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

Unified design process - experience is the product


Designers work with two types of products--completely new inventions and updates to existing products. Both can be catalysts for revolutionary changes in people's lives.

For example, Motorola produced the first handheld cellular phone in 1973. This invention changed the experience of voice and written communication for people worldwide. The first iPhone, a rethinking of the cellular phone, was introduced by Apple 34 years later, in 2007. The release of the iPhone marked another tectonic shift in the role of experience design in product and service development. 

As described in Chapter 1Experience Design - Overview, in the iPhone and the products that followed it, physical and digital experiences were fused into a powerful, beautiful, easy-to-use, multipurpose personal device that could handle work, personal life, and entertainment. This, of course, also meant a blurring of the boundaries that separated the personal and private from the public...