What Is Experience Notation?
Experience Notation is a domain-specific language (DSL) for describing complex human journeys, decisions, and disruptions using structured text. It is designed to be both human-readable and machine-parseable, enabling deeper understanding, simulation, and integration of real-world experience into digital systems.
It empowers researchers, designers, technologists, and policymakers to represent human behaviour with clarity, context, and structure.
Why Experience Notation Exists
Modern services and systems are often complex, fragmented, and unpredictable. Traditional tools for mapping experience are often:
- Visually rich but semantically thin
- Inconsistent in format
- Hard to validate or simulate
- Disconnected from engineering and data workflows
Experience Notation solves these problems by providing:
- A grammar-based, validated structure for defining experiences
- Shared vocabulary across roles and disciplines
- A format that is portable, versionable, and extensible
- Compatibility with automation, simulation, and AI workflows
What Makes It Different?
| Feature | Traditional Journey Maps | Experience Notation |
|---|---|---|
| Visual design tool | Yes | Optional (can be visualised) |
| Human-readable | Yes | Yes |
| Machine-readable | Rarely | Yes (validated by grammar and schema) |
| Branching and logic | No | Yes (IF, THEN, ELSE) |
| Structured personas | No | Yes (Persona, Metrics, Adaptation) |
| Simulatable and testable | Rare | Yes |
| Version-controlled (text-based) | No | Yes (.expn format) |
Use Cases Across Domains
| Sector | Applications |
|---|---|
| Design & UX | Structured journey maps, service blueprints, inclusive design |
| Public Sector | Modelling citizen experiences, accessibility testing |
| Policy & Research | Translating qualitative data into scenario models |
| Product Teams | Edge case documentation, QA, design-to-dev handoffs |
| AI & Simulation | Ethical testing, scenario training, persona modelling |
| Education | Teaching systems thinking, behavioural modelling |
Experience Notation in Practice
A typical .expn file might include:
- Structured events and steps
- Personas and their experiences
- Metrics like satisfaction or confidence
- Conditional logic to explore "what if" flows
- Context like disruption, environment, and parallel events
You can write .expn files by hand in any text editor, or prompt a large language model (LLM) to generate them from natural language descriptions. Once written, you can validate the documents using the Experience Notation grammar and the official tools and schema (coming soon).
Next Step
Now that you know what Experience Notation is, continue to:
👉 Core Concepts to learn the building blocks.