Information Design Part 4

Information Design

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Experience: vital to success, yet difficult to control

How you experience something is almost as important as the event itself. Spending a sunny day, as opposed to a rainy day, on a Caribbean island will fundamentally change the content and quality of the experience. Going to Paris for a honeymoon, instead of a funeral, will significantly alter the impression you have of the city. Attending an amusement park as the guardian to a group of children, rather than with a peer group of friends, makes a monumental difference in the experience.

How information is experienced is no different.

As an example, imagine you are soliciting proposals from different architecture firms for an addition to your corporate headquarters. A number of factors will influence this experience: the appearance (receiving a nicely bound proposal, as opposed to one that is merely stapled together); the presentation (having the proposal handed to you by a superior, as opposed to dropped on your desk by a subordinate); and the timing (first exposure to the proposal occurs as it is shoved into your hands during a stressful meeting, as opposed to receiving it while quietly relaxing in your office). All of these factors play critical roles dictating how effectively and successfully the information achieves its objective - to convince you to choose that particular firm to design your project.

It takes very skilled and knowledgeable practitioners to successfully control experience as a variety of different elements factors in: your audience, your environment, how the five primary human senses work together, the objective, the content, among many others.

Given the importance of the experience, well-designed information necessarily should be created in concert with and mindful of it. It is all part of the same package. In fact, the growing field of User Experience - a product of the rise and increasing sophistication of digital means of communication - underscores the importance of this element. With a litany of confusing titles - including what seems to be every possible juxtaposition of Designer, Architect or Engineer with qualifiers like "Experience," "Usability," "Interface," "Interaction," "Web" - the chaos surrounding this signifies both its acknowledged importance and relative infancy.

Regardless of the word choice, the elements of experience are a perfect fit among - and perhaps the most crucial of - the many disciplines that fall under Information Design.

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