Experience design: what it is and why it’s useful

How do you create a better experience for your students?

Web search - easy online booking - automated email confirmation - frustrating instructions - helpful phone call - clear signage - personal welcome - beaming smile… 

Think of a time when you’ve gone through a similar journey, what was your experience? 

Experience design is thinking about how all of the pieces create the whole. 

Experience design is a method for understanding how we create better experiences for our customers by thinking not just about the isolated touchpoints or functional elements within a journey, but about how our customers feel, and what their experience is actually like.  

How many of the processes or experiences that your students or customers go through have been intentionally mapped and designed? And how often have you thought about the real experiences and emotions of your students as they navigate that journey? 

Understanding the ideal journey, and the messy reality

“Personal experience is the only filter through which a person can understand the present world.” Veronica O’Keane

Experience design can help us to be more inclusive in our approach as it challenges us to think about both the ideal journey and the messy reality. Because people bring their own individual expectations, emotions, background and mindset with them, students on the same journey will, of course, have different experiences. Understanding this, we can put things in place to steer people in the right direction rather than set down a path that all users should follow smoothly, but may not be able to. Think flags on a ski run, rather than a straight line down the road. 

Experience design helps you to meet your strategic goals

Experience design is useful because it aims to help you create better experiences for your customers which can improve recruitment, enhance the student experience, and better engage your alumni. Experience design helps you to build relationships with your customers by creating better experiences, enhancing brand and reputation, and increasing engagement and loyalty. 

It can be also useful for overcoming common problems in large institutions, for example, it can help to break down siloed ways of working by creating a common reference point for individual content teams to see the bigger picture. 

Tools you can use

A useful tool to help you with intentionally designing experiences for your customers can be an amplified customer journey mapping exercise. You might already have a user journey or an empathy map. These are useful starting points as you can explore beyond the functional customer journey steps to think about how users feel, how you want them to feel, the wider context, and which parts of the journey where you want to create moments that matter. 

Take, for example, the graduation experience. You may want to ensure that the process of booking and collecting your gown is as smooth, but also purposely forgettable, as possible. But you may also consider how to create a setting for those moments that your graduates will remember and cherish. 

Having their photo taken? Walking across the stage to collect their degree? How can you create space for graduates to really feel the moment rather than just move through it? 

Next steps

What does your prospective student, current student or alumni journey look like? What are the pain points or moments that matter? And how do your teams work together to create a better experience? 

This might feel like an overwhelming challenge but if you are thinking about these questions, we can help. From a full-day workshop to an in-depth journey mapping project, we can help you gather and harness insights to deliver a better experience. Book a meeting with us to discuss your needs further.