Product Behavior

Here’s a tool that we use often both to analyze and plan consumer experience. I’ll talk about it here as a piece of a product design process, but we use it for service design, retail design, even to plan a business model.

A fair amount of the work I do involves the design of “user interface.” I don’t know who coined that term, but it’s interesting. I’m sure it was a software engineer, who divided his or her work into “writing the code that actually does stuff” and “writing the code that lets the user interface with the code that actually does stuff.” It’s a term with product-orientation–if we were consumer oriented, we’d call it the “product interface.”

No, this phone is not really red, and yes, the quotes are superfluous. But, in this case, it’s all fine. It’s not a red phone but it is a “RED PHONE.”

Writing last week’s piece about experience got me started thinking about what you can actually build into a product. Products can obviously have Creation Experience - that is, they can come about in an interesting way, and when you buy one, you get to own a piece of that story, tell your friends about it, etc. But can products come with other sorts of stories, like a 3rd Party Experience?

A few years ago, I went out into the world to ask people about the stuff in their kitchens. At one point, sorting through a drawer of silverware, one interviewee came out with two soup spoons, with blue-and-yellow-polka-dotted handles. “I love these spoons. I got them in France and I love them.” Then she moved on to something else.

When we buy something, what are we buying? Are we having an experience? Acquiring someone else’s experience?