If you have ever visited Riverfront Park in Spokane, Washington, you undoubtedly had an experience with the “garbage goat,” a copper and brass artistic sculpture famous for its internal vacuum mechanism. Perhaps more successful than any garbage can ever created, this goat sculpture actually encourages children and adults alike to pick up garbage—so that they can toss it under the goat’s mouth and watch the trash get thrillingly sucked into oblivion. Built in 1976, the garbage goat has created memorable experiences for people for over forty years by employing a simple concept: take something mundane and transform it into an experience.
Even at the most basic level, all communications can be transformed from something mundane into something meaningful. While not all information needs to be garbage-goat worthy, most should be strategically constructed to enhance the user’s engagement with it. The goal should be to, even if to a small degree, create an experience. Stephen Anderson, author of Seductive Interaction Design developed the “User Experience Hierarchy of Needs,” which outlines the six progressive stages for turning mundane communications into meaningful experiences. If you can get past the “Convenient” stage, you’ll transform the way you effectively influence people. Anderson’s hierarchy includes the following six stages:
FUNCTIONAL (USEFUL)
At the most basic level, what you create needs to be functional. People need to be able to view, access, and gnerally understand your information well enough to make it useful. To meet the functional level, your information needs to follow basic grammatical conventions; use fonts and colors that are readable; be created at an appropriate size; and generally get the basic point(s) across.
RELIABLE
Beyond functional, your information should be reliable, meaning that its usefulness should endure and that the information you present should be sound, accurate, and credible.
USABLE
It’s not typically enough to make information functional and reliable. It should also be easy to use, meaning that people should be able to quickly navigate the information, find what matters to them most, and not encounter any significant hurdles while using it.
CONVENIENT
Convenience, a step above usability, is the threshold where many communicators struggle to surpass. Making information convenient means making the information as natural to read, follow, and navigate as possible, requiring your users to have to think as little as is necessary.
PLEASURABLE
Once a communication piece becomes convenient (which deals primarily with cognition), you can focus on how it affects people’s emotions by incorporating more friendly language, making it more attractive, infusing elements of humor and fun, arousing curiousity, or otherwise making it enjoyable.
MEANINGFUL
The highest level of user experience, making something “meaningful,” means providing something of personal value to your user. While meaningfulness may be subjective, if you are able to tell stories and capture the cultural experiences and idiosyncrasies of your audience, you will be in a better position to make it meaningful to them. First, though, you must obtain the previous five levels.