Experience Thinking: Creating Connected Experiences

Experience Thinking (XT) is our innovation framework that tackles the sometimes more intricate reality of designing great experiences. XT breaks things down into four connected areas: how people experience your brand, your content, your products, and your services.

Each piece of this experience design framework helps shape the complete journey that organizations offer their customers, users and own employees.

Brand Experience

This is all about how people feel your brand. It covers your core values, what makes you different, the main promise you make to your customers, and the emotional mark you leave on people’s minds. Building a strong brand means digging deep to find what you’re really about and shaping how people see you. The main goal? Create a brand promise that clicks with customers and makes them trust you.

Getting there takes work – brand workshops, research with customers, checking what’s working and what’s not, planning your strategy, and figuring out what value you’re really offering. All this helps make sure what you think you’re putting out there matches what people are actually experiencing.

Content Experience

Content experience is all about how your stuff (information, data, functionality) is packaged and consumed across different platforms and channels.

For some experiences, the content is actually the whole show. So the goal is making sure what you put out there is relevant, grabs attention, and is easy to get to – creating a smooth flow of information that makes the experience better.

When designing content, we might dig into what you already have, map out user journeys, set up rules for who creates what, and develop strategies that put your audience’s most important needs first.

Product Experience

This is about the actual stuff you make – how usable it is, what it does, and the overall feel of using it.

The goal? Create products that solve people’s problems quickly and effectively while being enjoyable to use.

We use methods like building prototypes, testing with real users, capture their journeys. The research to make your products better. The result informs product designs that are based on real user needs and their feedback.

Service Experience

This covers all the ways people interact with your service – from getting started to getting help and learning how to use things. The aim is making sure your services work smoothly and effectively, keeping customers happy and coming back for more.

We use tools like service blueprints, journey maps, and employee programs to improve how you deliver services, train staff, and support customers.

In short: Experience Thinking

What makes Experience Thinking work is how these four quadrants fit together. None of them works alone – they all team up to create one smooth journey from start to finish.

For example, when you nail your brand experience and connect it purposefully to everything else, that strong brand can make your content more effective, which in turn makes your product experience better, which improves how you deliver services with the most impact.

This big-picture approach makes sure we’re covering all four key parts of what your audience experiences. It keeps everything lined up and working together, with each piece making the others stronger.

Ultimately everything is connected. And you’d think, yes, I know that. But even with that awareness, we build many disconnects into our product and service experiences. I’m sure we don’t mean to.

Don’t you think it’s time we intentionally make our experiences truly flow?