Why Experience Teams Need to Measure What People Feel: Key Takeaways from the WXO

Why Experience Teams Need to Measure What People Feel: Key Takeaways from the WXO

The World Experience Organization (WXO) recently published a piece that lands squarely on a theme we care deeply about: Why Experience Teams Need to Measure What People Feel. Written by Mike Goldsmith and drawing on insights from experience strategist Laura Hess, it makes a clear case that the metrics most experience teams report — attendance, reach, impressions — say almost nothing about whether an experience actually worked. Here's our summary of the argument, and why we think it matters.

The measurement trap

The article opens with a familiar problem, often called the McNamara fallacy: organizations optimize for what is easy to count and quietly ignore what is hard to capture. Footfall and impressions are simple to report, so they dominate dashboards — while the outcomes that actually drive value, like emotional resonance, memory, and loyalty, go unmeasured. The result is experience programs that look successful on paper but can't explain the impact they created.

ROX is not ROI

A core distinction in the piece is between return on investment and return on experience (ROX). ROI tracks transactions; ROX tracks emotional resonance — whether an experience moved people in a way that changes future behavior. Measuring it well means pairing quantitative data with qualitative interpretation rather than choosing one over the other.

A shared language for emotional impact

To make emotional outcomes discussable, the article introduces Hess's REMARKABLE framework — a ten-component system that gives teams a shared vocabulary for evaluating experiences, and helps separate the core emotional anchors of an experience from its supplemental components. The framework's real value is less the checklist itself and more the shift it enables: teams debating how an experience made people feel with the same rigor they apply to attendance numbers.

Feeling is a team skill

Two supporting points round out the argument. First, teams need emotional fluency — a richer vocabulary for emotion and built-in moments of self-awareness — to design and evaluate experiences well. Second, reflection is part of the experience itself: structured post-experience discussion deepens memory and meaning-making, turning an immediate reaction into lasting value.

About Laura Hess

The thinking behind the piece comes from Laura Hess, the experience strategist behind Reuleaux and the creator of the REMARKABLE framework. Her work focuses on giving experience teams the language and tools to design for feeling rather than footfall — exactly the shift the WXO article argues for.

We were honored that Laura gave Ether a shout-out during her WXO Campfire presentation, pointing to our platform as an example of how experience teams can actually measure the emotional impact her framework describes. It's a meaningful nod from someone shaping how the industry thinks about experience measurement — and a sign that the conversation is moving from "why measure feeling" to "how."

Our take

This is the argument at the heart of what we build at Ether. The industry agrees that experiences create value through feeling — the gap has always been measurement. The WXO piece is a strong articulation of the why; for the how, see our guide to building an experiential measurement framework.

Read the full article on the WXO website →