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

From eye candy to user experience


The internet was created in the 1960s, and it spread gradually from government and academia, to commercial and personal use. Important milestones include the emergence of secure online payments via encrypted browsers, Amazon's shopping cart, advances in warehousing and shipping logistics involved in the fulfillment of online orders, media streaming, the emergence of social networks, and a transition from slow dial-up to fast high-speed connections, which radically improved the experience of being online. In developed countries, a reliable and persistent internet connection has tremendous importance. It is comparable to utilities and is needed almost like water and electricity. We will expand this point later. 

Robust but relatively small, virtual communities formed in the 1980s through the early 1990s were propelled by the availability of personal computers and dialup connections to the network. The main form of interaction occurred on bulletin board forums...