Experience First, Then Product

Experience first, then product Most design education teaches you to make things better. Folkwang, under Marc Hassenzahl, taught me to ask a different question first: better at what? And for whom? And according to whose definition of better? This sounds abstract until you've sat in Hassenzahl's studio and had a project torn apart — not because the execution was poor, but because the starting point was wrong. You designed a beautiful interface. But you started with the interface. You should have started with the experience. What does the person feel? What do they need to feel? What conditions produce that feeling? Only then — after you've understood the experiential goal — do you design the thing that delivers it. This is the difference between pragmatic quality and hedonic quality, and it's the axis around which Hassenzahl's entire methodology turns. Pragmatic quality asks: does it work? Is it usable? Can the person accomplish their task? Hedonic quality asks: does it matter? Does it create meaning, stimulation, connection? Most of the design industry optimizes for pragmatic quality because it's measurable, testable, and easy to defend in a stakeholder meeting. Hassenzahl's argument — and it reshaped how I think about everything — is that hedonic quality is what actually determines whether something succeeds in someone's life. A product can be perfectly usable and completely irrelevant. My BA thesis made this concrete. I researched doctor-patient communication — supervised by Hassenzahl — and the obvious design approach would have been information design. How do you present medical information more clearly? Better pamphlets. Clearer discharge instructions. More readable test results. Pragmatic quality. Task completion. Usability. That's not what I did. I started with the experience. What does it feel like to sit across from a doctor who has seven minutes for you and information that will reshape your life? What does it feel like to be the doctor, repeating the same explanation for the fortieth time that week, knowing that the patient will retain maybe a third of it? The problem wasn't information clarity. The problem was that the entire communicative situation was designed — if you could call it designed — around the institution's constraints rather than the human experience inside it. So I proposed platforms that would handle the repetitive information transfer — the parts that don't require a physician's judgment or presence — and free the clinical encounter for what only a human exchange can provide: nuance, reassurance, the reading of a room, the question that only gets asked when there's enough time and trust. Not a better pamphlet. A redesign of the conditions under which doctor and patient meet. That thesis brought my two backgrounds into the same room for the first time. Healthcare gave me the clinical reality. Hassenzahl gave me the methodology to redesign it. And the methodology said: don't start with the artifact. Start with the experience you're trying to create. Then work backward to the system that produces it. I've applied this ever since, in contexts Hassenzahl probably never imagined for it. At URW, I wasn't evaluating whether seating areas were well-designed objects. I was asking what experience a person has when they arrive at a junction in a shopping center and something feels wrong — a spatial hesitation they can't name but their body responds to. At Grau, I wasn't optimizing customer service metrics for their own sake. I was asking what it feels like to be a dealer who places an order and then enters a silence — no confirmation, no timeline, no signal that anyone on the other end is paying attention. The metric follows the experience. Not the other way around. The methodology also gave me a language for something I'd felt in the ICU but couldn't articulate. In nursing, the best care isn't the most technically precise care. It's care that recognizes the patient as someone having an experience — of vulnerability, of uncertainty, of being inside a system they didn't choose and don't understand. The technical precision is necessary. But it's not sufficient. Hassenzahl would call that pragmatic quality without hedonic quality. I'd been practicing experience-first thinking in clinical settings for years before I knew it had a name. Folkwang is a university founded in the Bauhaus tradition — art, design, music, theater, science under one roof. The principle is that you dissolve boundaries between disciplines to produce people who think across them. Hassenzahl's studio was where that principle became operational for me. He didn't teach me a design method. He taught me a question. And the question works everywhere: what experience are you actually designing for? If you can't answer that, everything you build afterward — however elegant, however functional — is a solution in search of a problem. The question came from Folkwang. The instinct to ask it came from the ICU. I just didn't know they were the same thing until I sat in that studio.