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

Functional and emotional design


Design serves two primary roles--functional and emotional.

The separation between these two roles used to be distinct. Engineers dealt with the product's functional design, primarily the backend aspects. Product designers focused on crafting the desired emotional outcome associated with the product's attractiveness features, the customer facing aspects.

Technological advances have narrowed the gaps between the functional and the emotional to the point that they complement each other, and to the degree that they are sometimes difficult to differentiate. As long as the distinction between the roles of engineers and designers was maintained, there were negative implications on the product's user experience.

Let's use "buttons" as an example:

  • Have you ever pressed a button on a device without knowing what the button does, or knowing what to expect?
  • Have you ever wondered if a button indicates an On or Off state?
  • Have you ever searched, unsuccessfully, for a button to...