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

Preface

For as long as I can remember, I've been designing one thing or another. My earliest recollection is of a newspaper my friends and I put together during summer break before third grade. That publication lasted only for a couple of limited-edition issues; limited, because, in addition to writing articles about soccer, my job was to design the paper. This meant that I had to come up with a head mast, writing the few articles we put together neatly, tracing photos into a simple layout, and finally, manually copying each issue a few times. Altogether, this was a tedious, time-consuming effort, which took a while to compete, since we were lured into playing soccer outside. Yet, the joy of turning a blank sheet of paper into a meaningful product, which we distributed (handed out) to our beloved family members for money to buy an ice cream, planted the seeds that eventually blossomed to become my lifelong career in design.

Over the past three decades, I have made my living as a professional designer of a wide array of products. I designed physical objects, such as print publications, including magazines, books, advertisements, and posters; exhibition booths and gallery exhibits; time-based content, such as interactive learning materials and animated films; and eventually, moved to design user interfaces for desktop applications, websites, and apps.

Experienced designers arrive at their careers by a variety of paths. Some go to school to study one of the design disciplines, whereas others learn on the job by observation, trial, and error. Some designers plan and premap their career, whereas others more or less stumble upon it and are drawn by the interesting challenges and creative opportunities of design work. Experience design attracts practitioners from diverse educational and professional background, who are united not by a single skill set, but rather through their shared interest in multidisciplinary exploration, problem-solving, and creative team work.

The time spent on writing this book has often felt like building a sandcastle on the beach. I spent long pleasant moments pouring sand, shaping it, creating and fortifying the structure. All the while, I imagined that the castle and its formidable walls can withstand the approaching tide, but I accepted the inevitable--the entire construction would be gone in the morning. What's left is the anticipation and excitement of starting over, constructing a new castle--better than the preceding one. It is difficult to define experience design neatly and precisely. I have tried to construct a clearly organized and comprehensive description of what is experience design, the concepts underlying this field of practice, and the processes it typically utilizes. However, experience design is an evolving field, and the structure of its "castle" is in constant flux--definitions, practices, strategies, and tools are evolving continuously.

This book is my attempt to present what I see as the foundation of experience design, which, despite the inevitable waves of change, has an interesting history, a solid structure, and certainly an intriguing future.

I wrote this book for those who are curious about experience design and seek a general understanding of its evolving multifaceted nature. This is not exclusively a prescriptive set of answers. In fact, the central themes of this book are interesting questions, which are yet to be answered--how does an impersonal relationship between companies and market audiences turn into a very personal product experience? What is the role of design and designers in fusing intangible motivations, needs, and emotions of companies and people with concrete products, to form a strong, lasting emotional connection between an individual and a product or brand? 

The discovery process undertaken in this book involves forming a historical perspective. I reviewed relevant milestones throughout human evolution, which are like the lights marking a runway for a safe landing on a dark night. The seeds of much of what is done today, while appearing to be taken right off the pages of a science fiction book, have been planted a long time ago. Other important topics include the stakeholders, processes, methods, and tools that are involved in the practical, day-to-day activity of product design.

Finally, this book is also about the notion that while constant change, uncertainty, and ambiguity can be unnerving, these aspects of experience design are countered by opportunities for open-mindedness, curiosity, and creativity.

 

Note

Due to space limitation, I can list only a few of the works that inspired and shaped my thinking over the years here: Daniel Kahneman’s "Thinking Fast and Slow", Richard Thaler’s "Nudge", Atul Gawande’s "The Checklist Manifesto", Don Norman's "Design of Everyday Things", Ross King’s "Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling", Fredrick Brooks's "The Mythical Man-Month", Ken Albala’s "Food: A Cultural Culinary History", Jacques Pepin’s "The Apprentice", Anthony Gotlieb’s "The Dream of Reason", Edward Humes "Door to Door", Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan", Robert Cialdini "Influence", Stanley Milgram’s "Obedience to Authority", Dan Ariely’s "Predictably Irrational", Maryanne Wolf’s "Proust and the Squid", Steven Levitt and Stephen Dunbar’s "Freakonomics", Steven Pinker "The Language Instinct", James Gleick's "The Information", and Paul Walker’s "The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance".

What this book covers

Chapter 1Experience Design - Overview, introduces the reader to the emerging field of experience design (XD) and its evolution, by demonstrating the manifestations of XD in everyday life using contemporary and historical examples.

Chapter 2, The Experience Design Process, is a journey through the evolution of the product design process and the changing dynamics between its core entities--business, products, customers, technology, and design.

Chapter 3Business and Audience Context, explores motivations, vision, and constraints that influence a product’s experience strategy from a business perspective.

Chapter 4The User and Context of Use, describes qualitative and quantitative research methods and modeling tools, such as personas and journey maps, that XD practitioners use to research the needs, desires, and expectations of their intended users.

Chapter 5Experience - Perception, Emotions, and Cognition, is a panoramic, very high-level pan over key physiological and psychological building blocks of human experience, and also includes a discussion of how designers fuse sensory inputs with cognitive processes to build desired emotional experiences.

Chapter 6Experience Design Disciplines, dives into the evolution of disciplines that specialize in designing surface, space, time, motion, and virtual product experience.

Chapter 7The Design Team, covers the multidisciplinary nature of XD through an overview of professions and roles that originate in the various design domains. At the heart of the chapter, practitioners share their personal journeys through a career in design.

Chapter 8Delight and Engagement, explores the characteristics of great experience, which amplify a product’s desirability, engagement, conversion, retention, and reputation.

Chapter 9, Tying It All Together - From Concept to Design, is a sweep through concept development and the techniques that help designers communicate the design to stakeholders and validate their approach with target users.

Chapter 10, Design Testing, focuses on the important phase of testing to confirm that the experience meets the needs of the business and users.

Chapter 11The Design Continuum, concludes the book with a focus on managing design, from an evolutionary refinement through governance to revolutionary overhauls that unseat traditions.

Who this book is for

This book does not assume any prerequisite training in or knowledge of design, business, or technology. I wrote this with the following audiences in mind:

  • General readers who heard about experience design (XD) through the media and are interested to learn more about it
  • High school students who are researching inspiring careers in technology and design
  • Readers who wish to enter the field of XD, but want to understand which of the many possible specializations might best align with their interests, current skills, and training needs
  • Organizations that want to build internal awareness among leadership and employees around core concepts of XD
  • Non-designers who want to get a big picture of XD and collaborative design models that involve developers throughout the design process, not just at the end
  • Anyone who wants to understand the differences between XD and UX, CX, IxD, IA, SD, VD, PD, and more importantly, their convergence in XD

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