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

Defining the business context


Companies strive to be as profitable as possible. Simply put, profits are any funds left after the company paid off all its obligations. Profits compensate employees and shareholders, attract new investors, and fuel investments in new products, which, if successful, would generate more profits, and so the cycle repeats. Without profits, companies shut down.

The question, "How will our product(s) make us profitable?" is the generic survival challenge shared by all companies, regardless of size, industry, or product. The business context of each company, however, is unique, and so is its impact of the product experience strategy.

Suppose that you are the CEO of a small unknown company, which is similar to Pure Digital, the maker of the Flip, and suppose that you want to take advantage of cheap memory cards to create a tapeless camcorder. Here are a couple of options for a product approach:

  • Create a camcorder that has all the features of a tape-based camcorder, including...