Tedde van Gelderen's Experience Thinking Holds Up Eight Years Later, in the Age of AI
“This is a book that gives you a high-level overview of what this is about, why you should care, and also why you as an executive need to start connecting these dots better.”
Tedde van Gelderen, Founder and President of Akendi
Tedde van Gelderen runs Akendi, a UX research and design consultancy with offices in Toronto, London, and the US, after senior roles at Nortel, KPMG, and Philips Design. In 2018 he published Experience Thinking: Creating Connected Experiences with Scribe Media. Eight years and one AI revolution later, he says its core argument holds up, and the book remains the awareness piece he uses to open bigger conversations with clients.
Organizations built on islands
Clip · Tedde on broken experiences · 13s
Tedde wrote the book because he kept seeing the same problem. Brand is owned by communications or the founders. Content is owned by marketing, or freelanced out. The product belongs to engineering. Each team does good work on its own island, and the customer is left to build the bridges.
“Because when we throw it out there in the marketplace, you as the user or customer need to make these connections and need to make those bridges between these islands, whether you like it or not, because you're forced to do that.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
His framework brings four pieces into one experience: product, service, brand, and content. He called the idea experience thinking, a deliberate step beyond design thinking.
“So the idea of experience thinking is half sort of a play on design thinking, which is a more marketed, I would say, process, design process for people out there. And so experience thinking is for me the obvious step up from there, because it's not about just design.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
Six months from idea to finished book
Clip · Tedde on writing it in six months · 7s
Because the book described the work Tedde does every day with clients, the writing came quickly.
“The process even went very fast when I wrote the book. Within the six months, we had the full thing done.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
“I think the book is, it was definitely a bucket list kind of thing to me to have a succinct story to tell.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
A book for the executive, read by the practitioner
Clip · Tedde on who the book is for · 13s
Experience Thinking was written for directors, vice presidents, and the C-suite, the people who decide whether the islands ever get connected. Tedde deliberately stopped at the level of process and activity rather than step-by-step detail. The surprise was that much of the feedback came from UX practitioners and marketers, who recognized the ideas and wanted more depth. His answer: hand it to your boss.
“You need to talk to your boss or to people out there or your clients or any C-level person, but you need to introduce it. Because the words that I use are simply not familiar at that level.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
That is also how the book works inside his own business. When a client engagement starts with a narrow product or service problem, the conversation tends to grow into brand and content. The book is the awareness piece that makes that wider conversation possible.
“Well, the first part is the awareness piece. And I hope to do that with the book, of course, and through our website.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
Eight years later, AI makes the argument sharper
Clip · Tedde on the first step · 14s
Tedde says product design and service design have held up exactly as he described them. The piece that has changed most is content, which has moved from a purely human process to a human plus AI one. And he sees most companies repeating the old mistake: bolting AI onto the experience rather than building it into the customer's journey.
“It's a prompt. I mean, how backwards can that be? We're back to the command line interfaces.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
His first step for any team working in silos is simple, and very human.
“Next week, they should talk to each other. I'm amazed what we find sometimes in our client meetings, is that we introduce people to each other from within the company to each other for the first time, because they haven't talked to each other.”
— Tedde van Gelderen
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