This is the chat for Campfire 37: The Hierarchy Of Experiences, which you can now also watch back on WXO TV.

We think the dawning of a new age deserves a new set of frameworks to express it. To define a field, you need tools. This is one of our key aims at the WXO: to give experience designers the language, connections and confidence they need to raise the profile of what they do and compete in a global marketplace.

And what better framework to give a refresh than Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

Enter Mat Duerden: an associate professor at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, where he teaches Experience Design, and the co-author of the book Designing Experiences alongside fellow WXO Co-Founder Bob Rossman. Duerden wanted to define experience types and map them onto a hierarchy to create the hierarchy of experiences: a simple yet revolutionary tool to guide the way we design and communicate experiences.

Some of what we learned:

• Because experiences are at their foundation co-created, it’s important to consider what outcome you want to nudge your participant towards.
  
  
• Once you’ve defined whether you want to trigger attention, emotion, insight or change, you can map your experience design process against the hierarchy of experiences.
  
  
• Each experience type will require a different approach towards the three phases of experience – anticipation, participation and reflection.
  
  
• Measurement is crucial not only to understand the success of our experiences, but to demonstrate their value to investors, clients and employers.
  
  
• But the metrics we use – and how we capture them – are as highly specific as the experiences we create and the participants that enter them.

Let us know how you might apply the hierarchy of experiences to your own work in the comments below!