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

Summary


The efforts to understand how humans experience and perceive the world and themselves, has produced philosophies and theories, such as:

  • Dualism, an ancient philosophy that sees a clear separation between body and mind, each, an independent entity to itself
  • Behaviorism, an approach that explains all behaviors, emotions, and thoughts purely as a product of stimuli transmitted through the senses
  • Functionalism, a recent theory, explains all human thought and behavior as if it was software that operates with inputs and outputs

"I see what you meant", "I was touched by this experience", "Smell the roses", "The taste of paradise", "Sound bites"--these are just a few examples of phrases that demonstrate the paradox of experience--while our five senses continuously feed objective data about the physical world, that data is being processed and reconstructed by the brain, and the result is subjective, a mix of thoughts and emotions.

Designers found that controlling the objective ingredients of the...