Life Experience Design by Kevin Cheng

We often talk about the User Experience when determining how people will use our products. The term has become so popular that the title of User Experience Engineer, or UX Engineer, has become somewhat commonplace.

Some design agencies now speak of extending the experience beyond just the product. The product is not enough, instead, one needs to extend design into what is called Life Experience design.

The premise of the philosophy is thus: you can design for the product experience and that is the experience you have when you interact with the product; you can design for the user experience which taken in its traditional sense really means the same thing as product experience - the user’s experience while they interact with a product; or you can design for life experience which is the experience the user gets with the context of a product in their lives.

How is Life Experience different from typical User Experience? Let’s take a look at some examples of how people actually do Life Experience Design and see if we can spot the differences.

The Solution Approach

So many consultancies these days sell solutions but very few define what problems they’re offering solutions to. The Apple retail store has an approach to life experience design. Instead of just looking at how people use iPhoto or an iSight webcam, they look at the context - the complete package. In the store, you will find laptops with iPhoto and iMovie connected to digital cameras and camcorders illustrating how these devices work together. In other words, even though Apple does not sell digital cameras or camcorders (yet), they design with the context in mind. How are people going to use Apple products in conjunction with other products and aspects of their life? Apple’s marketing screams Life Experience Design.

The Ethnographic Approach

Take a PDA like a PocketPC or Palm Pilot. What does the user typically do with this? They make appointments, keep address book information, check their calendar, and perhaps take a few notes. Today most of these devices will also permit you to take photographs, listen to music and play games.

From a product experience perspective, you may conduct some focus groups on the product, and run some tests on prototypes with some set tasks. The team working on the Palm Zire 71 camera presented at CHI 2004 and their design methods, with a lack of budget and time, were mostly in-house testing and iterating.

The issue these methodologies have is a lack of context. Paper and post-it notes are still the preferred method of taking down appointments and phone numbers. I own a Palm Pilot and I still prefer to give and receive business cards and never think to “beam” my information. Why is this? How does a usability test discover this?

The problem is that it’s very difficult to design for how a product fits into someone’s life. Sure, in work applications we can perform things like contextual inquiries but for consumer devices, you can’t very well follow them for a few days.

Enter techniques like diary studies. With diary studies, you find out what the participants plan to do, and have them record what they actually did. However, just comparing the two isn’t sufficient. The study demands an experienced eye to observe the nuances between tasks and every little discrepancy and then determine why. Why an action is taken is important. For example, why did I give out the business card rather than beam it? Why did I not go to my scheduled appointment? Why did this person interrupt me and why did I permit them to? In these nuances, one discovers how products fit in with life not just how people perceive their lives to be but how it actually is.

That’s Life

Life Experience design means designing to consider every possible nook and cranny of a person’s life. It’s important to note that anything can have influence on your design even when it initially seems unrelated. Unfortunately, this approach to design means a heavy invasion into the lives of participants. Although costly in terms of overall time, such a design methodology need not require too much of the facilitator’s time.

Is product experience sufficient or is there really a need for life experience design? How far is too far when we design a product to fit into the existing mold that is the consumer’s life? Were it not for the Hawthorne Effect, would we end up with Big Brother style usability labs where we watch our participants live their lives while we inject various prototype products? Or is this just another buzzword that will fade away faster than the next pop hit song?