User experience focuses on the practical usability of products and media, especially digital ones. Customer experience is more comprehensive and relates to all of a brand’s touchpoints, which are sometimes widely distributed in terms of space and time. What we learnt in the workshop was an approach that focuses on the deeper, emotional meanings of experiences and how these can be managed. That’s why the term “design” here doesn’t mean aesthetic styling, but targeted planning.

Experience design first requires clarity about which group of people is facing which challenge. Tacit assumptions should be scrutinised and corrected, including through tests using prototypes. The approach thus adopts important elements from the design thinking and lean innovation movement.

In the experience design process, however, the problem is not only consistently placed before the solution, but also the emotion before the measure. In other words, you first ask how someone should feel and only then consider what actually needs to happen to achieve this, what trigger is needed. In our workshop, this principle was applied to exemplary cases, most of which had an event character. Probably because people quickly think of events in connection with an emotional journey.

At Atoll, we believe that communication professionals can view all brand-related situations through the lens of experience design. Asking about the subjective experience and its embedding in a larger emotional frame of reference is worthwhile everywhere.