Human Centered

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Human Centered. I'm Nick Brunker, a group director of experience strategy at VMLY and R and your host for the show. Thanks for taking a listen. We've talked a lot on previous episodes about how over the years we've progressed from the awareness era to the engagement era to the experience era, which is where we are now, where modern consumers choose brands that offer better experiences versus just the product itself. In short, the experience has become the brand.

So how does that affect what and how to design? Our guest today will dive into that and more. It's my pleasure to welcome in the VML Y and R chief experience design officer, Eric Looney. Looney, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, Nick. Thanks for having me. Long time listener, first time caller. Is that what I'm supposed to say? If you

if you've actually listened for a long time, which I wouldn't fault you if you hadn't. Oh, goodness.

No. Thanks for having me. It's I know it's been a while to get on, but glad to be here.

Yeah, it's exciting to jump in with you on this stuff. A lot to get into in the next thirty minutes or so. For those that haven't met you yet, share a bit about you and your background.

Yeah, so, yeah, oversee experience design inside of VML Y and R. I've done that for about almost sixteen years now. So that's cool. And now share with the partner that excited to kind of welcome into the Bolden work with. But over the years I've cut my teeth on flash banners and building websites and doing apps.

And we've kind of just gone on this trajectory of this path of really kind of connecting broader experience overall. And that's kind of where my background's at in terms of digital marketing and design and experience. And also though spend a bit of time in architecture world doing signage and way finding. And that's always been something I think that's kind of led to this experience thing too. Like how do you experience physical space?

How do you experience navigation through physical space? And a lot of that's led to a lot of what I do in terms of experience design as a whole and a broader set of context.

So when we think about that overall premise of the experience as the brand, I know it's something that you've spent a lot of time talking about, especially of late around here. How do you wrap your head around that and kind of explain it to somebody who's just hearing that statement or that type of a thought for the first time?

Yeah, brands, you so many different things like visual and logos how they're reflected TV. But really it's just come down like every touch point you have with a brand, be it opening a box, using the product, seeing something on TV or recognizing some sort of advertisement or something else in the space. Like every one of those touch points an experience with that brand. And so it's become more interesting for us to think about all those touch points adding up to your collective experience with that brand and how you feel about that brand versus just brand coming at you one way all the time. It's really kind of a collective set of touch points that kind of equate to your overall feeling.

And that's kind of where we looked at it. It really leans into not just the product but the ecosystem of that particular product or the brand itself. And again, all those touch points that you have and how you feel across all those touch points. And then overall, that's your experience. And so the experience that you have is the brand like that the brand is putting forth all those things.

And it's our job as designers to kind of really kind of map that out and bring that to life.

So in thinking about all of the different brands you've either touched, worked on or just experienced in your life, what does that feel like? Give us some examples of seeing the Yeah, ecosystem yeah. Come to

think of maybe a couple examples I like to use. One maybe more obvious is Sonos and I bought some of the speakers and they're great but there's lots of great speakers. And in fact, is Sonos the best quality speaker I mean, some might say yes might say no but I think that the notion there is like when you set it when you open it up and you set it up and the way like you connect to the system like that experience is flawless. And it's it's almost like magical in a sense and things just start to work and happen. And so the way you've experienced the brand through the setup the way and it really goes back to their side the ordering all those things as well.

But really that kind of moment of setup is something that's magical. And it's kind of a way that you experience Sonos in a way that is different than just kind of the normal kind of brands. Another one is it's a restaurant in London that I like to go to when I'm there and it's to Shoom and you can wait an hour and a half in line but they make it feel like fifteen minutes the way they navigate the serving you try in line. If it's raining they'll give you umbrella as you get to the first kinda stage of them welcoming you in. You kind of go down to the bar and you order drinks and snacks.

And then you're up to your overall place where you eat. Food and their kind of staff services is already great. But the way they navigate the experience around all these other touch points knowing that the lines are gonna be there is pretty remarkable. And that makes you wanna go back and you don't mind it because the way you're experiencing the brand is a is a positive positive way.

Generationally, I think it's interesting to look at the data that comes out of it and listening to to Gen Z and millennials of which I'm a millennial. As we we think about the brands that we have patronized and, brought into our lives and continue to give money to, time and time and time again, the data is pretty staggering. And you talk about Gen Z. Let's just talk about teens for a minute. They they're preferring to spend money on experiences.

