What is an “Experience”?

We tend to think of experiences in terms of users, design, visuals, usability, interactivity, apps, dashboards, etc. While all of that is correct, it is also incomplete. Experience can be defined simply and broadly as:

Anything we interact with.

What is the experience pipeline?

Each of these touchpoints has a user-experience that needs to be considered.

Architecture > Development > DevOps / Release > App Store > Website > End User

What does it mean to be “Experience Driven”?

Everything that is in service of the experience. Experience doesn’t just dictate what a user sees but, the underlying architecture and development efforts as well. Why build what you don’t need to? You could easily find yourself overbuilding.

Thoughts

This definition presumes that end-users are the target audience. In fact, all users are affected by the interfaces we create. Developers and architects are users and their decisions affect other developers and architects far before it affects an end-user.

Just because a particular person isn’t the target audience doesn’t mean that the experience doesn’t affect them.