Experience Isn't Equal in All Forms

User experience isn’t just the interaction design on your website (although that’s especially critical for purely online plays.) It’s the whole customer experience – the smell at the threshold of your location, the inflexion in your customer service rep’s voice, the sincerity of their smile and the texture of the floor. Even the toilet paper in the restroom.

We live in a world where product and services are becoming increasingly commoditized. So the ability to provide a unique, relevant, and engaging experience may be the sole surviving differentiating factor for some companies. The ability to transport a customer to another world becomes your responsibility. They aren’t just paying you for your wares – they are paying for love, for excitement, and often for the chance to fulfill a perceived identity. Your ability to provide them with a visceral experience relies not on a wow factor, but on an intuitive understanding of the intangibles that make up your brand and touch your customer’s soul.

Don’t underestimate the value of user experience nor assume that user expectations of experience are similar across online and offline media. Further, don’t expect that the merging of two or more media is going to yield an experience similar to either individual medium.

Experience in the physical world has higher value because all senses can be engaged. It’s easy (and this is particularly true for those of us in the interactive industry) to focus entirely too much on the digital experience. But even though we are certainly going to see more digital signage tailored to a viewer’s individual identity (yes, think Minority Report), the physical world will still take precedence.

Our experience in the physical world engages obvious senses such as smell and touch. Attempts have been made to simulate those aspects online, but they just can’t stimulate the emotions and provide the same degree of engagement. Especially when you add in the impacts of the intangibles – like intuition, pheromones, wind shift, a genuine smile from a customer service rep, and so on.

The long and short of it is this: what you do to enhance the online user experience also enhances the brand by leveraging the utility value within the brand itself and sharing it with your users. So even if users can have a physical experience of the brand, you still have an opportunity to improve overall ROI with the online experience – and it’s generally a far more cost-effective proposition.