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 4. The User and Context of Use

"All generalizations are false, including this one."

-Mark Twain

The primary questions this addresses are:

  • What are the methods and tools that experience designers use to learn about the user they are designing for?
  • What kind of user and use information is relevant to the experience design process?
  • How can the specific needs of an individual user be generalized to the product design, yet reflect the diverse needs of many other individual users?

We will be shifting from research activities focused on the product's maker, audience, and segmentation that we explored in the preceding chapter, to research activities focused on the product's individual user--from understanding what the company hopes and expects to get out of its investments in design, to understanding the experience, features, and capabilities that will engage the user with the product and provide the most value.