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

Recruiting participants


A key component of testing, sometimes overlooked, is the testers--the actual people who agree to participate in the testing effort. In the end, experience testing is all about real people--this is the theory, at least.

In practice, testing with real people is expensive and time consuming. Recruiting can be challenging when design schedules are tight, when relevant audiences are overseas or in remote places, and when the design team is small and limited in budget and time. As a result, many companies end up testing with a smaller set of actual people than initially envisioned.

The screener

Many products, such as smartphones, e-commerce websites, and cars are meant for a wide and general audience. Potentially, almost any person is thus a candidate to be recruited to participate in usability testing. However, a random call for volunteers might yield an enormous list of interested candidates, but no effective means to ascertain if they really qualify.

Some degree of qualification...