Podcast Summary: Work For Humans

Episode: Designing Time: The Future of Experience Design
Host: Dart Lindsley
Guest: Dave Norton
Date: October 28, 2025

Overview

This episode features Dave Norton—pioneer of experience design—discussing how organizations can shape the way people spend their time at work, with customers, and through their offerings. Norton and Lindsley dive deep into experience as a currency, the evolution from product and service to experience and transformation, why context trumps psychology, the centrality of narrative, and how modularity, modes, and systems thinking change the workplace. The conversation spotlights shifts in business thinking, practical frameworks, and the future impact of AI on transformational, bespoke experiences.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Experience Design: Time as the Core Element

• Time Well Saved, Spent, Invested:
  Norton lays out a foundational framework:

  "Services are all about time well saved. Experiences are all about time well spent, and transformations are about time well invested." (Dave Norton, 00:04 & repeated at 12:37)

• Beyond Physical Design:
  Experience design isn't just about physical spaces—it’s about how people expend time with organizations, whether physical or digital. Every design "hits" time.

2. Context Over Psychology

• The Role of Context:
  Norton's rhetorical background led him to focus on how context and environment shape what people need and perceive far more than personality or psychological models.

  "There was a smaller body of research that said, no, the context really matters...the customer will behave differently based on the situation that they find themselves in." (Dave Norton, 05:37)

• Remote Work as a Case Study:
  The rise of remote work is a "huge argument about the role of context" (07:46), demonstrating the situational, not just psychological, demands of work.

3. Origins: Experience Design at Royal Caribbean

• Norton and Joe Pine designed Royal Caribbean’s private island Cococay in 1999, emphasizing the importance of delivering "privacy" as promised, using observation and design thinking to enable guests to feel they owned their piece of the island.

  "If you call it a private island, what people want, obviously, is privacy. And so we made recommendations that included things like the type of cabanas...so that they had just a little piece of that island to themselves." (Dave Norton, 09:43)

4. Leisure, Transformation, and Discomfort

• Leisure as Gold Standard:
  Leisure is the ultimate test for experience—if people will pay for time well spent.

  "Leisure is the gold standard of experience design because it's something that people actively participate in voluntarily." (Dart Lindsley, 14:24)

• Transformational Offerings:
  Transformation involves discomfort, challenge, and investment in self (e.g., health or travel experiences that change you).

• Designing for Discomfort:

  "With an experience, discomfort is an important element...you actually get people to want to spend more time if there's a progression..." (Dave Norton, 18:01)
  Using Freytag's dramatic arc, Norton explains how tension and catharsis are key.

5. Narrative Structure in Experience

• Designing Narrative Arcs:
  Each service—from a tropical island to a Denny’s restaurant—must have a narrative progression, addressing both what companies want to create and how customers actually consume in real life.

• Agency and Modularity:
  Companies should not force singular journey paths but enable customers to control their own routes.

  "Let me control the way I receive the experience." (Dave Norton, 23:01)

6. Modularity and Modes

• Modes:
  People self-organize their activities into modes (e.g., crisis, strategy, productivity). Supporting modes enables better employee and customer experiences.

  "Time is the basic element...most people today, in their work lives and in their personal lives, approach their activities by getting into modes." (Dave Norton, 25:03)

• Modes as Temporary Alignment:
  Modes facilitate alignment and intent. Teams can literally "switch modes" to realign objectives.

  "One of the advantages of having a team that's in the same mode is that they're aligned around intent and objective." (Dave Norton, 28:52)

7. Designing Systems: Whole Offerings and Jobs to Be Done

• Systems Mindset:
  The market has shifted its expectation from individual offerings & pampering (in 2002) to holistic, systems-based solutions (in 2024/25).

  "A lot of that language was systemic language—balance...coordination...understanding lives holistically." (Dave Norton, 49:15)

• Whole Job to Be Done:
  Customers increasingly expect providers to solve the entire job, not just pieces. In work or banking, fragmented solutions hurt time value.

• Rethinking Perks:
  Snacks or gyms at work are not mere perks; they support modes and the broader system of work.

  "The snack is a tool that works within a system that allows you to be more successful at what you're trying to accomplish. It changes the purpose completely." (Dave Norton, 55:34)

8. Experience Strategy: Four Core Questions

• Norton offers a framework for experience strategy:

  • How will you grow?
  • How will you become compelling to the customer?
  • What represents the need of the customer?
  • How do you create time value?
    (Dave Norton, 38:00)

• The focus is always on "time value"—for customers and organizations.

9. Problems with Personas and the Power of Situational Segmentation

• Norton rejects targeting static "personas" in favor of situational markets:

  "Needs actually arise from situations." (Dave Norton, 41:18)
  Google succeeded because it targeted anyone facing a search situation, not just a 'researcher' persona.

• Product lines should serve robust situations rather than demographic "types."

10. Business of Experience Design: Trends & Future

• Demand for experience design rises and falls, but always returns, often with a focus on innovation during up-cycles.
• Experience design has shifted too much toward loyalty/monetization; Norton argues for a return to value-creation and innovation.
• AI will be crucial in making transformational (bespoke) experiences scalable.

11. Transformation, AI, and the Intellectual Frontier

• Norton sees AI as enabling the scaling of transformative, bespoke experiences—where previously, such offerings were hard to operationalize for mass audiences.

  "AI is going to enable companies who weren't previously able to support transformation to be able to do it...AI is going to be really, really important for scaling transformation." (Dave Norton, 61:04–61:18)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On What Experience Design Hits:

  "The hammer always hits...the time that the customer expends with the company… you may be designing a physical thing, you may be designing something that is just a screen, but it’s always about time."
  (Dave Norton, 12:22)

• On Discomfort and Transformation:

  "You actually get people to want to spend more time with you if they feel like there’s a progression that they have to go through..."
  (Dave Norton, 18:01)

• On Systems Mindset:

  "Life has become complex. There’s a lot of tools out there...the consumer is trying to maintain their time value, preserve time for things that really matter, and automate things that don’t really matter."
  (Dave Norton, 54:54)

• On Whole Offerings:

  "If you can only do part of the job...it frustrates me and it’s not good time value for me. So the whole job, getting the whole job done, is an important part of what the customer expects from solutions today."
  (Dave Norton, 54:54)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:04 – Norton introduces the "time well saved/spent/invested" model
• 03:55 – Rhetoric, context, and the roots of experience design
• 09:43 – Case study: Designing Royal Caribbean’s private island
• 12:22 – What does experience design actually "hit"?
• 14:24 – Leisure as the gold standard for experience design
• 17:20 – The role of discomfort in transformation
• 21:06 – Narrative arc examples in service and product
• 25:03 – Modes, modularity, and modern work design
• 38:00 – The four key questions of experience strategy
• 41:18 – Situational segmentation vs. personas
• 49:15 – Shift from pampering to systems in customer expectations
• 54:54 – Whole job/whole offering expectations
• 61:04 – AI’s role in enabling transformational scale

Final Takeaways

• Great experience design is about designing time and supporting the modes and situations people live and work in, not simply improving products or services.
• Context beats psychology; situational needs are more actionable than static personas.
• Transformation and bespoke experiences are on the horizon, with AI acting as the great enabler.
• Systems thinking and holistic solutions are the new bar for meaningful offerings—fragmentation hurts time value.
• The field is at an intellectual frontier: how to deliver transformations at scale, how to combine modularity and narrative structure, and how to serve the "whole job" for people both as customers and workers.

Learn More:

• Dave Norton: Stonemantle.co
• Substack: experiencestrategist.substack.com

(For full discussion, refer to episode for in-depth anecdotes and elaborations.)