How to design experiences I (audience)

Four key aspects to experience design

Audience. Who is the experience for?

Participation. How will they take part?

Aims. How do we want the audience to feel afterwards? What actions or changes in behaviour do we want the experience to lead to?

Narrative. What type of narrative can bring about this emotional impact?

Understanding the audience

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The audience is the priority. We must start the design process with understanding the audience’s motivations and needs rather than designing an experience and then assuming it will meet their motivations and needs.

Who is the audience?

• What is the audience’s gender, age, social class, income, demography, interests …?
• What is the audience’s lifestyle, culture and behaviour?

Why does the audience want to participate in the experience?

• Self-actualisers seeking inspiration?
• Sensualists seeking to be emotionally moved, taking in sounds, colours and smells?
• Self-improvers and research professionals seeking intellectual stimulation and wanting to learn something new?
• Friends seeking places to socialise or families and tourists seeking sites and other sites?

If an experience involves different types of audiences, then we need to identify common interests that can bring them together.

Understanding audience participation

People can participate in an experience in different ways whether just observing (seeing and listening), doing some activity or interacting with other people.

How people will participate will depend on the type of experience.

Participation will also depend on how engaged people want to be:

• A ‘treater’ wanting a one off experience?
• An ‘addict’ wanting to return for similar experiences?
• A ‘gambler’ wanting to return for different experiences?

A key aim is to design experiences that don’t just meet an audience’s motivations and needs but also facilitates change so that their level of engagement increases.

A post-mortem can help understand why and how an experience failed or can be improved.

A pre-mortem is also important to test out the experience and identify possible barriers to participation:

• physical barriers that could cause discomfort or affect the disabled;
• social barriers that don’t make people feel accepted or make them feel like they might be judged;
• intellectual barriers that make people feel like they don’t have something to contribute and their opinion is not of value.