[00:00:02–00:00:29]
Good morning everybody. Good morning and good morning to you too, and welcome to this Morgenbooster: Designing Lovable Experiences. We've been looking forward to this, and it's great to see such a nice turnout despite the cold weather. We aim to keep this relatively short and sweet so we have time for questions, but then again—we've said that before, so let's see if we can make it.

[00:00:29–00:00:54]
Before we get started, just a very short intro to us. I am Jonas. I work here at 1508 as brand strategist and transition designer. And I am Frederik, and I'm one of the two experience designers in here. The other one is sitting over there on the table. Hi.

[00:00:54–00:01:36]
Yes. Okay. Okay, I think I will take this sentence. I'm pretty sure you've seen this before. If you haven't, raise your hand. I assume that you all know this. And I think this is interesting because this says something about—we have a watch that can measure time very precisely—but we also have subjectivity in how long something feels. So there's something interesting in this in terms of humanity, what is measurable, subjectivity, and reality and all that. I think that's super interesting.

[00:01:36–00:02:11]
So this next one is a model. Probably some of you have seen this before. Can I see how many designers and UX are in here today? Okay, nice. Maybe some of you—and maybe others as well—know this model already. It's called the peak-end rule. It's one of my favorite things to talk about, so people over here will be super tired of me, because this is a repetition of something I've said a hundred times before. But the idea behind this is that an experience is one of these two lines: it's an experience from A to B. It could be going to the doctor, going to the supermarket, going on vacation or something. So it doesn't matter how long it is.

[00:02:11–00:02:46]
The point is that when you look back at it afterwards, how you remember things is through your emotions, and you remember primarily a peak and an end moment. So that could be going to the doctor and you need to have a vaccine or something. You probably remember the pain—that is the peak in this instance. It would probably be down here somewhere because it's painful.

[00:02:46–00:03:25]
But I think this is interesting to talk about in terms of the experiences that we create, because when you go to a website and you look back at that visit—or a brand you look at—then you probably remember only a few things when you look back at it. So this can actually be used as a way of prioritizing what we do—the efforts that we make. I think this is interesting because sometimes we tend to design things where we want all pages in a visit to have a certain level of quality. But if it's true that we remember the peak and the end more, we should probably focus more time and effort on these moments. Does that resonate? Yes. Nice. Okay.

[00:03:25–00:04:06]
So, when we design a website or something, we often need to build the highway. We want people to go from A to B as fast as possible because that's how we assume it needs to be. It's measurable, nice, and logical. But maybe there is another way of getting from A to B. Maybe this is more pleasurable. Maybe it gives us a better user experience or better experience overall. So it's just a note—something we can think about.

[00:04:06–00:05:20]
Great. Besides getting into peak moments today, we also want to address some common design ambitions and pitfalls—how to miss the point when designing experiences. And this is both in terms of client ambitions and internal ambitions. Just click for the next one. We took this triangle of pitfalls to highlight some common—maybe mistaken—focuses when we approach a brand project that we often come upon. It could be the client just wanting something that informs: something functional, neglecting the human angle. This is a B2B solution where we had to inform about this and that, or it could also be a consumer-related product—but still where there's an experience designed for machines instead of humans.

[00:05:20–00:06:22]
Another common thing we hear is: we just want something that works. Maybe we have a design system. Maybe we know from our insights that this leads to that, and this is what our customers need and want—and that's why we design for this and nothing more. In this we see people neglecting the element of surprise that we need. We'll get into that soon. And the last thing: we just want something cool. That could equally be internal—it could be a designer ambition: we want to work with this technology, this trend, this expression—and thereby neglect the overall purpose, the substance of the brand.

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Hopefully, in 50 minutes or so, we've at least shed some light on these conceptions about how to approach a brand project. Yeah, welcome. I'm going to make this extra embarrassing for him there. Okay. So, next up, a little more food for thought. Everyone knows that you need animals in any presentation just for the sake of it—and this actually is relevant. Have you met our office dog—or Head of Good Vibes, as he's called? We don't have a monkey in here, but there is this Pavlov's dog. Have you heard about this? Some of you have. I'm pretty sure it's about this guy—he was called Pavlov; he's dead now. He did these experiments on his dogs where he rang a bell every time he gave them food, and by the end he found that just by ringing the bell they started salivating before getting any food served.

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This is interesting in terms of behavior, and we all know this as well. I think some of us at least: during the day we might not feel hungry, but we look at the time—oh, it's 12:00—I actually do feel hungry. So we have mechanisms that spark a reaction inside us. And this guy took it even further a few years later, so he could actually measure the dopamine levels in monkeys' brains, and he found out the same thing. He had some monkeys perform tasks and they would get a reward. There would be juice. It came out of a door in a wall, and every time they got this reward they went to the door and got the juice. And he found out that the dopamine levels of the monkeys spiked already when the door opened, not when they got the juice.

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And two very interesting things: when this continued, he found that over time getting the same juice wasn't enough. The dopamine reaction in the brain decreased over time. And when he gave them juice that was different from what they expected, the reaction in the brain was even bigger.

[00:09:10–00:10:09]
I think that's interesting because we can use this and conclude that we need some sort of reward in what we build when we talk about design. We also need an element of surprise to get an even bigger reaction. I think this is interesting and important. It just so happens that this guy won The Brain Prize. We did the visual identity for The Brain Prize. The Brain Prize is the Lundbeck Foundation, who gives out an award every year—10 million Danish kroner and a real gold medallion—for someone who does something remarkable within brain science. So that's interesting as well. So, what to think about is: what is your juice in your organizations and your work? What is the reward system? And I also want to note that when we talk about these things, we know they can also be misused. When you develop a game or something, you can get this dopamine addiction in children and all that. We of course don't want that, but it's important to be aware that this function exists.

[00:10:09–00:10:46]
Yes. So, going from what we want to what we need—in order to answer this question—we ask you to think about the line we had in the invitation, the pitch to this presentation today: that we want to go from functional experiences to memorable experiences to lovable experiences.

[00:10:46–00:11:25]
And we had to figure out ourselves what that really means, because it's not a journey where you leave everything behind—but it's definitely a journey, and most importantly, from the second to the third point we really want to stress the importance of being aware of.

[00:11:25–00:12:09]
So it's both a matter of taking the best parts of the functional design experiences, the memorable design experiences, and the lovable design experiences—and also possibly leaving something behind. So first off, just shortly, in terms of functional experiences: if we went completely radical on it, it would be purely descriptive. It would be non-evocative. It would be non-speculative experiences where it was just: this is the experience. This is the product. This is the organization. This is the brand. Nothing more, nothing less.