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

Human factors (ergonomics)


Human factors, also known as ergonomics (the terms are interchangeable) emerged as the leading domain dedicated to adjusting the design of physical products to fit the human body and mental states. Over the years, the domain has contributed to significant understanding of the human physical and cognitive condition under stressful conditions.

Stressful conditions do not necessarily mean extreme conditions. On the contrary, often the circumstances appear on the surface to be relaxed and easy. Like using a computer's keyboard and mouse, for example, which, after an epidemic of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in the 1990s, has led to research into the causes of the ailment, and product designs that attempted to eliminate or reduce the problem.

The term ergonomics first appeared in the 1950s, a mashup of the Greek word "ergon", which means "work", and the English word "economics". The latest definition of the term, according to the International Ergonomics Association, is:

"The...