The Seventh Face of Innovation: The Experience Architect
Editor’s Note: This is part of a multi-part series about the book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, written by Tom Kelley. You can read other parts of this series here, here, and here.
If you are my age or younger, you likely prefer collecting experiences over collecting things. I was born in the 80s which was the transition decade between the Gen Xers and the Millennials. Someone has to be squarely between these arbitrary generation classifications and I happen to be one of them.
To give you an example, someday I do want a nice car (to be precise, a Jeep, if you’ve read a previous article). So I do want “things” but I want that nice car to take me places for “experiences.” I have a list of places only a Jeep can get to… I guess I’m kind of in the middle. Many people younger than me probably don’t care how they get to the valley of the Grand Canyon as long as they get to “experience” the Grand Canyon. On the other hand, my older neighbor has an awesome, expensive, and luxurious car. But he never drives it. It sits covered in his garage. I still think he may be happy though.
Having things can bring us happiness… but our new sense of elation fades over time even if we are objectively more comfortable, healthier, and enviable (for our gadgets or toys) and have more free time. Unfortunately, we get used to having that “thing” and then need something more for the next happiness fix. This principle isn’t new to most people in theory but we fall victim to it all the time.
Another example: I think I’m on my fifth smartphone since 2010. I’ll come back to why this is important later, but I’ve noticed that the rush of excitement of having a new, clean, crack-free phone wears off sooner with each one. The honeymoon phase with this most recent phone lasted about two weeks. I don’t talk about it, and no one else cares about or asks about my phone anymore. Why should they? It’s become a commodity. Interestingly, my first phone was awesome for months and months (in my mind), and it had objectively, one-tenth the battery life, one-hundredth the capability, and one-thousandth the memory space.
How I gain happiness from my phone is not from the “thing” itself but from the “experiences” it provides. I watch Disney+ with my children on it, listen to great books stored on it, and video chat with family and friends on more than three different apps. All of these can be experienced in other ways (via a TV screen, physical book, face-to-face meetings) but the “thing” (my phone) is just the vehicle for the laughs, the entertainment, the experiences.
Experiences are what can provide lasting happiness, and even more so if the experience involves other people, effort, and service [1]. More and more people are realizing that too - as they eschew material accumulation for experiences of serving, or being with, other people like, and unlike, themselves. (Read more about the experience economy).
Thus, as a future or current designer of some product, it’s imperative to put on the seventh face of innovation, The Experience Architect, and make sure the experience your product is enabling is memorable. Everything else will eventually end up in the landfill (or better, the recycling center).
Tom Kelley, in “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” discusses a number of choices, and often small choices, that various companies have made so that the experience of their customer is memorable. For example, I think I have the physical ability to mash up my own ice cream, but for some reason, we are paying teenagers at Cold Stone Creamery to mash it for us on a cold granite stone. The Cold Stone Creamery experience has been replicated by a lot of other companies, but regardless, there is something fascinating about watching our ice cream made in front of our eyes, like those satisfying gifs, looping videos, or taffy-pulling machines.
In another example, Kelley discusses beds in hotel rooms as, sometimes, the only thing we really want to experience in the entire hotel. It’s happened to me only twice, but I was once traveling so much that I forgot where I was when I woke up. All the hotel rooms on that multi-city trip were almost identical. I couldn’t have cared less for almost everything in those rooms except for the bed. My full work and travel days meant I wanted to sleep, sleep well, and fall asleep quickly. Kelley shares that some hotel chains realized that many of their patrons were in a similar situation to mine and so they focused on the experience of the working traveler, who arrives quite late, isn’t really going to watch TV, and just wants to go to sleep on a nice bed. Investing in better mattresses resulted in a better experience for their customers, return visits, and ultimately increased profits.
Experience Architects will focus on how someone acts, uses, and experiences a product. In the past, most alarm clocks and tv remote controls had far too many buttons that no one ever used. Thankfully, designers, with the face of an Experience Architect, are fixing that. Seriously, how many buttons do you really use on your microwave? The 30-second button almost exclusively? Am I right? Even recent iPhone designs have removed the one home button from models five years ago.
Kelley takes the concept of experience collectors to new heights with products and services. Even if we can’t visit every country in the world, can we visit every state in the country? Can we watch a game at every baseball stadium? Can we try out every flavor? Can we collect all the characters to make the complete set? Companies know that we’re all like boy and girl scouts and tend to collect merit badges, where those merit badges are experiences. The experiences don’t even have to be big or expensive. You likely know someone who has read all Harry Potter novels, watched all Star Wars movies in a weekend and tried all the menu items from their favorite restaurant. Experience Architects know how to keep you coming back for more by changing things around just a little or modifying something in a small way. We all have an affinity to novelty so consider how your customers of the future (or now) can re-experience your product in new ways as a collection of experiences.
Now, back to my five smartphones I mentioned before. Each one of them eventually died, cracked, or fell into a place rendering them unusable. Some of the stories are funny, some of them are sad, but every one of them was memorable. I can no longer tell you the exact model of some, or most, of them, but I savor the pictures they took and the places that each one of those phones got me to (or got me out of!). It wasn’t the physical size, shape, or cost that made them valuable it was the memories and experiences they enabled.
When designing a product, experience is everything.
[1] Ariely, D. (2016). Payoff: The hidden logic that shapes our motivations. Simon and Schuster.
