During the lockdowns, I finally got round to properly outlining my Laws of Experience Design. It’s a set of principles I use whenever working on customer, employee or other experiences. ​

The below is a work in progress, which will need more than a blogpost to express all the nuances. Also, I still see room for improvement in both language and structure. But it's getting there, so I'm sharing what I have so far. 

If you have any feedback or improvements, don't hold back. I know you mean well 😉.
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Most experience leaders want to 'beat the competition'. But audience expectations are forged by every experience. When my car dealer offers me the choice of 6 different coffees and 10 different organic teas, I somehow feel underserved when my lawyer can only handle 'coffee, tea or water'. If my doctor's online system can give me access through facial recognition, I wonder why my bank still insists on login, passwords and antiquated card readers with bad screens.

In part, this even applies to experiences people hear about through social and other media. For example, if an influencer shows how to get the perfect lipstick in Korea, French customers will wonder why Sephora isn’t there yet. Even theme parks and musea can enter that mix.

Implication: always consider your audience's complete experience universe. Not just your competition.
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The language of customer/employee experience experts is one of customer insights, KPIs and journey maps. But even at their most advanced, they are only abstract indicators. Sure, it feels good if someone scores the experience a ’10’. But even with an explanation we’ll never experience ourselves how they ‘feel’.

An ‘experience’ is literally assembled in the brain, and until we hook up quantum computers to neuralinks, our toolkits will never truly understand what happens. It also means that as creators, we can never truly know the experience that we deliver. We can only hope to approximate it through our own (biased) perception.

Implication: Use your tools, but don’t get lost in them. Live your own experiences, so you can feel part of what your audience feels. Make emotion, perception and context part of your management speak. But never take your views for reality, as the audience's WILL be different.
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Most of our life runs on autopilot. So mundane experiences simply need to support the mental shortcuts we created. Amazon doesn’t need to surprise me, my office computer just needs to work and my flights can be uneventful. In fact, too much experience can annoy me. I just want to preserve brain energy and make life easy for my autopilot.

But when I step out of ‘non-thinking’ mode, things get serious. If I pay a premium or do something that matters to me, I want to be delighted or even transformed. Even if I don’t quite realise what that means. Either way, to be effective, the experience should reflect this need. 

Implication: Before you design, determine whether you are going for satisfaction, delight or transformation. Then deliver accordingly.
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At some level, we all bear responsibility for the state of our planet and society. And while experience leaders cannot solve all problems, they can have very positive impact. Both to fix past mistakes and prevent new ones in the future. 

After all, every server that is added to speed up the website increases CO2. Every unconscious bias that slips into a design discriminates. All the plastic we created in the past still swims in the ocean.   

Implication: Don’t just design experiences for profit. Think how your experience can promote prosperity, equality, peace and planetary wellbeing.

PS. I admit this last one is more of a belief which I turned into a law for myself. But if I can move one of you to do the same, it’s a win 🥇.

Amazing that you came to this blog. As we just changed content management systems, it's unfortunately still in technical beta.

But I'll soon be filling it up with new content as well as a ton of past articles.  If you want to stay up to date, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter on the home-page.

​Take care!!

Even the best customer experience has never convinced me to like the taste of truffles.
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But I always wondered whether my taste perception would change, if I actually hunted them myself. Would the customer experience of finding the food, transform its taste. Or would I still continue my track record of baffling Italian cooks around the world.

Earlier this year, I had a unique experience. Following a chance encounter with immersive theatre superstar Felix Barrett, I was able to take a group of friends through a one-day, bespoke masterclass on the Punchdrunk immersive experience design methods.

Immersive experience design isn’t just about providing people ‘a good time’. In fact, in Norway, the ‘go-to-prison experience’ has been designed to help those that broke the law reintegrate into society.

Very early into researching transformative experience design, I realised that for real insights I’d have to go off the beaten track. So on a recent trip to London, I booked myself a Tarot experience on Airbnb.

In 2015, Japan introduced us to Henn Na. It was the first hotel in the world completely operated by computers and robots. In January 2019, a growing number of customer complaints led the company to fire 243 of their robotic workers and replace them by humans. While people were ready for a digital human experience, they weren’t ready to completely abandon humanity just yet.

I regularly meet people who want to use the Net Promoter Score as a target in their business. I invariable direct them to the wisdom of Charles Goodhart. In the 1970s, this British economist found that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes”.

This statement is pretty dry and hermetic. But it is something that every customer experience professional should be aware of. Because in regular-people-speak it translates as:
“when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure”.
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The reason for this is simple. When presented with an outside target, humans will always seek the path of lowest effort to achieve it. Especially if the target is linked to some sort of reward or punishment.
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