Like, 57% of them say that's more important, the experience, than the tangible item. And from somebody who is and you've already hit on some of the the examples, but somebody who is actually in a place of thinking through the experience, the design of that experience, the design of the ecosystem, what is that shift where tangible items no longer have that inherent value as much as an experience? What does that mean for a CX leader that is now trying to design for what will be the largest spending audience, spending generation in the world?

I think we've got to make it worth their while. I mean, the experiences that we're designing need to either be magical, they need to be serendipitous. They need to be, you need to help me be better, create more relationship, right? And or just simply have great memory. It's not just one thing to have a really strong industrial design or a product that performs really well in its space.

It's the ecosystem around it and people are attaching themselves to brands because of those experiences. If you don't have a great experience around the product, people are, they'll pay more for the experience around the product even if the product is like on par with something else like that you'll go to places that make you feel better, that add value to your life. And I think that's what millennials are showing us. Want those experiences rather material things. They wanna have the live ticket.

They wanna have the great experience kind of at a venue, if you will. And so it's not just about physical things anymore. And it's about experiential things as a whole.

One of the examples that you've talked about a lot is around this idea of a competitive set and how somebody, Gen Z or otherwise is evaluating you as as a brand and the services and products that you provide. And and I'd love for you to kind of explain just the example of of an airline versus another airline and and unpack for us

a little

bit the idea that if you're trying to think about and design experiences for your brand, you may not always just be focused on your other competitive set because the the customer isn't comparing you to just the people in the same industry. Talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah. I think the, you know, consumers especially millennial and Gen Z, you know, they're always on device. They're always doing, they're always on something and they're comparing brands and products and services directly with each other as they're surfing and navigating between these different kinds of things that they're using on their phone or web or even on TV or whatever. So they're immediately comparing different things. And when we've done a lot of research through the work we've done with different companies, we often say that you're not just competing with your direct competitors, you're competing with other things.

The example, you talk about the airline and the one I use is Delta. Yes, Delta competes directly with the Southwest or an American airlines, but they also compete with Netflix. They compete with Netflix in those screens, the back of seats. You know, if that UI UX doesn't work, if that content or programming isn't good, people are gonna say they're gonna notice like, cause they're so used to Netflix working for them on their phone or at home on their streaming device. And so like, that's the direct one.

They're gonna compete with, you know, let's just take the WiFi on flights. Like if it doesn't work, you're competing with like a Google Nest at that point, like Google Nest, it works. It's beautiful and well designed. And it creates the experiences you need in your home. If that doesn't work on the airline, like you're, you know, it's already amazing that we're gonna have Wi Fi on an airplane but when it doesn't work, you know, it's kind of challenge.

Even down to like, I like to say they compete against the Marriott in the sense of like, you know, the welcoming aspect of the double lounges or the epic date or the way you're served on the plane. Like those are very kind of service models that great hotels use. So I think brands need to think about and not just their direct competitors in their space but what are the other kind of areas that their consumers are going and what other brands they're engaging with and they need to make sure that they're looking at that across category.

It's super interesting and what a great and exciting time to be in the space. Our industry, overarchingly has a lot of alphabet soup, CX, XD, UX, UI. Give us a cliff notes version of what the human centered experience design process is and what it looks like to be an XD at VML Y and

R. Yeah, that's a I don't know if that's a short answer. It is kind of messy. But it is there's a lot of CXXDUX So look, experience design we looked at, you just kind of break it down. We're like, look, there's a spectrum in terms of the type of capability that we need experienced designers to do.

For me experience design is the kind of the parent, if you will. And the child inside of that parent child relationship like this is the UI and the UX and the copy. And we look at how people who can do be very visually creative or user interface driven. That's one aspect we look at from a behavioral standpoint or user experience driven. And then from a story or a copy standpoint.

And we look to have people on our teams that are T shaped in that sense. They go deep on, if they go deep on visual UI, they're gonna know about behavioral UX or kind of story copy. Even our copywriters, if they go deep on copy, they understand good look and feel or interaction. They understand the behavioral aspect of the user experience overall. And honestly, we have copywriters that are sometimes our best design thinkers because they can kind of extrapolate and be more abstract in terms of what they're doing.

