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

R.T.G.D.M?


R.T.G.D.M is an acronym that stands for--"Read The God-Damned Manual", a complaint attributed to frustrated designers and engineers of perplexing products, who are puzzled by users' helplessness.

The difference between an aircraft and a home kitchen, besides the fact that training is needed to operate the first, is that from a pure experience perspective, the kitchen is associated in many cultures with a positive and comforting atmosphere that people cherish. This is why terms such as "Mom's Cooking", "Homemade", "Home Cooked Meals", are used for advertising restaurant chains, food products, and even kitchen appliances that are mass-manufactured. The promise is to reproduce a cherished homey experience.

Given that the kitchen is also the most dangerous room in the home, usability testing of kitchen appliances helps reduce the risk of accidents due to user-error caused by poorly conceived interactions.

Consider the microwave oven. You probably have one in your kitchen. There is a...