Design better experiences.
A framework that helps teams see, understand, and design the experiences they are responsible for. Built for collaboration.
Most teams that want to improve an experience begin by deciding what to change. But the harder question, and the one that shapes the quality of every decision that follows, is whether you can see the experience clearly enough to know what actually matters.
Nine lenses for seeing and shaping experience.
The framework has already been used to build school websites, shape messaging strategy, design campus tours, run stakeholder engagement workshops, develop communication and campaign strategies, navigate crisis response, and redesign experiences in schools across the world. It travels across disciplines because the underlying structure of experience does too.
Seeing dimensions
Five lenses for understanding an experience
Shaping dimensions
Four lenses for designing an experience
Every card is a small, focused thinking routine.
Each prompt card begins with a framing sentence that constrains attention, followed by a scaffold that structures the inquiry and three questions that help a group think more carefully about what is actually happening. When someone picks up a card, the quality of the conversation changes.
Pick up a card. Start delivering better experiences.
There is no correct starting point, no required sequence, and no single way to move through the framework. That flexibility is deliberate.
Choose a dimension
Pick a single lens and work through its prompt cards. A group might spend a whole session in Friction, carefully mapping every source of resistance. Or in Hero, testing whether the experience works for each mode of arrival.
Follow a recipe
Five guided pathways for common situations, each one specifying which dimensions to use and in what order.
- From Friction to Flourishing
- From Zero to Hero
- From Moment to Momentum
- From Job to Do to Job Done
- From Experience to Transformation
Go wide
Work across all nine dimensions for a comprehensive view. Use the deck as a shared thinking environment over days or weeks, whether you are mapping a full journey, redesigning a service, or setting the experiential direction for an entire organisation.
Tested with real schools
The deck is just the beginning.
Experience Builder is growing into a broader toolkit for teams who want to work with experience more deliberately. Here is what we are building toward.
A collaboration between two organisations that care deeply about how people experience the places they belong to.
Yellow Car is the world's leading experience strategy training and consultancy firm for schools. In a world full of schools that all look roughly the same, Yellow Car helps schools stand out and be seen as truly different, supporting school leaders and their teams to intentionally design the experience of their school.
Dr David Willows is Co-founder and Strategic Director. Between 2005 and 2022, he was Director of Advancement at the International School of Brussels, where he grew to be widely regarded as one of the most innovative practitioners in the field, helping to shape and define the future of Advancement in schools. Recently listed as one of the world's Top 10 Global Educational Influencers, he is an author and regular keynote speaker, passionate about helping schools advance in ways that are relevant for today's educational landscape.
Suzette Parlevliet is Co-founder and Experience Director. With a background in hospitality management and nearly a decade at the International School of Brussels, Suzette has deep expertise in how people, systems, and stories shape the lived experience of a school community. She partners with school leaders and teams around the world to design and embed experience strategies that connect human insight with organisational practice. Her focus is on helping schools measure what matters, act with intention, and create environments where people and purpose thrive together.
Bolsta Education is an experience strategy and design firm serving schools globally. Rather than functioning as a traditional marketing agency, Bolsta Education operates as a strategic partner drawing on marketing, communications, management, and design disciplines to close the gap between who a school is and what families actually experience.
Jacob Shultz, Bolsta Education's founder, works with principals, business managers, marketing, communications, and admissions teams to create unified, parent-centred approaches through journey mapping, experience design workshops, brand and story strategy, and systems alignment. Experience Builder emerged from this work and from his collaboration with Yellow Car, where he kept encountering the same pattern: teams that cared deeply about experience but lacked a shared framework for seeing it clearly enough to design it well.
Be part of the first run.
Register your interest and we will be in touch before the public launch, with early access for those who want to help shape what comes next.
Register your interest