So we look at the spectrum, we partner those teams together. We pair them with great folks in our experienced strategy team, somebody like yourself and along with our technology as well. So it's the relationship and the partnership between those capabilities that we feel like kind of come together bring forth great work. And we wanna make this kind of smaller kind of core teams to kind of do that in a way that's I think fresh and exciting and not kind of stagnant and stale. Obviously everybody would wanna say that but I think we're always trying to look at like how can we make that fresh so the ideas are fresh and the conversations fresh inside of that.

You said something earlier that sparked something in me, which was designing better futures and the idea of of thinking about what somebody's future looks like and how can we improve upon that. And I'd love for you to take us a level deeper. What does that mean in practice? And what should we be thinking about when trying to accomplish that?

Yeah, I actually, we like to use imagining better futures. Because imagination is our best, most powerful creative tool. It's something we believe on our end. If we can imagine, then we're gonna be kind of stuck with the same stuff we have all the time. But better futures, better kind of leans into this kind of incremental way of looking.

I'm kind of an incrementalist as myself like you can shoot for the moon and always drive and some people do that well but I'm kind of let's continue to build and build and build and build on top of what we're doing to make it better, better, better, better. And if you do better enough you're gonna get amazing or awesome. And a lot of times in a product land that's what you do. You launch an MVP and then you kind of keep building onto it over time. And futures futures so many different things.

Features literally like one minute from now features you know five minutes from now it's five weeks five months five years like there's lots of future. Future is next best action. Right and how like we design things for somebody's next best action. We also think about futures in terms of our employee experience and how are we creating you know futures for our team members our associates that are on board with us. And so there's a lot of different futures in there.

But if we can imagine better futures of use imagination and incrementally make things better and better and better and look at like whatever that might be from a future standpoint, it allows us to kind of go beyond where we're at today and hopefully get us out of the sea of sickness.

You led me exactly to the point I was gonna take us, which is in a world where technology is changing, which we'll get into in a minute, everybody has similar attack points depending on what industry you're in. Like, it's very easy to get stuck in that that sea of sameness. How how do you actually combat that at a tactical level?

Steve saying this for me is it's kind of starts with the fact that like early in our career, we like really looked at pushing web and app and everything kind of to the limits. But then I think we've just optimized ourselves through the training of Google and Apple and Android eggs and all these things to kind of get to like, there's like the best place to put a search bar is here. The best place to put this button is here. And we've kind of just started to kind of homogenize the experiences overall. And they're just kind of all kind of the same.

And even though the technology has gotten better and better and better. And so I think when what we're trying to do is look at combining the, like I talked about the type of talent, the type of teams that we build and looking at imagining better futures, like how do we do that inside some of those digital experiences but even bigger than that how are we kind of looking at rethinking how you interact with your vehicle how you look at your shopping experience how you look at just interacting, take from the airline standpoint, like what that's like to purchase and get through the airport. Like anything that we kind of go through is like we wanna push against the norms and get us out of the sea of sameness because those are gonna be those experiences that people really kind of talk about, reflect on and keep them coming back to those brands.

I had a good conversation an episode or two ago with Ben Gahab and Martin Cody. They were down in Nashville for a Forrester CX conference, and there was an interesting topic that came up. And Ben referenced it as digital fluidity and the ability for Yeah. Customers to move in and out more seamlessly from digital physical spaces. As a designer, and you mentioned your architectural background, I gotta think this is a great time to be alive, at least in in your expertise area, because you're you're no longer kind of forced to think about just how has the digital experience come together.

Yes. That's part of the job. But now, especially lately coming out of the pandemic where, you know, foot traffic's increasing again, you're opening up your aperture a lot more, aren't you, to to not just the digital space, but how the digital and the physical connect?

Yeah. You have to. And the digital, you know, it used to be the digital just kind of sat wherever it was and now it transcends and moves with you and it's constantly with you. And we're getting to this kind of place of, you know, where, you know, wherever I'm at is where I need to do what I'm going to do. And so like whatever I'm going use and the digital aspect of that is going to transcend across all these physical touch points.

And yet in order to enhance those places that you're at, and especially if you think about brands and how you can kind of bring to life that experience more, like we need to connect into those digital kind of touch points to kind of make more magic happen, if you will, to imagine more possible at that point. And I think that's gonna be really compelling. So it is very fluid. It's know, dumping well, he's great. And it's a true point that the fluidity of it is gonna be critical.

