Key Takeaways
Product experience (PX) is the sum of every interaction a person has with a product — from the first time they see it on a shelf to the day it becomes part of their routine. It goes beyond usability: a truly great product experience makes people feel something, fits naturally into their lives, and keeps delivering long after the purchase.
The product experience examples in this article offer several valuable lessons:
- The best experiences are invisible. When packaging, onboarding, and daily use work as they should, customers don't notice the design — they just enjoy the result. Friction is what breaks the spell.
- Personalization doesn't have to be complex. Even a small detail that makes someone feel individually seen can fundamentally change how they relate to a product.
- Involving customers creates ownership. Whether through assembly, feedback campaigns, or co-creation, people value things more when they've played a part in them.
- Trust is a product feature. Backing a product unconditionally removes a layer of psychological friction that most brands never think to address.
- Feedback only works when customers can see what happened to it. Closing the loop publicly turns passive buyers into invested stakeholders.
Perhaps the most important insight across all of these product experience examples: the sale is the beginning of the relationship, not the end. Great product experience is built from dozens of small, careful decisions — made consistently, and with the customer's real life in mind.
Every successful product experience example ultimately relies on accurate, consistent product data across every touchpoint — something a PIM system provides by acting as a single source of truth that ensures customers encounter the right information, everywhere.
What Makes a Great Product Experience?
Think about the last time you used a product and thought — this just works. No instruction hunting, no frustration, no second-guessing. That feeling is product experience (PX) doing its job quietly in the background.
Product experience is the sum of every interaction a person has with a physical product — from the moment they see it on a shelf to the day it becomes part of their daily routine. It's not just about whether the product functions correctly. It's about how it feels, how intuitive it is, and whether it creates a moment worth remembering.
It's worth separating PX from UX (user experience) here. UX tends to focus on the usability side of things — is this easy to use? PX goes a layer deeper — does this product make me feel something? Does it fit my life? Those are harder questions to answer, but the brands that get it right tend to build products people swear by for years.
A few things tend to separate great product experiences from forgettable ones:
- Usability — people can figure it out without a manual
- Emotional connection — it resonates beyond its function
- Consistency — it delivers the same quality every single time
- Value delivery — it genuinely improves something in the user's life
How do you measure it? Metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), repeat purchase rates, and customer reviews are good starting points. But sometimes the clearest signal is simpler than that — are people recommending it to their friends unprompted? That's a great product experience at work.
Product Experience Examples by Category
Onboarding Experience — LEGO
There's a reason LEGO instruction manuals have no words. Not a single one. Just numbered steps and clear visuals that work whether you're a seven-year-old in Tokyo or a forty-year-old in Toronto.
LEGO figured out something that most product companies still struggle with: onboarding shouldn't require effort from the user. The goal is to get someone from "I just opened the box" to "I'm actually enjoying this" as fast as possible — and without making them feel lost along the way.
The manuals are designed so well that even complex sets with thousands of pieces feel approachable. Each step builds on the last. Progress is visible. And because you can see the finished model on the box, there's always a clear destination.
The lesson: Strip away every unnecessary barrier between your customer and their first success with the product. If they have to work hard just to get started, you've already lost them.
Personalization — Coca-Cola "Share a Coke"
In 2011, Coca-Cola Australia did something surprisingly simple: they replaced their logo on bottles with people's names. That's it. The campaign proved so successful that it expanded globally, eventually reaching over 80 countries.
People hunted for bottles with their name on them. They bought extras for friends. They shared photos. A product that hadn't fundamentally changed in decades suddenly felt personal, because it literally had your name on it.
What made it work wasn't the technology or the complexity. It was the emotional trigger. Seeing your name on a Coke bottle turns a commodity purchase into a small moment of recognition. It says this one is for you in a way that no advertisement ever could. In the US alone, the campaign reversed more than a decade of declining sales.
The lesson: Personalization doesn't have to be sophisticated to be powerful. Even a small detail that makes someone feel seen can transform how they relate to a product.
Simplicity & Ease of Use — Gillette Mach3
The Gillette Mach3 launched in 1998 and quickly became the top-selling razor in North America and Europe. A big part of that wasn't just the three blades — it was how the whole thing felt in your hand.
The handle was designed with grip, balance, and control in mind. The pivot head adjusted to the contours of your face. The cartridge clicked in securely. Changing blades took five seconds. Nothing about using it required thought — and that's exactly the point.
When a product disappears into the background of someone's routine, that's a sign the experience has been designed well. You don't think about a good razor. You just shave.
The lesson: Reducing friction isn't just about removing steps, but about eliminating the moments where someone has to stop and think. The smoother the physical experience, the more likely someone is to reach for it again tomorrow.
Emotional Connection — IKEA
IKEA furniture isn't the easiest thing to put together. That's not a secret. And yet people don't just tolerate the assembly process — many actually feel more attached to the furniture because of it.
Researchers at Harvard Business School call this the "IKEA Effect." In a 2011 study by Norton, Mochon, and Ariely, participants who assembled products themselves placed significantly higher value on them than those given pre-built versions — in some cases, nearly as much value as they'd place on expert-made goods. Your bookshelf isn't just a bookshelf — it's the one you spent a Sunday afternoon building, the one you almost got wrong on step 14, the one that's now holding your favorite books.
