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

Planning usability tests


It is important to clarify to test participants that in usability tests, the design is being tested--not the participant. Because the feedback on the quality of the experience is provided by multiple people, making sure that all testing sessions conform to a consistent protocol, can be important. That being said, it is OK to have some flexibility in each session, to explore directions of research that was not initially planned for, if the opportunity arises.

There are several reasons testing sessions should be planned:

  • Planning ensures that all the important experience questions are covered. If it turns out that there are just too many elements to test, this fact will emerge during planning, and alternatives can be developed--for example, having two or more scripts, each focused on a major experience theme. This revelation might require recruiting more participants, and setting more time for testing.
  • Once design questions are identified, appropriate testing scenarios...