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

Testing considerations


Do you know an elderly person who owns a smartphone? If you do, you know how frustrating these and many other technology-driven devices can be to the elderly. Most of the well-known tech companies are proud of their large investments in user research and usability testing facilities. And yet, the difficulty the elderly have with operating devices raises a concern about the true ease of use of their products.

This ties to the topic of this segment--test participants map to user personas. As was described earlier in the book, personas are used early on in the design process, as models of key user-segments. Obviously, with products such as smartphones which have hundreds of millions of users of all ages worldwide, personas can be very limited.

So, if an elderly persona has not been created, it is quite likely that little or no testing will be performed with this segment of the user market. Given the difficulties elderly people have with technology, the industry's claim...