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

The power of context


The user experience of most content-dependent products relies heavily on translation and adaptation to the local language, units of measure, regulations, patterns of use, price, and other relevant cultural aspects.

For example, the world-renowned New York Times (NYT) is a daily newspaper with a global readership of several millions, but the web edition of the paper is available only in English, Spanish, and Chinese (see the preceding image). These are, after all, the three most common languages on Earth. In contrast, Facebook, with over a billion and a half users, has an interface that is nearing a universal support for all languages.

The difference between the New York Times and Facebook is that the first provides content, and the latter relies on users and advertisers to generate content. Both relay on Unicode, the computing industry standard for text, which was designed to handle most of the world's written languages. Unicode is a remarkable invention, of which most...