feature and/or its outcome satisfies customers in a specific usage context.

Wikipedia records a plethora of quality properties [Wikipedia^®] and academia has defined multiple taxonomies over the years, including a couple of ISO Standards such as ISO/IEC 9126 [ISO/IEC 9126-1:2001] and ISO/IEC 25010 [ISO/IEC 25010:2011]. While many of these taxonomies are related to software quality properties, many of them apply to any product. Among all quality properties, Don Norman [Norman 2013] identifies three main kinds that matter for product experience:

There are many other quality properties and each discipline has a different perspective: products have to be reliable, attractive, safe, etc. All of the quality properties may look crucial, but some tend to have a negative influence on others. For instance, maximizing maintainability may lead to a sacrifice in efficiency; increased reliability may have a negative effect on performance or usability. A study from Professor De Weck at the MIT [De Weck 2016] reveals a highly-connected network of quality properties. Further discussion of some of this area is included in Non-Functional Software Requirements.