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Experience Designer
AKA: Retail Experience Designer, Store Designer, Customer Experience Designer, Interactive Experience Designer
What is an Experience Designer?
An Experience Designer designs the overall environment and interactions that customers experience when they visit and patronize a business. Not to be confused with User-Experience Designers who primarily work in technology fields creating virtual experiences for gamers, website visitors and software users. Experience Designers create real-world experiences.

What does an Experience Designer do?

Experience Designers are responsible for the overall look and feel, even the aura or essence, of a business environment. They are not only responsible for choosing paint colors and fixtures and the music that will be piped in, but also for developing and/or redesigning customer service, sales and delivery processes, events and promotions, and for figuring out ways to expand the experience beyond the initial visit.

Experience Designers are paid to create interactive, high-touch environments, events and processes that not only make customers want to visit the business, and, hopefully, purchase something, but also help them create a relationship with the brand or the business so that they’ll want to come back and do it all again, or at least be more likely to purchase other products/services from the same business.

Perhaps the most outstanding examples of Experience Designers’ work are experience-driven concepts like the American Girl and Build-A-Bear stores. In these stores, children and their parents don’t just shop for and buy toys; they create a day of memories. At Build-A-Bear, children and their parents select a bear, select its voice, clothing and accessories, choose and warm it’s tiny heart (the Build-A-Bear trademark), watch the bear being assembled and finally name it (complete with a certificate) and take it home.

And, if that’s not enough, the experience continues outside the store via the Build-A-Bear Workshop Tour and other events.

The American Girl store is considered the ultimate in experiential retailing. Each store contains a theatre to watch American Girls musicals, a cafe where mom, daughter and doll can enjoy a casual meal, a doll hair salon and a photo studio where girls and their dolls pose for the cover of the American Girl magazine. All of these awesome features are designed to drive the purchase of dolls and their accessories, as well as apparel for the girls. American Girl expands the experience by allowing parents to host birthday parties at their stores and cafes.

These stores are beautifully decorated in bright and inviting colors and whimsical fixtures. They are professionally staffed and managed. But, the real selling points are the interactive activities and the follow-on activities, i.e. bear and doll birthdays. Experience designers are responsible for all of this.

Experience designers are considered creative gurus, but they must also have mastered generally accepted merchandising practices and standards, have a firm grasp of marketing principles and practices and have intimate knowledge and understanding of the business for which they work.

Experience Designers seldom work alone and cannot realize their visions in a vacuum. Instead, they must partner with every department within their employer’s business.

First, they must understand what the employer does–the products/services offered, the target customers and their wants and needs, the company’s values, mission and strategy, how it currently conducts business (staffing, locations, customer service processes and practices, how they make their products/services available to customers, how they process sales, returns, exchanges, complaints) and its current circumstances (available budget, real estate locations, limitations, etc).

Then, Experience Designers must take all of this information into account as they set out to craft a concept or experience. Designers, marketing, merchandising, senior executive, and even front-line employees collaborate with experience designers on this portion of the work. They work together to brainstorm ideas, sketch concepts, create models, test new ideas, develop project plans and budgets and to source resources needed to complete the project. Experience Designers must be able to bring all of these people together and to get the best ideas and feedback from them in order to make the experience design concept a success.

Finally, Experience Designers manage the build out of the concepts they develop. They may employ or supervise project managers, fixture designers, interior designers, architects, 3-D designers and other staff, but they are ultimately responsible for completing the design, build out, testing and implementation of the concept.

In the end, Experience Designers are part “big ideas”, part creative facilitator, part supervisor and team leader, part project manager (and champion), part designer and all business.

For whom might an Experience Designer work?
Experience Designers work primarily in retail or hospitality environments, but are increasingly being hired by other businesses–from hospitals to financial services firms–who want to make their environments and processes more inviting, more engaging and more memorable to clients.

Experience Designers are employed by retailers, restaurant chains, architectural firms, design consultancies, fixture designers, event planners, museums, galleries, resorts and gaming venues, to name a few. They work as independent consultants, as consultants for other employers and as in-house experience designers, store designers, visual designers and/or Chief Experience Designers (the Grand Pubah of experience designers).

