What Is Experience? — User Experience as a Process of Acquisition

In the previous piece, we made clear our direction: to empathize from the user’s perspective rather than the consumer’s, and to step directly into their environment of use in order to improve their experience. If the declaration has set the direction, it is now time to actually move along it. To do that, we must first understand what “experience” is, and grasp how it can be deliberately shaped.

Borrowing again the diving metaphor for UX design from the previous piece: the water into which the diver plunges — that is, experience — corresponds to a river flowing ceaselessly and inexorably onward. The river flows at its own pace and in its own direction regardless of the diver’s will, and the diver who enters it feels the river’s nature with their entire body. And what determines the character of that river is precisely its headwaters. Where the source begins and what terrain it passes through shape the water quality and direction of the river we call experience.

Experience: Something We Already Know

So what, concretely, is experience? To understand this, let’s first look at how we exchange experience in everyday life. When we ask about or answer questions of experience, we typically ask “how was it” or “what do you think” about some object. Questions like “How was that restaurant?” or “Is your new phone any good?” are exactly this kind. Both share the trait of being questions about the past. Since we cannot ask about experience with something not yet undergone, we can take experience, for now, to be some kind of memory of interactions — things that happened in the past with respect to an object.

And if we recall the answers we actually give, most of them turn out to be emotional evaluations — “good,” “bad,” “comfortable,” “uncomfortable,” “nice,” “not great,” and the like. Of course, for parts that left a particularly strong impression, we might add an analytical remark such as “this specific part was uncomfortable in this specific way” or “this particular point was especially good.” But in general, a handful of dominant emotions form the core of the answer, and whatever is added afterward mostly functions to support or justify that emotion. This is also why, when we recall an experience, an overall feeling comes to mind before any fine-grained facts do. Putting these observations together, then, we can define experience as “an integrated emotional memory of interactions that occurred with an object in the past.”

The definition above was derived inductively from our everyday observations. Interestingly, though, if we set this empirically drawn definition aside and look at the dictionary definition instead, experience turns out to be summarized in a strikingly similar way. Here is how a dictionary defines it:

ex·pe·ri·ence /ikˈspirēəns/

the process of getting knowledge or skill from doing, seeing, or feeling things

Recast in our own terms, this dictionary definition tells us that experience is the process of acquiring knowledge or skill from external stimuli. The essence of UX design is compressed into this short definition, and the two keywords that deserve special attention here are “acquisition” and “process.” What matters is that experience is not a simple outcome but is formed through the act of “acquisition,” and that it unfolds in time as a “process.” In other words, this “process of acquisition” is precisely the fundamental principle by which experience is formed.

Understanding this principle brings the essence of what UX design does into sharper focus. Doing UX design means intervening in this process of acquisition and delicately manipulating it, so as to change the water quality and flow of the river we call experience in the direction we want. Let’s now look more closely at what “acquisition” and “process” each specifically mean, and how they connect to design practice.

The Process of Acquisition

Let’s start with “acquisition.” Put another way, acquisition is the input of information — that is, Cognition. Through our sensory organs — eyes, ears, nose, skin — we take in information about an object’s various facets: its shape, color, texture, sound, smell. Processing that information in the brain and storing it as memory is the sequence of events that constitutes “acquisition.”

But here a fundamental difficulty emerges — one that every UX designer must confront. Because this process of cognition is largely an internal phenomenon taking place inside the user’s head, current technology makes it practically impossible to observe or precisely analyze it directly. There is no way to look into what a user feels or what judgment they make, in real time, as they look at a product. This forces the designer who practices UX design to infer the invisible internal state of cognition from the user’s visible, surface-level responses. The unconscious representation that a user shows, naturally and without awareness, in response to an object is what we call “Behavior.” Behavior is like the shadow of cognition — it is nearly the only window through which we can indirectly read cognition that cannot be seen directly.

If acquisition corresponds to the “what” of experience, “process” corresponds to its “how.” Looking at this “process,” even when an experience lasts no more than a fleeting instant in time, some flow inevitably exists within it. Experience is formed through an analyzable Sequence — first encountering a product, then using it, then storing or carrying it, and so on. Even the experience of drinking a cup of coffee, for instance, passes through a sequence: the moment of picking up the cup, the temperature meeting the lips, the taste of the first sip, the weight felt when setting it back down.

