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

Emotions and executive functions


There is no universal agreement on exactly what emotions are. The terms emotion and feeling are often used interchangeably.

Emotions are triggered involuntarily and involve physical reactions such as increased heart rate or elevated blood pressure when we get angry or become fearful.

The Wheel of Emotions, illustrated in the image above, is a model developed by the psychologist Robert Pluchik. The model arranges 32 emotions by levels of intensity and positivity. The colorful depiction is misleading, and only a closer observation reveals that the number of negative emotions far surpasses the positive ones. The emotions that are important to good product experience are generally limited to: anticipation, interest, joy, serenity, and trust. Most of the other emotions are on the spectrum of negative experience.

Where time and emotional states connect, is in the length of the emotion and its intensity. For example, when one is in a state of rage, that state consumes...