7 min read

Posted to Medium Sep 30, 2019

I’m putting these forth to try and qualify a valuable word in design: meaningful. So many great words get pulled out in our community and used and often so overused they certainly lose their impact. Words like ‘Holistic’, ‘Empathetic’, ‘Human’, and of course ‘Meaningful’. When I try to distill what is most important about Experience Design, it always come back to “the value of deep, long lasting and meaningful experiences.” I can’t come up with a more compelling, more Thesaurus type of word though- (as much as I’d like to). So, in lieu of finding another word, I’ve decided to try and spell out specifically what I find valuable about Meaningful Design, and how I feel it should be considered.

Sometimes design can be too pragmatic. We focus on values like ‘efficiency’ and ‘utility’ and often ignore how subconscious and cultural momentum affects how people expect things to work. ‘Wishful thinking’ and intangibles like belief, culture and mood, can drive whether people like something or not. If this is the case, then as designers, we need to pay attention to why people want things, and what real purpose they serve. Often they are not pragmatic needs. People like to pretend, they like to dream and hope, and they like to belong.

People like people. At the core of human experience is the need for other people. Solitary confinement is considered one of the worst punishments because of this truth. So, personal connection is probably the most important way to make things meaningful. Consider how people feel in the range of ‘madness of crowds’ to being the younger brother.

Daily life is full spectrum, involving more than 5 senses- so, it is important to design experiences that consider a longer view of that experience. Rather than focusing on the ‘wow’ effect of a design, spend time considering how it will be experienced, say, early in the morning, when people are anxious, or what they might feel about it 5 or 20 years later. Are there unintended consequences that others could benefit from? Consider how their ideal self wants it be. Consider if it could be outmoded in 3 years.

What I mean by ‘Sustainable’ is really a nod towards making it last longer. To design something that can be maintained easily, iterated on and still keeps its essence. Make it become natural to always be something- make it ‘inevitable’. There are a couple design tenets that D.J DePree (of Herman Miller) set out that resonate here:

Inevitability A design must give final and inevitable expression of an idea so that in studying it, we say “That is right, this is the way it has to be.” -D.J DePree

Durability Truth is not transient. It never wears out. Truth bears repeated examination. The memory of truth is hard to efface. -D.J DePree

Part of an architects awareness is to understand the scale of space in relation to humans- how tall a ceiling feels, how wide a hallway should be, etc. Similarly, as experience designers, we need to be aware of the time it takes people to move and think. This is even more important in the age of machine learning. Allowing machines to make things so streamlined, removes humans ability to fully experience things at the pace of their own circulatory and nervous systems capability. It’s more than just synapses in the brain.

Technology is outpacing us, but what I want to encourage us to do as designers is to focus on the human experience- that means we need to buffer our solutions to work within our own pace. One other very interesting thing to consider is the deeply social nature of peoples’ decisions. Sometimes we need social validation to intuit upon, other times instinct is instant. With pace, consider key emotions in relation to time and their chemical effects: Gratification, Anticipation, Ambivalence, Boredom.

What does this look like for design? Some examples are obvious like designing delightful status bars and loaders. But other worthy approaches are solutions that delay gratification, or require you to listen or watch. I’m a big fan of tech that helps us slow down, allowing us to take more in. Have you ever watched the moon? or a snail?

Always consider where people are when they use your product. Waiting in traffic at a red light? On the toilet? Peoples willingness is governed by where they are in that moment. Are they in a hurry? Are they waiting and trying to kill time? Are they distracted? This is why Podcasts are so powerful, for example. Podcasts have become a great way to dive in, become emotionally invested during times where they are in between (commuting, for example). There are no similar distractions, its purely focused consumption, and on a deeply human (non visual) level.

We can take podcasts at our own pace, where we want to consume them. I’m not sure where my father found this but it has stuck with me for many years he said: “Consider time broken down in 3 ways: Focus Time, Buffer Time, and Free Time.” If I consider these when designing, It affects what features get put in front of others and which features will most likely get unused or overlooked. Not everything should be designed for distracted ’snack time’. I think there is an opportunity to consider deeper, more ’nutritional’ experiences that are considerate of where people are.

I’ve covered this before, but in this context, I wanted to emphasize the growing need for us to design experiences where people physically learn to do things, in order to make them ’stickier’. In other words, for deeper or more ‘memorable’ experience, it needs to be stored in the cerebral cortex as well as the cerebellum. Our 5 senses help that connection. We are not just visual creatures. In a moment, we perceive and store touch, temperature, smell, light, color, memory, mood, sound, at the least, and all of that is connected to the actual designed experience. Encouraging people to DO something, to have figure it out themselves, to even struggle with it, can cement the experience into something far more valuable and personally ownable.

Sometimes the path of least resistance isn’t the best way. This is, of course, a rabbit hole, because, as designers, we want to create intuitive experiences- which often translates into common behaviors, or habitual behaviors, and forcing a foreign and potentially difficult interaction might be destructive. So it really depends on what and where- but I encourage us all to always consider how a little action and skill nurturing could make a solution more meaningful.

It seems extremely important to create space for people to insert themselves. For example, I find the ’Similar Artists’ tool on Spotify far more compelling than the ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist. It allows me to create my own path and ownership. The thrill of the find, whereas the ML generated list (although really good and interesting) doesn’t make it feel like ‘mine’. I think this resonates with so much of what makes experiences meaningful.

Questions are an easy way to bring people in and insert their sense of will. Creating a place for people to insert themselves, also creates validation. Validation gives people the true sense that they matter and that their input has a positive effect. Creating space for people is different than merely allowing for customization. It goes deeper into the value of a platform, allowing for upfront feedback, and the sense that what people are saying is heard. This builds real value and trust in a way that can’t be fabricated.

The concept of ‘Planning for Spontaneity’ isn’t new, however, it’s a crucial one. Delight is an extremely important emotion, especially in relation to design. When we experience delight, our senses are awake, and we are full of life. Delight is instant, instinctual and, for it to be real, spontaneous. With that said, as designers, we need to always strive to create a place for life to happen. For the random spark that makes an experience delightful.

The complexity and nuance of human interactions require there be enough ’tolerance levels’ (to steal a term from engineering.) The ‘tolerance level’ is that room for random things to happen. The random things that happen are the core of what makes life- life. With this in mind, not only allowing for spontaneity to happen, designing to welcome a healthy amount of randomness welcomes serendipity.

Most importantly, creating room for spontaneity, allows the grace of unexpected unstructured time, and this is crucial for meaningful experiences.

So, in a nutshell: Design for culture and belief, Make your experiences long lasting, consider human-time and where people are, encourage skill, ownership, validation and freedom. These observations are based on work over the past few years as well as conversations in and out of the project war-rooms. They are merely observations, and not nearly complete.

I would love to expand on many of these awarenesses, so if you are so inclined, when you have time, let me know what you think- comments, criticisms, and especially additions.