And because time inevitably entails space, experience — however small in scale — is always formed, unit by unit, through a definite temporal and spatial procedure. This procedural nature is closely tied to the improvement of experience, since the quality of the overall experience shifts depending on where in the sequence, and what kind of change, is introduced. Also not to be overlooked here is the irreversibility that time and space possess — their inability to be undone. A moment once passed never returns, and the impression a user forms at a particular point in time colors the entirety of the experience that follows. This irreversibility makes unmistakably clear how important it is to manage every single moment in the procedure through which experience accumulates.

Between Cognition and Behavior — The Role of the UX Designer

Let’s now bring the two axes of acquisition and process together for an interim synthesis. Designing an experience, in the end, can be summarized as a series of tasks: observing the user’s cognitive process through the window of behavior, designing the object based on the insight gained from that observation so as to induce a change in behavior in the desired direction, and ultimately pursuing a change in cognition. In other words, it is an indirect yet intricate undertaking — observing visible behavior in order to change invisible cognition, and then changing the visible object again in order to affect that invisible cognition. In this process, what matters above all is to continually cross the boundary of the user’s unconscious — the boundary earlier likened to the “surface of the water” — checking whether the user’s behavior is being steered in the desired direction, and to synchronize and empathize with the user in order to infer their experience. In the end, we might say that the UX designer is someone who converses with the user’s unconscious.

The fact that experience design deals with the invisible domains of cognition and behavior naturally causes the competencies it demands to differ considerably from those of existing consumer-oriented design. And this difference in required competency is what led UX design to be newly pioneered as an independent discipline and field in its own right. In existing design, the core competency lay in presenting styles and qualities that would appeal to the consumer, through the designer’s personal inspiration and intuition — the formative ability to create beautiful shapes, a sense for reading trends, and expressive skill in delivering visual impact were what mattered most.

In UX design, by contrast, what matters is how deeply one can empathize with and understand the user’s perspective, in order to accurately infer their inner state even where it is not outwardly visible. This is territory that the mere “ability to make things pretty” cannot reach; it requires a broad understanding of human cognition and behavior. IDEO’s 1999 “Reimagining the Shopping Cart” project illustrates this well. Looking at the backgrounds of the people who took part, we find an astonishingly diverse group — industrial designers and engineers, but also people from psychology, architecture, business, linguistics, and biology — coming together as a single team to design one single product: the shopping cart. Why would designing a single product require experts from so many different fields? Because truly understanding the user requires more than the viewpoint of any one field; mobilizing diverse perspectives and competencies capable of illuminating the complex phenomenon of human experience from multiple angles is essential.

Let’s draw all of this discussion together. Good UX design can be summarized as design that closely observes the user’s cognitive process, discovers the qualitative or behavioral problems that arise within it, and, through design, resolves them naturally — without the user even noticing. Rather than making the user consciously think “something has changed,” making them feel that “somehow this is more comfortable now” or “this just works naturally” is what good UX design aims for.

To close by bringing back the river metaphor borrowed at the start of this piece: just as finding a river’s headwaters, improving its water quality and volume, and carefully guiding its course produces a river that is clean, stable, and beautiful, the role of the UX designer is to find the headwaters of experience and change its flow. Of course, compared to the immense flow of experience a user has accumulated, the individual adjustments a designer makes may at first seem far too minor. One might well doubt how changing one or two interactions could possibly change the entire experience.

But in the end, every great flow is made by the accumulation of small things. Just as a river is ultimately formed by the confluence of countless small streams, changing the details of an experience one by one will, at some point, bring about a turning point where the overall flow suddenly draws much closer to the design goal. Enduring this process, and pressing steadily forward by trusting the weapons of observation and empathy rather than relying on one’s own intuition or inspiration — this is at once the greatest competency demanded of a UX designer and the hardest homework they must do.

Now that we’ve confirmed experience is a process of acquisition, the next post will look at the concrete attributes that make it up — the six parameters that constitute experience — and identify which of these parameters UX design primarily deals with.