And that's a big challenge because it makes from a designer standpoint, the problems we need to solve far more complex. Right? Because now you're not just in these kind of singular moments, you're connecting across a broader set of touch points, both physical and digital. And all that has to come into play to kind of really truly bring a great customer experience and great experience to sign overall.

So a bit of a wildcard as we think through that point about XD, you've touched a lot of brands, you've done a lot of things in your career. Thinking back to some of the more exciting and interesting work that you've been on, I know you can't really narrow it down to one, but if there's anything that made you really excited and just groundbreaking of late that's that you can talk about publicly, of course. I don't know if there's anything that rises to the top of your head, but this has been an interesting handful of years. I'd love to hear hear kinda what's on the top of your mind.

Yeah. Yeah. Think the you know, what that comes to mind, mean, I talk loosely around it but just being a part of the Mach E launch for Ford was really cool because we were working while they were building and designing finishing the design of the vehicle. We were working on designing experiences outside of the vehicle and that kind of connectivity between physical and digital was there. And then notion of how do you bring together the owner and the vehicle how do you bring them together when the car is even still being built and or you purchase it online and you're waiting for it like how do you start to kind of like set up your profile and start to get connected.

And we did a lot of interesting things there that I think are compelling and continuing to kind of grow. And that was pretty exciting. Probably can't go too deep on it but like, yeah, that was one that feels, yeah, that feels to kind of be really exciting as a whole.

Well, and it's a great example too because I think among the automotive industry and other industries technology has continued to just hockey stick up into the right when we talk about the number of connected devices, IoT, you know, talking about digital fluidity and how does that work. Like, I think we're we're within the next two years is gonna be around 40,000,000,000 connected devices, and that number is gonna just continue to go up. That's definitely Moore's Law at work. How how does that impact the design and innovation process? Because, obviously, it it's not a a short process.

You wanna be agile. You wanna be nimble, but things are happening so fast. What can you share with leaders on how to keep up with that pace of change?

Yeah, we've got to, I mean, obviously you got to pay attention to it. You got to see where it's, try to see where it's going. It's hard to see around the corner on that. I think for me looking at the behavioral side of like where consumers are shifting and going is gonna be a big part of that. Like how they're using all of this IOT and how they're kind of connecting all these different pieces together because we've got to anticipate behavioral needs and user needs that we need to solve.

There's gonna be a lot of pain points inside of that. I think there's with matter coming along that's gonna be an interesting way to kind of merge a lot of the IOT into kind of a single kind of a system where it'll in theory hopefully all connect because from an IoT standpoint as cool as it is, like it's been a bunch of disparate brands doing disparate things that aren't connected to each other. So hopefully that'll change. But I think leaning in on what those touch points are. But also I think what's magical about is like we're coming to a place where you can start to kind of bring different things together and start to kind of actually like, hey this is cool over here.

This is cool over here. What if we brought them together? And it might kind of give you this new thing. I think that's gonna be start to be compelling in terms of like thinking about design. I also think our tools are gonna start to be changing as we get into it.

Mean, it's not just the IoT realm but like the way devices are merging the way the physicality physical and digital that we talked about. I think the way we are tools that we have as designers are gonna kind of probably influx as well and into new things. We're gonna go beyond the sketch and the Figma's and even get into Unreal Engine and things like that as designers.

What do you make of the idea that we're gonna be in a world without screens as we know them? As a designer, that's gotta like, rack your brain a little bit because as much as things have changed and and the sizes have changed and the dimensions and how we design, obviously, from, you know, desktop to mobile, etcetera, like,

do

you do you wrap your head around that that concept at this point? Because it doesn't seem like it's that far away, but at the same time, it's also it seems so, just Orwellian, I guess, that's the right word. Like, is there really a point where we're we're not gonna have screens? And then at that point, what does design look like? Do you ever stop and think about that?

Yeah.

No. I do. I do think about it quite a bit. You know, I've got a I've got an iPhone 13. Right?

And and and right now my Apple Watch that I wear is is like a Gen one or Gen two iPhone. At some point, your Apple Watch is gonna be as powerful as your iPhone 13 if we just keep going with that kind of hockey stick example. And if that's the case, then at some point the watch is gonna power my AirPods, which they already kind of do anyway, but then also like any sort of AR glasses. So there's rumors about Apple's AR glasses and so is Facebook and so is Google. Like, they're all getting to that.

