U?X? HX Research & What It Means To Experience

Previously on The 100-Year Product...

• Origins of The 100-Year Product (Part 1 ,?Part 2 )
• The More Personal A Product Is, The More Universal Its Appeal .
• Is Innovation Holding Us Back?

We're all in the race to build the best-in-class user experience, but here is the catch. Our interest in "user experience"(UX) has grown steeply by 150% over the past two decades (since Don Norman famously coined the term in the 90s), while our interest in "human experience"(HX) lags behind.

User experience and human experience are related but distinct concepts. The former is how a user interacts with your product/service/company, with user research being an attempt to understand users in the (narrow) context of your product. The latter is our experience in its entirety as we move through life agnostic of the invisible roles we take on (e.g., user, customer, seller, buyer). It is a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year experience.

Once you commit to understanding human experience, you have a real chance at building an unforgettable product that people love within the context of their life, as opposed to within your product's context of use. We'll be building on this insight in the next post!

At any given point in time, product teams need to understand both UX and HX, yet how often do we honor this distinction and conduct both UX and HX research? Competing on user experience might place your product/company at the top of the ranks, but competing on human experience will place your product/company at the core of people's lives, hearts, and minds.

So, what does it mean "to experience"?

This requires us to ask ourselves how we, as complex human beings, experience the "things" (e.g. events, places, products) we personally encounter and react to. While there are many ways we do this, one of the key insights revealed in my study and extended research, corroborated by the co-founders of Carnegie Mellon's Integrated Innovation Institute in their book "Built To Love", is that we experience things through sensory engagement and interaction.

"To experience a product is to touch, use, see, feel, hear or taste it. Every time this happens, we react to a product with emotion" - Jonathan Cagan, Ph.D., P.E. and Peter Boatwright , Authors of Built To Love

When I revisited the products shared in my study and reflected on my own experiences with 100-Year products, it is evident that every 100-Year product experience engages many of our senses in conjunction. In fact, the more deeply our senses are engaged, the more vivid and passionate the product recollections, loyalty, and emotions are.

Going back to the origins of this study , my timeless love for Parle G biscuits is perhaps shaped by the depth and breadth of the sensory engagement, from the brand's unique visual identity that I see and the crinkly feel of the packaging to the soft, crumbly texture post dipping the biscuit into my tea and its sweet, wholesome taste.

It is worth noting that we should think beyond the original five senses coined by Aristotle and mentioned above. Over the past several decades, many more senses (popular research suggests 22 senses linked to our biological makeup and counting!) have been discovered, including a sense of direction, balance, temperature, belonging, connection, or closeness.

What does this mean for product teams?

To build 100-Year products, we need to consider our innate human need for sensory interaction as a means to experience over technological elements that determine how we build the experience (e.g., hardware and software decisions).

Think about how these senses may interact with one another instead of being experienced in isolation. How might we expand the product’s sensory experience by engaging (or partnering with) sensory elements in the user’s peripheral environment? Lovable products do not need to engage all senses but they need to engage one or more senses meaningfully and deeply.

As a digital product manager, this insight was a reminder that we're in the business of elevating human experiences, not solely building a better, intangible user experience. I walked into Carnegie Mellon with a chip on my shoulder about digital products and a point of view that understanding other mediums and spheres of human experience were of little relevance to me.

My time at Carnegie Mellon and 100-year product study taught me that regardless of the type of product team you are on, we need to take sensory elements into account and have open dialogue/debate on:

• What "sense of XYZ" must, could, and should we enable with our product?
• How are we currently doing that?
• How might we build this into our current experience?
• Does it make sense for us (no pun intended!) to extend our product experience to these other spheres of interaction?
• Or do we partner with another product/company that could give us a sensory element to interact with? (e.g. think Meta's Whatsapp partnering with Google's Playstore so people can use Whatsapp on their Android smartphones and subsequently engage their sense of hearing and sense of touch, among other senses).

Sensory Interaction TLDR Case Study: Webkinz

Originally designed as an experience centering around a stuffed animal in 2005, the Webkinz makers evolved the experience to include going onto webkinz.com, typing in a code found on the stuffed animal’s collar, playing games as the virtual version of the stuffed animal with other participants and earning virtual dollars along the way. Within 2 years, without advertising but simply creating these opportunities for deeper sensory engagement, over a million Webkinz users were registered. Building for sensory engagement represents opportunities to maximize both product lovability and profitability.

??How do you feel about HX (research) and sensory engagement? Would you agree or not agree that the products you love, use, and/or remember trigger your senses in ways other products don't?

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