IKEA understood this, even if intuitively, long before the research caught up. The flat-pack model isn't just a cost-saving logistics decision. It turns the customer into a participant. And participants care more.
The lesson: Involving your customer in the product experience, even through effort, can create a stronger emotional bond than handing them something perfect. Ownership feels different when you earned it.
Customer Feedback Loop — Lay's "Do Us a Flavor"
In 2012, Lay's asked a simple question: what if customers decided the next flavor? People submitted ideas through Facebook and other platforms, the public voted, and the winning flavor actually ended up on shelves. That first US campaign received nearly 3.8 million submissions — far exceeding the 1.2 million Lay's had hoped for. Cheesy Garlic Bread was crowned the winner, with Chicken & Waffles and Sriracha rounding out the finalists, all of which made it to store shelves.
The campaign ran for four iterations and became a cultural phenomenon. It didn't feel like a survey — it felt like a competition with real stakes. Your idea could end up in the snack aisle.
That's what made it different from most feedback exercises. Companies often ask for input and do nothing visible with it. Lay's closed the loop publicly and loudly. Customers could walk into a store, pick up a bag, and think — someone suggested this, and it's actually here.
The lesson: Feedback only builds loyalty when customers can see what happened to it. Making that connection visible and public turns passive consumers into invested stakeholders.
Packaging as Product Experience — Pringles
Most people don't think of a chip container as a product experience example in its own right. Pringles changed that.
In the late 1950s, Procter & Gamble tasked food chemist Fredric Baur with solving a frustratingly common problem: chips arrived broken, stale, and half-buried under a bag of air. His solution, developed over two years, was the now-iconic cylindrical canister — paired with a saddle-shaped chip (technically a hyperbolic paraboloid) that stacked perfectly without snapping. Baur filed the patent for the can in 1966, and it was granted in 1971. He was so proud of the invention that when he died in 2008, his family honored his wish to have some of his ashes buried inside a Pringles can.
The canister did more than protect the chips. It made the product instantly recognizable on a shelf, easy to store at home, and satisfying to open. The pop of the lid. The uniform stack. The exact same chip every time. It turned a snack into a reliable, repeatable sensory experience — and the design was so effective that competitors like Frito-Lay eventually launched their own versions.
The lesson: Packaging isn't just protection — it's part of the product. How something feels to open, store, and use is part of the experience, and solving a real consumer frustration through design can make your container as iconic as what's inside it.
Trust & Reliability — Zippo
There's a product guarantee, and then there's the Zippo guarantee. Since founder George Blaisdell created the first Zippo windproof lighter in 1932, every single one has come with the same unconditional promise: "It works or we fix it free."
Not for a year. Not while the warranty is valid. Forever. A Zippo from 1945 can be mailed to the factory in Bradford, Pennsylvania today, and it will come back in working order at no charge. In over 90 years and more than 600 million lighters sold, the company has never charged a customer a cent for a repair.
That promise changes the entire relationship a person has with the product. You're not buying a lighter — you're buying a piece of equipment that someone stands behind for life. It's why Zippos become heirlooms. Why soldiers carried them through wars. Why people collect them across generations.
The product itself is good — windproof, refillable, built from solid metal. But the guarantee is what turns a purchase into a relationship. It's one of the clearest examples in consumer goods of a brand using reliability as the core of its product experience.
The lesson: Trust is a product feature. When a company backs its product so unconditionally that customers don't have to worry about what happens if something goes wrong, it removes a layer of psychological friction that most products never address. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can offer isn't a better product — it's a better promise.
Omnichannel Consistency — Apple iPhone
Open an iPhone box and the experience starts before you've even touched the device. The packaging resists just enough that opening it feels deliberate. The phone sits perfectly centered. Everything is exactly where you expect it.
Then you turn it on. The setup process takes minutes. If you've had an iPhone before, your apps, photos, and settings are already waiting. If it's your first, the steps are clear enough that you don't need to look anything up.
And that consistency holds. The same attention to detail in the box shows up in the product, in the retail stores, in the support experience, in every software update. Apple doesn't treat these as separate departments — they're all part of the same experience. The brand promise made by the packaging is kept every day you use the phone.
The lesson: Great product experience isn't a single moment — it's a chain of consistent ones. From unboxing to daily use to getting help when something goes wrong, every touchpoint either reinforces or undermines the overall experience. The best products make sure every link in that chain holds.
Every example in this article depends, in some way, on accurate, consistent product data — the right description on the right shelf, the correct specs in the right market, the same message whether a customer encounters the product in a store or online. This can be achieved through dedicated PIM software (Product Information Management) software. A PIM system acts as a single source of truth for everything a brand knows about its products — and tools like AtroPIM make it easier for teams to manage, enrich, and distribute that data across channels without the chaos of spreadsheets and disconnected systems. When product information is messy or inconsistent, the customer experience suffers before someone even picks the product up. Getting the data right is, quietly, part of getting the experience right.