(Museum Exhibition Visitor) Experience Design

Welcome to “What Is Experience Design” Week, Episode 3 (the finale).

In Episode 1, we saw your answers to: “What is experience design?”

In Episode 2, we learned how all the other “experience design” fields evolved over the past 40 years, creating well-established disciplines like user experience, customer experience, and patient experience design.

Today, it’s finally time for our MtM Word of the Week: we’ll tackle what it really means now in our discipline. (And, uh, make the longest MtM article ever. Sorry about that.)

“Experience design“ might be the most influential idea in our field at the moment — yet it also might be the most misunderstood.

Some think “experience design” is merely a rebranding of our existing practice. But it isn’t. As we learned in Episode 2, it is a legitimate new set of additional methods and tools, and our field is one of the last to adopt them.

Some say these new methods justify replacing and renaming our field entirely. But that’s not true, now or historically. Customer experience design didn’t replace retail design. It can’t. It grew alongside it. Patient experience design didn’t replace hospital design. It didn’t try to. It is one of many complementary disciplines in that field.

Some say the term just describes firms that like to make trendy digital media installations. Nothing against digital, but you don’t necessarily need anything digital to make a better visitor experience.

If none of those are quite right, what is?

Here’s the thing:

First, “experience design” is actually an abbreviation. The full term might be something like “museum exhibition visitor experience design.” Whoa, that’s niche. Why mention that? Because in every other related field, the term is never just those two words. Often, it includes the type of person served, such as customer experience design and patient experience design.

That’s because, like in those related fields, it focuses on enhancing the personal experience, which is unique to each individual. It does not design objects, interfaces, or spaces. Instead, it aims to choreograph how people feel, think, and behave over time, and whether they recall the visit fondly.

It can be practiced independently, but is more commonly added to the early phases of an exhibition project to improve visitor outcomes.

Like its sisters in customer, retail, and patient realms, (museum exhibition visitor) experience design might use unique tools like journey maps, empathic research, service blueprints, experience prototyping, and emotional outcome goals.

And my favorite part: like all those sisters, it is cross-disciplinary. It has to draw from psychology, spatial design, interaction design, and storytelling, to name a few.

How can you learn “experience design” and start incorporating it into your work? Good question. There are few, if any, dedicated programs specific to our field. I suspect most of us pick it up from colleagues or through independent learning. Maybe that’s a future MtM topic.

And that wraps up “What Is Experience Design” Week. For all those of you who requested this as your #1 topic, I hope this scratched that itch. For the rest of you … thank you for your patience.

Next week: back to our normal shorter fare.

Warmly,
Jonathan

P.S. I’d love to hear from you. Hit REPLY and let me know what you thought of this week’s topic, and our question: What is experience design? No wrong answers, no judging.

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MtM Word of the Week: See above.  :)