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

Establishing the context of use


The following section explores methods and activities designers use in the process of forming a strategy and approach for the new design.

People interact with products and services to fulfill specific needs. The nature of that interaction is called context of use, and it is defined by three variables:

  • The user
  • The user's preferences toward fulfilling a need
  • The product used to fulfill that need

Solving such a three-variable equation that involves people is like solving an extremely intricate puzzle, and although at first glance the challenge appears impossibly difficult, the work is being done every day. In this section, we will explore the foundation of approaching the solution.

Information about these variables and how they are interrelated is collected during research. After synthesis, research findings help designers think about the appropriate experience, and communicate their vision to stakeholders. The result provides both the approach to the appropriate...