“You cannot NOT have a user experience.” — Lou Carbone

We experience the digital world as timely, relevant, useful, and personable. I can find out exactly what my friends are doing as they do it via Twitter or Facebook. Or grab directions to a restaurant and concert tickets on the go through my mobile phone. This is how technology (when it works), has fundamentally altered the way we behave, work, and live.

But when it comes to advertising the focus is currently on disrupting culture, not augmenting it, and advertisers have focused on crafting messaging rather meaning. For this industry to thrive as technology continues to shift behavior, and during tough economic times, the model of experience design must move front and center.

As a discipline, User Experience, or UX for short, has been a staple of product and software development for decades. In essence, UX is about designing things for people. As Don Norman puts it, “The whole point of human-centric design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable.”

UX in its basic form is information architecture: organizing content logically. But at its most potent, experience design has the power to transform brands and products. OXO changed cooking products by emphasizing ergonomics. Nike Plus transformed running through community. The iPhone redefined “mobile phone.” All of these examples stem from understanding and designing for peoples’ needs.

The vein through which we can transform advertising from a function of marketing teams, to a core piece of the enterprise, lies within human-centric design. It starts by approaching brands, not with an eye for communications, but from the view of an experience designer. After all, consumers can interact with software, or use a physical product. But people have never been able to use a thirty-second spot, or gain value from a billboard ad. And that’s the fundamental reason why traditional forms of advertising are in decline: people want meaning, not more messaging.

Experience design focuses on individuals, rather than customer segments, and it levels the playing field between people and brands. Because people want to talk to each other, not to technology, and not to advertising. Just momentarily think about this: if corporations treated individuals like humans, would ads exist?

For decades we’ve been saturated with marketing messages from all angles and channels. Messaging that is surface-y rather than cerebral, comical rather than emotional, and usually based on popular cultural symbols, rather than deeper human truths. What we really long for as individuals are meaningful connections — emotional, personal, and significant moments.

That’s in essence what this cultural shift is all about — not technology, but about humanity. A revolution against the pedantic brand and enterprise-wide efforts we’ve been fed for so long. We don’t want to be talked down to anymore. We want to communicate with other people. Meaning trumps messaging.

After all, some of today’s strongest brands, from Whole Foods to Google, made their way into culture without a dollar spent on ads. They’ve built permanence by focusing on customer experience. They’ve designed for people, and that is the treasure chest for any agency moving forward. And this is the mantra: redesign the experience.

I’ve decided what I have to say is more broad than just user experience or the web. It’s about how the creative process can improve the world around us.  Maybe that’s vague, but design is now as applicable to products and software as it is to restructuring communities and saving our environment. There’s lots of uncharted territory here. So I came up with a new mantra: Redesign The World.

With that mantra in mind, it’s time for a a little retrospective of posts from this blog. First, posts from the design category. I hope you enjoy these:

• Design And a Theory of Everything. The most effective design processes are cyclical. User research feeds design prototyping, which feeds user research. And with sustainable design, cradle to cradle creation is all about industry that mimics the cycle of life — a cyclical, universal process. Looking at the basic components of the universe, like vibrations and math, there are clear parallels between the composition of the world around us, and the way over time we as a species re-structure perceptions using design.

• Defining Sustainability As Cradle To Cradle Design. True sustainable design is a product, manufacturing proccess, or business model, that creates minimal waste — whatever it produces for consumption, it takes back and reuses. Some are calling this the next industrial revolution . Rather than the cradle to grave processes that dominated the 20th century, where corporations viewed nature as a limitless resource, cradle to cradle design requires a complete rethinking.

• Three Themed Entertainment Principals. Through course notes I took during grad school at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, I came across this simple list of themed entertainment principals: 1) Know your audience, 2) Know your story, 2) Tell your story using every means possible.

• Choosing what features to design? Hit the sweet spot. A lesson I learned from working on the first Guitar Hero about tuning learning curves. It’s important to think about the different levels of users, and how you will thoughtfully structure a difficulty curve for each of these levels.

Yahoo will debut new branding in the fall, courtesy of a newly-hired CMO. Futurelab has an interesting take on how what most marketing execs do: burn through media money and leave.

She  has a newly hired coterie of her favorite branding gurus. There’s nothing surprising about this news: one of the first things new top marketers usually do is hire new vendors to reinvigorate or change the brand.  It’s what they do.

Here’s what usually happens next:

• Within about 18 months or so, she or he gets fired because the beautiful new branding didn’t have any measurable impact on the business
• The exec swaps jobs with another similarly failed exec at another company
• They trade vendors, and hire new teams to do new branding, and
• Repeat

What this means for ad agencies and marketing firms is that they need to start reaching into other parts of the enterprise than the marketing team. Agencies can’t just keep working with middle-level marketing managers, who approach things from a narrow, “my-way-or-the-highway” perspective.

When Marines get rifle lessons, they learn the acronym BRASS: Breathe, Relax, Aim, Squeeze, Shoot, and Bruce Temkin wrote about how these can apply to marketing:

Breathe: Set aside time every week to focus on what your brand is communicating. Don’t just assume you have it right for the next few years.

Relax: Remember that the brand will not fail if you pause for a moment to focus. It may fail, however, if you continue to waste marketing shots that are off-target.

And of course Aim: know exactly who your target audience is, their desires and emotional perception of your band.

I think the new agency site for CP+B is fantastic for three reasons:

1. The aggregation concept is a solid approach for companies (@Jowyang points that out) — bringing together all the conversations around a company from across the web fits the paradigm of open and transparent.
2. They’ve launched the site in an “open-beta,” the same way Google would. It’s rough around the edges from a functional perspective, but it’s up there and they’ll make it better.
3. They have plans to release it open source (see the “developers” link at the bottom of the site).

But despite that, I think the site is weak, because it looks like “beta,” unpolished, un-thought-out, with cliched tabs on the top right hand, and a standard grid layout. Across the web, there is a minimalist aesthetic shows beauty with just a little code. Poccuo is a small design-shop who does it right, among others.

While I’m not one to talk with the look of my blog, I do honestly feel CP+B would have done better had they just coded up an elegant wireframe, with clearer navigation and clickable elements.

If you own an iPod you’ll know Dieter Rams’ work by absorption. He was the head of design at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, and influenced Johnathan Ives, who designed the iPod:

His “ten commandments” for good design focuses on simplicity and minimalism. This is a list a lot of industrial designers know, but take a look through the 10 qualities of good design below and see if there isn’t something that applies to what you do: I just recently came across it.

Good Design…

1. is innovative.
2. makes a product useful.
3. is aesthetic.
4. helps us to understand a product.
5. is unobtrusive.
6. is honest.
7. is durable.
8. is consequent to the last detail.
9. is concerned with the environment.
10. is as little design as possible.

[via BBHlabs]