Thinking Beyond the Buzz, Experience Design is Where the Industry is Heading

By Wayne Crawford, Guest Writer

“I guess we’re all just ‘designing experiences’ now.” I heard someone say, with air quotes around the buzzy term, at IAEE Expo! Expo! last week. Members of the group I was talking with eye rolled and chuckled at the “jargon of the day” reference.

And it’s not that I disagree with them. Overuse of industry buzz terms can range from annoying to meaningless after a while. But my takeaway was that paying attention to the trends that inspire the buzzwords, is relevant, if not critical.

Take for example Experience Design. It’s currently defined as “the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omni-channel journeys, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions.”

The definition itself is one click away from the notorious Bullshit Generator. Click here to make bullshit: https://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

But what does it actually mean? It’s very applicable to the current state of the trade show and conference space, for a few reasons that all event organizers should pay attention to.

Let’s just break out the first part of the definition. “Products, processes, services, events, omni-channel journeys, and environments.” It sounds like a string of words from a marketing keynote gone wrong. But these words are an amalgamation of terms that have everything to do with attendee engagement and sales growth–which is really what event organizers are in the business of doing. 

Now to the second part of the definition –“with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions.” This is where the technology trend overlay comes into play. Without knowledge of the latest and greatest tools and trends in technology, organizers can’t properly scale their experiences, because they’re designing for the past, not the future.

The third piece of Experience Design is the analytics. Events are no longer ephemeral happenings that disappear into the ether forever. Event organizers now have loads of data and a digital footprint of every attendee, sponsor and exhibitor, at their fingertips.

It’s now an event organizer’s job to plan events based on desired data outcomes, not just formats and intuition. Knowing the technologies that can lead to actionable analytics is an important aspect of the overall design of an event.

Core-apps has been progressively moving away from just an event app supplier and into an overall event technology solution for years. But now we see ourselves as not just offering event technology, but working as a partner with our clients to help them design the experience as well. That’s because technology is now a ubiquitous part of the overall design of an event’s experience.

Just a few weeks ago we rolled out our first augmented reality installation. We recently added a chat bot offering as well. We offer these cutting-edge features to our event organizer clients, because we know they are faced with growing demands to provide new tech to attendees and exhibitors. We exist to help our clients succeed, and sometimes that means thinking beyond our own tools and bringing trusted partners into our offering.

Our augmented reality experience was a success because we designed it for specific outcomes. We see our role as being able to support our client’s experience design with the cutting edge event tech tools that the marketplace now demands.

Let’s have a conversation about how your experience design can be based on specific outcomes and the cutting edge tech that can bring these outcomes to life.