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

Concept development


Concept development is a formal part of the Experience Design process. The purpose of this phase is to help the designer synthesize all the information gathered in previous phases of the project--through activities that are mostly formal and analytical--and define the design approach and solution that address the product objectives and needs in unique and engaging ways.

One way to think about concept development is as an advanced form of problem solving, as illustrated in the preceding figure:

  • Define a problem statement: The early phases of the product design process are focused on discovery and research activities--Company X wants to create a unique experience for its product Y, which will focus on target audience Z, and others. What should this experience be like?
  • Aspirational problem solving: To answer this question, the designer needs to switch to a different mode of thinking--from research and analysis to synthesis guided by design-thinking and experimentation. Concepts...