And at some point we'll have truly good glasses that actually kind of do MRXR AR, whatever they're gonna call it. And I think that's really interesting because it's at that point you don't need a phone anymore. You don't need to carry around a brick in your pocket. It's like all gonna happen before you. And then smart clothing is there where you're gonna have your jacket or shirt or whatever is gonna be connected to that kind of doing more from a biometric standpoint.

And also all of sudden, like it's all it's all kind of getting to a point where we won't have the typical screens that we're that we're used to. So then like, wow, do you have a TV or do you just watch TV on your on your glasses? Like, do you, you know, in the car that you're driving around and you're probably not driving at this point because it's a autonomous vehicle, but then like, are your glasses augmenting what's happening outside or is window in the vehicle augment, putting up advertisements or showing like from a map standpoint where you're at. You wouldn't even have like dashboards at that point anymore necessarily, like why would you? So I think it's really compelling to think about that.

And it goes back to my tools example, like that's where tools are changing. Like, That's not going to just be a straight component level design inside of Sketch or Figma. It's going be something that you're going to have to use different tools and things like we've already seen lots of companies dive into Unreal and Unity and kind of do different things that starting to kind of push where we're at and the way we design that kind of overall like what you're seeing from an AR standpoint is gonna be really kind of interesting. So I do think about it. I think we're kind of at some point it's gonna be one of those moments when something comes out new that we're gonna hit and we're gonna it's gonna it's gonna shift in our phones and iPads and things are just gonna start to go to where the old rotary phone used to be.

Well, bookend to it is if the experience is the brand then it's not necessarily about the product in which the customer is engaging with something even if it's technology, it's the experience that we can build around whatever the customer needs are. I think that that goes back to our our title of the episode and the the podcast of being human centered. It is Yeah. It is an interesting time to be alive, no doubt. You had a quote in one of your recent presentations that I loved, and if you want to expound upon it, you can.

I just thought it was an interesting way to kind of close the segment, which is the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. And that is from William Gibson. I thought that was fascinating. Do you have any more builds or thoughts on that? Because I found that to be super profound.

Yeah, think, I'll just go back to the example. We already have an Apple Watch, got AirPods. We've got a version of the AR glasses, right? We do have smart clothing. Those all exist but they're not distributed enough at a scale for everybody to use and they're not quite connected as they should be.

So like to me it's there and like all these kind of bits of the future kind of exist in our around us as designers innovation lies in connecting those things as we move forward and finding out what is possible inside of that. So I think to me it's a reminder to look around, look at the technology and the things that are the future that exist before us and start to connect those dots because it's already here and it'll always be there. It's just gonna be pockets that you gotta hunt hunt it down and find it.

So cool. So cool. Really appreciate the conversation. Before we wrap up, I know you are a well traveled individual. You have been around the world for all kinds of things, business, pleasure, family, etcetera.

But you've obviously been able to spend a lot of time in Japan. Talk about that your family and some of your special skills.

Oh yeah. We love Japan. It's a beautiful place. Our boys are Japanese descent and I'm fluent Nick. I'm fluent in Japanese.

Not many people know that. Now I'm only fluent at like maybe a one year old level. So I can pretty much get around but that I am I like to say it's totally true but would your

wife say the same.

Don't know. Mindy is actually the one that is actually fluent. I would say she's fluent but yeah we love we love traveling with Japan. That's a special part of our family story. And if you've never been, it's a beautiful place.

It's just great, great place to experience both this beautiful history and tradition and this like crazy modern way that I've never experienced before.

So That's amazing. Well, I appreciate it again. Just, having a chance to catch up with you. It's been great. It's been too long since we've had a chance to get you on the show, and, I I really appreciate all the insight.

I know a lot of folks that are listening will will really enjoy it, and, we will have to have you on again. Thanks again.

Yeah. Thanks, It's been been a true pleasure.

And thanks to you all for listening to human centered as well. To learn more about our CX practice and our approach to the work, check us out online at vmlyr.com/cx. We'd also love to hear your feedback on the show. Give us a rating and offer up your thoughts wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon, and more. Have a topic idea or just wanna drop us a line?

You can connect with me on Twitter at Nick Bruuncker or shoot us an email. The address is humancentered@VMLYR.com. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.