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 2. The Experience Design Process

"Do the difficult things while they are easy, and do the great things while they are small."

- Lao Tzu

This chapter addresses the following questions:

  • What is the experience design process?
  • How does experience design fit into the broader product development process?

We tend to think of processes as linear entities, just like stories--with a beginning, an arc of action, and an end--in our case, a successful finished product. Indeed, from a bird's eye view, experience design fits this model well, neatly positioned as the middle phase of the overall product development process:

Define > Design > Build

There is practically an endless variety of products in the world--physical, digital, and hybrids. Zooming in on each phase of the overall development process reveals a spectrum of variation just as wide. The fact is that a single unifying approach to design process does not, and probably cannot, exist. Understanding how experience design processes fit into...