Engineering an Experience

If your boss walks in one day and tells you that you’re no longer designing and engineering products, but are actually creating props to support an experience, there’s a good chance he/she has been reading The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. The book was written in 1999 and updated in 2011, but many of the ideas it professes are far older.

The shorthand to the “experience economy” business philosophy goes something like this: In an agrarian economy, consumers often bought the raw ingredients needed to make their own products, then we moved to an industrial economy where consumers bought pre-made products. Many of those products were then transformed into services. Sure, consumers often still paid for a physical product, but in the service economy what they were really buying was a more complete solution to whatever problem the product was intended to help solve.

And now, proponents of the experience economy would say consumers buy experiences, and any company not providing an experience is just selling a commodity that does not achieve maximum profitability.

Products as Props

The name Walt Disney is often invoked when discussing the experience economy. When you buy a ticket to Disney World, it’s understood you are really paying for the entire experience—from the parades to the lighting of Cinderella’s castle, to being treated like a guest. Steve Jobs’ name comes up almost as frequently thanks to Apple’s attention to user experience—not just in the user interface of its software, but in the way its physical products are designed and packaged. A YouTube personality’s video [lightbox full=“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpFcFypzZlY” title=“Unboxing a gold iPhone5S”]unboxing a gold iPhone5S [/lightbox] has more than 3 million views. Further evidence that experience matters more than the actual product: his full review of the 5S’ functionality received about a tenth as many views as the unboxing.

If your designs are more along the lines of brackets and braces than Magic Kingdoms and iPhones, do you really need to worry about the experience economy? The short answer is yes, eventually.

Even if the products you’re designing are as exciting as an executive-level PowerPoint presentation on accounting best practices, experience still matters. The person buying your products might be just as interested in them as those 3 million YouTubers watching an iPhone being removed from a box. Or, and this is more likely, your customer is comparing your products, services and the entire experience of working with your company to that of your competitors. The product is just one part of what your company is, or should be, designing.

Experience in Design Engineering

I recently attended two industry conferences that reinforced the importance of experience: the COE 2015 Annual PLM Experience & TechniFair and the 2015 Americas Altair Technology Conference (ATC).

COE, a usergroup for Dassault Systemes software, was focused on experience thanks to 3DEXPERIENCE, Dassault Systemes’ platform to help companies design, collaborate on and track user experiences—from product design to marketing to manufacturing and end use.

“Today we’re in the experience economy,” declared Scott Berkey, managing director of Dassault Systemes North America and CEO of the company’s SIMULIA brand in his COE presentation. He was followed by Phillipe Laufer, CEO of the company’s CATIA brand, who said CATIA is changing because the economy is changing.

Altair is taking the experience economy to heart by taking a critical look at the how users experience its software. At ATC, Altair Chairman and CEO James Scapa said the company has begun the process of redesigning its HyperWorks software suite’s user interface.

“In the past we were designing things so they performed well, but aesthetics were a bit of an afterthought, especially to a lot of engineers,” said Scapa. “Companies like Apple have kind of woken everyone up to the importance of human-centered design ...”

Nowadays, design engineers are creating products that have to satisfy a number of different parameters beyond pure functionality—from weight to serviceability. In the very near future, the Internet of Things will drastically increase the amount of information design engineers have about how customers use the products they create while advances in high-performance computing and machine learning will help them make use of that data. From there, it’s not difficult to imagine user experience dictating design requirements—even for design engineers who don’t think of themselves as “Imagineers.”