THE EXPERIENCE — DEFINING THE DESIRED PRODUCT EXPERIENCE

DEFINING THE EXPERIENCE TO LEAD

What experience will users of your products have when they set out to use your products, or will recipients of your services have when they set out to receive your services?   How will they encounter the key Moments of Truth?   What experience do you want them to have?   Will this experience satisfy their unmet needs?   And will this experience match your brand promise and the expectations it has set?

These are all fundamental questions that your organization must address with the utmost of care and attention.   In terms of delivering the right experience for the targeted market, this is where the rubber meets the road.   It becomes your first real opportunity to respond to the voice of this customer by providing solutions to their pain–points... their lingering unmet needs.   These may be needs that have evaded prior attempts (yours or others).   More importantly, these may be needs whose solution stands to upend prevailing value models in an industry.   If there was a "what innovation" coming out of Phases 1 and 2 (The Context & The Insights), this work will put the pertinent details to that "what".

This is the domain of Experience Design.   Here, the question of experience is addressed through the intentional design of the product or service experience — what experience you want customers individually, and the market collectively, to have when using your product or receiving your service.   Together with your marketing message, this experience is what will ultimately shape the market's perception of your brand and your business.

In addressing the core question of this phase – what is the desired product or service experience to look like? – we use the Legacy Innovation Experience Design Process.   Typically at this stage however, we only define the intended product experience (or service experience), and do not yet delve into the more comprehensive customer experience associated with considering, purchasing, receiving, and maintaining the product, and also with affirming the brand.   That work is typically reserved for later on once the project has been fully approved and funded.

The tool we use for this work is Legacy Innovation's Product Experience Framework, or PX Framework – a variant of what is known within Design Methods as an Alignment Model.   This tool allows us to capture all of the relevant experience metrics pertinent to delivering the product's or service's intended jobs and outcomes, and to thereafter translate those into appropriate product or service attributes.