Across industries it is getting harder and harder to stand out in a crowded field, especially when consumers are demanding more than just a place to buy something, and when businesses must compete with competitors both small and large and local and international.

The retail industry is particularly fertile ground for would-be Experience Designers given the success of children’s concepts like Build-A-Bear and American Girl and adult concepts like the Art of Shaving’s Barber Spas which use luxurious hair and skin care treatments to sell premium shaving products.

Experience Designers who work outside of the retail industry do essentially the same things that retail experience designers do; they design customer experiences that are inviting, attractive and memorable in an effort to make win repeat customers.

In the case of a hospital, Experience Designers might be hired to redesign the patients’ experience. This might include designing a faster intake process, more comfortable waiting areas and patient rooms, more convenient parking and better staffing to take care of patients’ medical needs and families’ questions.

Experience Designers working for an advertising agency might be hired to redesign the work space in order to facilitate more collaboration and generation of more great ideas. This might include creating more open space and more fun and visually interesting spaces in which the employees may work.

Experience Designers working for a financial services firm or an auto dealership might want to make customer reception areas and the areas in which customers work with the firms’ employees feel less ominous, and the interactions less pressure-filled.

How much does an experience designer earn?
Experience designers earn as little as $43,000 per year, and more than $100,000 as consultants and in-house managers and executives. Experience designers who amass impressive portfolios of successful concept designs can earn far more. Additionally, earnings vary based on the type of employer and the path taken to the Experience Designer job. For instance, Experience Designers who work for consultancies and those who work as independent consultants generally earn more than those who work in similar in-house positions, and those who began their careers as architects (complete with architecture degree and license) or fixture designers may earn more than someone who began working in retail operations or marketing. Finally, Experience Designers who work for/with high-end retailers and creative firms earn more than those who work for museums.

To break in you’ll need…

Experience design is an emerging field, so there are no absolute paths to success. Most new entrants to the field come from closely related fields like interior design, visual merchandising, architecture, fixture design, product design and exhibit design. Nearly all will hold at least a bachelors degree in either a design or non-design related field. For Chief Experience Designer and other executive roles, most will hold a masters in design and/or an MBA.
As always, internships are a great way to sample the field, but this only works for students and recent grads.

For the rest, landing jobs in store planning and design, visual merchandising, exhibit design and customer-facing departments may be good places to start. The latter-most option is by far the longest climb. That’s because would-be experience designers will need to marry their customer service, sales, marketing and other experience with product design, interior design, color selection, event planning, merchandising, facilitation, and/or 3D/CAD design skills. While not impossible, it is difficult to amass these skills on-the-job and find employers receptive to allowing experience designers in training to rotate through the necessary departments.

Would-be experience designers should consider returning to school for design, merchandising, marketing, human factors and event planning classes. Art schools, liberal arts colleges and design schools all offer design courses, certificate and degree programs. And, a small crop of business and design schools, most notably, the Illinois Institute of Design, have begun offering masters degrees in design coupled with an MBA.

Finally, would-be Experience Designers can go it alone and start their own practice. Because experience design is a big investment, and quite risky to existing businesses who sign up for a redesign, upstart Experience Designers will not likely find many takers willing to risk their current customer base and invest large sums of money in untested skills. So, start by volunteering to assist smaller firms with smaller projects, i.e. redesigning a single customer service process, redesigning a workshop or employee area. If customers are satisfied that their clients are more responsive to the environment or process, new business will certainly follow (competitors are great next business opportunities).

Who might love this job?
Anyone who has ever wanted to use both sides of their brains at work!
Experience design offers that rare opportunity to be creative and bottom-line focused, and get paid.

What about this career doesn’t suck?
See above.
The Experience Designer career scored 89% on our WorkYourWay Index, due mostly to its good salary and salary growth opportunity, projected job growth, creative, challenging and fun work environment and relatively low barriers to entry.

To find current openings…
Experience Design Jobs

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