What is an experience?
Every interaction that a human being has with a system, a product, a brand, or an organization results in an experience.
Experiences can be described as the way the interaction was perceived, from the utility of the interaction, to the emotions or physical sensations felt, to the ease of engagement, to the amount of time or energy spent, to the resulting level of overall satisfaction and earned trust from the interaction.
Positive experiences can strengthen engagement and relationships over time, just as negative experiences can accumulate over time and erode trust and reputation with customers, candidates, employees, partners, and other stakeholders.
What is experience architecture?
Experience architecture is the strategic design and orchestration of interactions between humans and systems, focusing on creating the conditions for positive interactions at each step of a user journey.
Experience architecture draws from a broad range of technical, artistic, and scientific disciplines including as User Experience (UX) Design, User Interface (UI) Design, and Information Architecture (IA), along with human psychology and sociology.
Designing experiences focuses on crafting interactions that are both functional and meaningful, eliciting positive responses by anticipating the needs, motivations, and behaviors of users to meet or exceed expectations to build trust and loyalty.
What are applications of experience architecture?
What experience architecture expertise do I bring to the table?
Journey Design
Journey design is the mapping and optimizing of end-to-end user, customer, employee, or other stakeholder experiences.
Visualizing the entire journey identifies the touchpoints for potential interactions in addition to understanding the incentives, motivations, and potential behavior or emotional states of the individuals at each step along the way.
Well-crafted journeys remove friction from interactions and ensure seamless transactions, address business challenges and pain points, and align not only with the objectives and strategies of the organization, but also with the goals and expectations of the stakeholder on the journey.
Experience Design
Experience design focuses on creating interactions that go beyond basic functionality and value exchange to provide deeper and more meaningful engagement with a system.
Designing optimal experiences requires a deep understanding of the humans that will be interacting with a system, what their expectations are, and how to exceed those expectations.
Building trust and loyalty over time can be influenced by thoughtful and intentional experience design, providing intuitive, cohesive, and aesthetically pleasing interfaces to customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), employee experience (EX), and other applications that make it enjoyable for humans to interact with technology.
Product Architecture
Product architecture involves understanding tradeoffs and making deliberate decisions about the structural design, underlying technology stack, and interconnectedness of the components that make up a product.
Architecting products drives scalability, adaptabillity, technical soundness, and positive user experience, ensuring adoption and relevance over time.
A forward-looking approach to product strategy and planning creates conditions for innovation and market fit, allowing product capabilities to mature iteratively, and interoperability to grow through seamless experiences and interfaces that enable integration with additional systems and processes.
Onboarding Process Design
Onboarding process design combines journey architecture, experience architecture, and knowledge architecture to optimize front-end interfaces and back-end operational processes related to the initial entry points for integrating new customers, counterparties, partners, vendors, and staff into enterprise systems and processes.
Designing frictionless and engaging onboarding processes ensures positive initial experiences, which sets the tone and creates positive momentum for subsequent interactions throughout the lifecycle of a stakeholder relationship.
Well-designed onboarding processes instill trust, build loyalty, and foster cooperation and collaboration, accelerating the time to mutual value for both the organization and the stakeholder being onboarded by making processes clear, intuitive, and engaging.
