Calling all experience strategies
by petermeIn my last post, I commented on how Google Calendar’s vision has lead to its rapid and remarkable success. At Adaptive Path, we’re referring to such statements of vision as experience strategies.
Experience strategies are clearly articulated touchstones to guide product teams in all the decisions they make about technology and features. An experience strategy defines a product requirement from the perspective of the user, and what they want to accomplish, achieve, do.
Along with the example from Google, another favorite experience strategy is written on the About Page for Flickr. There, you’ll see two statements that capture what Flickr is all about, and what has clearly guided that service’s development:
- We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
- We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.
(It’s worth reading the full About page to see how these ideas are fleshed out).
Google Calendar and Flickr are firmly grounded in the chaotic world of Web 2.0. Experience strategies provide them with an explicit statement of purpose that enforces coherence and integrity, where otherwise it could be tempting to go off in many different directions.
Perhaps the ur-experience strategy comes from George Eastman, who was guided by the phrase “You press the button, we do the rest,” in the development of his original Kodak camera and the processing and printing services he provided.
A challenge I’m facing is finding good examples of experience strategies. I’m sure there are many out there. If you know of one (or many!) please post them in the comments. I’d love to see strategies for a range of endeavors — physical products, software and web products, consumer-facing services (airlines, banks), etc.
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January 5th, 2007 at 1:00 am
http://www.pandora.com/corporate/ - “At Pandora Media™ (formerly Savage Beast Technologies™), we have a single mission: To help you discover new music you’ll love.”
And they do!
January 5th, 2007 at 1:21 am
[...] Thanks to the Adaptive Path blog for pointing out this great page. Technorati Tags: user experience UX flickr web design web2.0 [...]
January 9th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Aren’t these missions or visions, rather than strategies?
A mission is: win the war. Strategies are used to help you accomplish the mission, and missions can be accomplished or not by choice of strategy and ability to execute the strategy. But strategies are not the same as the mission, and different strategies can be used toward the same goal. In the business world, I think customers often make product choices based on how different strategies lead to different products, even though at the macro level the goals of the manufacturers of those products might be largely the same.
January 12th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Great post. I’m inspired to write a post about how movies are a RW example of “experience strategies.” Filmmakers always talk about how audiences experience the “ride” of a film, especially during production and post-production. I will make sure I link back.
January 23rd, 2007 at 12:07 pm
[...] Peter Merholz takes that task and focuses it on what experience we’re trying to cultivate for end-users by creating a user-focused mantra he and his AP colleagues are calling the experience strategy. Experience strategies are clearly articulated touchstones to guide product teams in all the decisions they make about technology and features. An experience strategy defines a product requirement from the perspective of the user, and what they want to accomplish, achieve, do. Along with the example from Google, another favorite experience strategy from mine is written on the About Page for Flickr. There, you’ll see two statements that capture all that Flickr is about, and that have clearly guided that service’s development: [...]
February 4th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
[...] Earlier this year, I put out a call for experience strategies, clearly articulated touchstones that guide product design and development from an experiential point of view. The examples I gave were of Flickr’s About Page, Google Calendar’s vision, and Kodak’s slogan, “You Press The Button, We Do The Rest.” [...]
April 2nd, 2007 at 6:53 am
[...] are increasingly turning from an obsessive focus on page creation to interaction design, overall experience design and designing for the truly distributed nature of Web services in all its many modes. This, also [...]
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:09 am
[...] We’re not just designing the potential experience on our page. Nor are we talking about designing an experience system, per se, as Peter has been talking about. More like, we are designing for the sandbox, but the [...]
August 9th, 2007 at 4:52 am
“i think that is an A wing.”-i feel the same
December 2nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Experience is the Product - Designing Products That Make Customers Happy and Passionated…
Peter Merholz gave an exciting talk about product experience called “Experience is the Product“. He is president of Adpative Path, one of the leading consulting companies when it comes to product experience strategy and design. Why is the e…