Book Image

Exploring Experience Design

By : Ezra Schwartz
Book Image

Exploring Experience Design

By: Ezra Schwartz

Overview of this book

We live in an experience economy in which interaction with products is valued more than owning them. Products are expected to engage and delight in order to form the emotional bonds that forge long-term customer loyalty: Products need to anticipate our needs and perform tasks for us: refrigerators order food, homes monitor energy, and cars drive autonomously; they track our vitals, sleep, location, finances, interactions, and content use; recognize our biometric signatures, chat with us, understand and motivate us. Beautiful and easy to use, products have to be fully customizable to match our personal preferences. Accomplishing these feats is easier said than done, but a solution has emerged in the form of Experience design (XD), the unifying approach to fusing business, technology and design around a user-centered philosophy. This book explores key dimensions of XD: Close collaboration among interdisciplinary teams, rapid iteration and ongoing user validation. We cover the processes, methodologies, tools, techniques and best-practices practitioners use throughout the entire product development life-cycle, as ideas are transformed to into positive experiences which lead to perpetual customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Chapter 10. Design Testing

"Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding."

- Burt Rutan

This chapter addresses the following questions:

  • Given all the work invested in research, experience modeling, and design, what is the purpose of testing?
  • How and when to test?
  • What to test and who should perform the testing?
  • What to do with the findings?

Launching a new product or a product redesign, is a significant investment for most companies. Because design plays a pivotal role in the success of many products, testing its effectiveness is considered an important activity before, during, and after the product is launched. And that is why most companies invest in testing.

Testing focuses on two primary dimensions of the design:

  • Strategic (macro) testing: This type of testing validates the entire design approach at a high level to ensure that it matches agreed design principles, high-level business requirements, and target audience expectations. This is a macro-level approach that is mostly concerned...