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

Processes and change


The design of products and experiences is closely connected to the processes underlying user-product interaction, which in turn are influenced by ongoing social and technological changes. In this section, we will explore the relationship between the evolution of products and changes to the nature of the user experience they engender.

The world transitioned rapidly from the industrial age to the information age. Today, many products and services are digital and data driven, as is the manufacturing of most physical products. Slow and linear human-controlled processes have been replaced by real-time, parallel, computer-controlled processes. Some of the trends that have emerged are as follows:

  • Highly personalized products, which are tailored to the preferences of each individual customer and are manufactured on-demand by robots and 3D printers, are sun-setting mass-production of impersonal cookie-cutter products.
  • From industrial machines to cars and home appliances, electro...