What Evaluators and Experience Designers Have in Common
Design is always on my mind. It’s no secret to my friends and colleagues that I love using my skills as an evaluator to support designers in creating meaningful experiences for people. I get excited when we work with experience designers to see how visitors make sense of concepts through exploratory front-end evaluation, lead visitors in prototyping sessions to refine exhibits and messages as part of formative evaluations, and measure the impact of visitors’ experiences in multi-method summative evaluations.
Experience designers and evaluators each undoubtedly bring their own distinct skill sets and add their unique contributions to any project. And yet, over the years, I’ve also noticed that how we approach our work—our processes, mindsets, and goals—tends to be more similar than different.
Here are just some of the things we have in common:
At the start of any project, both evaluators and designers must quickly get up to speed on topics we don’t know much about. We both must take in and make sense of a vast amount of information from people in cross-functional roles and from varied sources, and (often very quickly) turn it into a cohesive project scope that is right for the circumstances, infusing a blend of creativity and practicality.
Just like experience design, research design is an art requiring constant iteration, technical expertise, and a high tolerance for ambiguity. Our clients (and my evaluation students) are often surprised to learn just how many creative decisions are inherent to the research design process. We are designing an experience for research participants to go through. And just like designing an exhibition, nothing is ever completely set in stone at the start. Figuring out what will make for the best experience for research participants, visitors, and clients takes active listening and flexibility.
Both experience design and evaluation ultimately center on (and are nothing without) honest storytelling and radical transparency. Experience designers are tasked with authentically representing people’s stories in the experiences and interpretation they create. Evaluators must do the same when presenting our findings to ensure that we are authentically representing participants’ voices and stories in ways that deepen understanding. For both professions, it is a difficult yet potentially very rewarding undertaking.
Neither experience designers nor evaluators are afraid to ask hard questions in order to drive change. Experience designers are often seen as creative change agents (and rightfully so), and I would argue that evaluators play the same key role in any project. Though evaluators don’t always make clear “do this, don’t do this” recommendations in our reporting, we always make a point to introduce sticky questions arising from data that must be addressed and teased apart to move experience design forward. These (sometimes challenging) discussions often ultimately shape major decisions in any experience design project, especially ones with complex narratives and interpretation.
Whenever I think about all of this, I often come back to the words of experience designer Judy Rand:
“Some people—maybe you've met them—think that knowing more about their visitors will constrain them; that evaluation will close off their options, stifle their artistic freedom. That astounds me. Evaluation doesn't stifle my creativity; it inspires it. It opens my eyes to the real world… Visitor research tells me where my visitors are coming from, so I know what kind of bridge to build to get a message from us to them, and back again.”
—Judy Rand, The 227-Mile Museum, or, Why We Need a Visitors' Bill of Rights
Like Judy, I’ve come to see evaluation and experience design as inherently intertwined. Both are powerful tools that drive creativity and transformation. Both involve a give and take in developing inclusive, accessible, and relevant experiences. The more evaluators and experience designers appreciate the overlaps in our own creative processes (and how the lines are often blurry), the better equipped we will be to collaborate in helping museums build more meaningful and audience-centered experiences.
