Experience

Everything is an Experience with 5 stages.
Do you plan for all 5 stages??

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
The late Steve Jobs

Background Commentary

Everything is an experience, either intentionally created by the experience creator or the user. The question then becomes what makes up an experience, and how can we use what we have learned to create a compelling experience for the user. In 1997, Larry Keeley of Doblin, spoke at the 1997 TED conference about the Compelling Experiences Model, which would become the 5Es. The 5Es is a conversation starter that when combined with the Service Blueprint Worksheet below, can help you create compelling experiences for your users.

Important Definition

The 5Es

• Entice
  What brings your users to the experience? What fears do you need to overcome, or what excitement can you use to bring users to you? What is the point where they will be engaged with you, but not yet enter the experience?
• Enter
  Where is the inflection point, where you know that a user is committed to the experience and will participate in what you have created for them? What was the turning point for them to make a decision to be engaged? What are their emotions at this point?
• Engage
  What is the curated experience they hang out in for the main point of their interaction with you? What are their emotions as they work with your tool? How are you managing their expectations and Experience? What tasks are they doing, but more importantly what are derived tasks? What are the made-up tasks by the user, that they might want to do, that you didn’t think of yet? How will a self-discovered user journey play out for them? What things can you eliminate or curate for the user, to limit the delivered complexity over what needs to be created, to foster a holistic journey for the possible interactions?
• Exit
  Like in nature, everything must come to an end. How do we ensure that a clear end-point is delivered for the user? From Behavioral Economics, and the fact that humans remember the most recent thing the most and will impact how they remember the experience. What will we do to ensure they get a win at the end?
• Extend
  This one is often forgotten, but what do we do to extend the interaction with us? How to we make sure they stay aware of what we are doing, and how we can help them in the future? What cadence of engagement do we want to foster with them over time and how do we make that happen?

Activity

This is a worksheet to get you thinking about how the 5 steps of any experience, captology, behavioral economics, the emotional state of the user, and the things you need to create for them to use to round out a complete experience. Of course you can have any number of each of the 5Es, but they do go in order. This tool can be used to map to an existing or a future experience, feel free to use it for either. Duplicate the sheet below and have fun.
Service Blueprint Worksheet

Another Reading

The 5Es and 6Ps Experience Inventory: A Conversation Guide

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