What is Human Experience and How to Describe it ?

2.3 Threads of Experience: An Essential Compromise

As mentioned in Chapter 1, an experience is characterized by its holistic nature. In other words, an experience is a blend of diverse elements that cannot be easily broken down.

Driving to the countryside, picking berries, having a breakfast with my parents, and talking to the neighbors all together build up my Sunday morning experience. Each part of the experience is too closely related to be separable. One part leads to another, and the whole experience cannot be fully understood if we were to try to explain only a single part of it. For instance, the two hours of driving every Sunday morning doesn’t sound too pleasant was it not for the fact that the purpose of that drive was to be able to have a lovely breakfast with my 80-year old parents. Without the singing birds and sweet morning air, lifting heavy tree trunks would not make me eager to want to experience that again. All these details, as a whole, created this meaningful Sunday morning experience.

However, the story is different when trying to understand a person’s experience during the process of designing a product or service that can provide a better experience. Although it is difficult to divide experience into distinct parts, it is feasible to try to understand what elements constitute an experience without overlooking the overall context or circumstances that surround it. Of course, it is impossible to draw clear boundaries between the elements because of the holistic nature of experience. What we can do is to group the pieces that are more closely related to each other and regard them as elements and analyze the relationship between the ones who are less closely related. This approach allows us to interpret human experience in a more systematic way and to provide better overall experience for users.

Among them, there are three threads that are especially important and help us understand our experiences: the sensual thread, the judgmental thread, and the compositional thread.


The sensual thread of experience is concerned with what we sense through our sensory organs. The cheerful sounds of morning birds, the spectacular sunset over
the countryside, the sweet and sour taste of luscious berries, and the soft walk on the
garden path are all important sensory elements of the experience.

How we judge or evaluate our experience through our thoughts and feelings is
referred to as the judgmental thread of experience. Pruning the branches and helping
the trees to grow better by relocating them makes me feel proud of myself. I feel
happy and healthy doing hard physical work out in the fresh air. My Sunday morning
experience wouldn’t be fully understood without these values that I appreciate.

The compositional thread of experience is the aspect concerned with relationships
and interaction of oneself with others, people or things. The relationship between
me and my parents and the interaction between the neighbors and me affect
the harmonious experience at the farm. Also, being able to dine with the family and
share the handpicked fruits and vegetables at home enriches my Sunday morning
experience.

Each thread of experience—the sensual thread, the judgmental thread, and the compositional thread—can be woven (crisscrossed with each other) into different patterns.

In order to look at the relationships between the threads, their external environments, and their specific experiences, the three threads need to be seen in a single integrated frame. Therefore, I want to present a three-dimensional model of experience that can help explain the integrated threads of experience.


There are a number of merits in expressing our experiences of using a product or
service as a point in the three-dimensional space as shown in Fig. 3.1.

Firstly, experience does not exist as three different parts based on the three threads but rather exists as a single integrated point. The three dimensions must combine as a single point in order to fully and properly express the holistic nature of experience.

Secondly, the three-dimensional space provides a simple way of describing human experience in using a specific product or service. Figure 3.2 shows the results of a survey on the executives of LG Electronics, a Korean electronics company.

They were asked what kind of experiences consumers who had bought UHD (ultra high-definition) TVs from LG would go through. In terms of the sensual thread of experience, the results indicated that users would feel a high degree of sense of presence due to the quick reflection of a minute screen for setting changes and high resolution that would make them think the characters in the TV were almost real.
As for the judgmental thread, the popular opinion was that users would feel a slight internal locus of causality for their experiences since the content of what they enjoy watching on the TV screens such as dramas and sports cannot be controlled. In the perspective of the compositional thread of experience, both the lack of connections between TVs and the use of a TV to communicate with other people would lead to users feeling a relatively low level of cohesiveness.

Figure 3.2 also shows the results of a survey on the employees of a portal site (NAVER) on what they think people’s experiences would be while using their mobile internet messenger (MIM) In terms of the sensual thread of experience, the limited screen size and difficulty in interacting on that small screen would seem to lead to a fairly low degree of a sense of presence. They also think that the distinctive user interface of the messenger would provide a greater degree of a sense of presence compared to competitors’ mobile messengers. In the perspective of the judgmental thread of experience, the enjoyment users feel while exchanging messages with other users and the direct interaction they conduct to send a message was expected to stem from internal locus of causality. The employees said that mobile messengers provide a means to communicate with other users and enable intimate interaction between close people. Therefore, the level of cohesiveness that the compositional thread of experience provides would be very high.

Finally, a three-dimensional model provides the advantage of an easy and quick method for gathering opinions within a company regarding how to provide a better experience to users. By understanding the position of the current experience and the direction a future experience should shift towards, a point for the future experience can be created. In other words, the three-dimensional model can be used as a tool for deciding the strategic goals of a user’s next great experience.