How Can We Design A Better User Experience?

Have you ever read something that instantly blows your mind? When was the last time you experienced a gasp of freshness? It can come in many forms: a café, a paragraph, a person, a manifesto, a piece of music or even an argument that was so cogent, well-delivered and persuasive that you took the time to tell someone else about it. Every once in awhile, we stumble upon something (or someone) that makes us sit up and want to notice it more. I believe this quality is the exceptional attribute that makes something or someone unique. It is the way it smells inside a bakery. It is the way it arrests your attention.

It is the way it makes you feel like you belong.

If the experience is normal, we don’t tell anyone about it. It is what we’re supposed to go through. What makes the experience remarkable is if it is appalling beyond belief or if the event is so commendable (the food delivery guy voluntarily requested for mayonnaise on my behalf in case I want it with my fries!) that we want to share it. If an experience is typical, we wouldn’t care about it. We probably won’t even remember it after we leave. We couldn’t describe most parts of it even if we tried. There is no parallel construction to give us a mental map of what we just witnessed. There is no hierarchy of one thing being more important than the other to form a lasting impression.

This is why the design of a wholesome experience is important.

Everyone has a limited attention span. We can’t read all the books we want, listen to all the music we want, watch all the Netflix series and documentaries we want. So, we filter. We ignore. Sometimes, we even procrastinate about how there are so many kinds of material going on, but there is nothing for us. It is seemingly made for everyone so much to the extent that it became for no one. If someone we trusted insisted that we spend the time to try a certain something out, we might. If the material is created by a director that we liked in the past, the likelihood of us trying out the new material is higher. If we could try them out for free, we would be more likely to try them out too.

If someone is not interested to try or share about a service/product, then that is the end of the discussion.

No cash is earned. No attention is leveraged. No one wins by barging through the doors. We win, be it as a consumer or a business owner, by building a relationship. Given the status quo of the media landscape, I believe what we want is not more content or context, but for business owners to break through the clutter and succeed by limiting the amount of information they offer. The result is that people end up with the right information that business owners want them to have. I loosely reference this to the omakase experience. The word, omakase, means to entrust yourself to the chef. We’re literally placing the choice of ingredients and presentations in the hand of the sushi chef. We don’t know what we’ll be served. We only know a couple of things. We know the place. We know the chef personally, or through a friend’s referral. We know we’ll have a good time, and we’re willing to pay a little more, say a little more of a good time.