Experience design
Encyclopedia
Experience design is the practice of design
ing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience
and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality
of the design. An emerging discipline, experience design draws from many other disciplines including cognitive psychology
and perceptual psychology
, linguistics
, cognitive science
, architecture
and environmental design
, haptics
, hazard analysis
, product design
, theatre, information design
, information architecture
, ethnography
, brand strategy, interaction design
, service design
, storytelling
, heuristics, technical communication and design thinking
.
s, between people and brands, and the ideas
, emotions, and memories that these moments create. Commercial experience design is also known as customer experience design, and brand experience. In the domain of marketing, it may be associated with experiential marketing. Experience designers are often employed to identify existing touchpoints and create new ones, and then to score the arrangement of these touchpoints so that they produce the desired outcome.
, describes the practice as working across disciplines, often furthest from their own creating a relevant integration between concepts, methods and theories. Experience designers design experiences over time with real and measurable consequences; time is their medium. According to Jones, the mission of Experience Design is "to persuade, stimulate, inform, envision, entertain, and forecast events, influencing meaning and modifying human behavior."
Within companies, experience design can refer not just to the experience of customers, but to that of employees as well. Anyone who is exposed to the space either physically, digitally, or second hand (web, media, family member, friend) may be considered in the application of XD. This includes staff, vendors, patients, visiting professionals, families, media professionals and contractors.
While it's unnecessary (or even inappropriate) for all experiences to be developed highly across all of these dimensions, the more in-depth and consistently a product or service is developed across them — the more responsive an offering is to a group's or individual's needs and desires (e.g., a customer) it's likely to be. Enhancing the affordance
of a product or service, its interface with people, is key to commercial experience design.
Design
Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...
ing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience
User experience design
User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design that pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models that affect user experience of a device or system...
and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality
Function (engineering)
In engineering, a function is interpreted as a specific process, action or task that a system is able to perform .-In engineering design:In the lifecycle of engineering projects, there are usually distinguished subsequently: Requirements and Functional specification documents. The Requirements...
of the design. An emerging discipline, experience design draws from many other disciplines including cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
and perceptual psychology
Perceptual psychology
Perceptual psychology is a subfield of cognitive psychology that is concerned specifically with the pre-conscious innate aspects of the human cognitive system: perception....
, linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
and environmental design
Environmental design
Environmental design is the process of addressing surrounding environmental parameters when devising plans, programs, policies, buildings, or products...
, haptics
Haptic communication
Haptic communication is the means by which people and other animals communicate via touching. Touch, or the haptic sense, is extremely important for humans; as well as providing information about surfaces and textures it is a component of nonverbal communication in interpersonal relationships, and...
, hazard analysis
Hazard analysis
A hazard analysis is used as the first step in a process used to assess risk. The result of a hazard analysis is the identification of risks. Preliminary risk levels can be provided in the hazard analysis. The validation, more precise prediction and acceptance of risk is determined in the Risk...
, product design
Product design
-Introduction:Product design is the process of creating a new product to be sold by a business or enterprise to its customers. It is concerned with the efficient and effective generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products.Product designers conceptualize and...
, theatre, information design
Information design
Information design is the skill and practice of preparing information so people can use it with efficiency and effectiveness. Where the data is complex or unstructured, a visual representation can express its meaning more clearly to the viewer....
, information architecture
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems. Among these activities are library systems, Content Management Systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming,...
, ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
, brand strategy, interaction design
Interaction design
In design, human–computer interaction, and software development, interaction design, often abbreviated IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Like many other design fields interaction design also has an interest in form but its main...
, service design
Service design
Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers....
, storytelling
Storytelling
Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values...
, heuristics, technical communication and design thinking
Design thinking
Design Thinking refers to the methods and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring information, analyzing knowledge, and positing solutions in the design and planning fields...
.
Commercial context
In its commercial context, experience design is driven by consideration of the moments of engagement, or touchpointTouchpoint
Touchpoint is the interface* of a product,* a service or* a brand...
s, between people and brands, and the ideas
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
, emotions, and memories that these moments create. Commercial experience design is also known as customer experience design, and brand experience. In the domain of marketing, it may be associated with experiential marketing. Experience designers are often employed to identify existing touchpoints and create new ones, and then to score the arrangement of these touchpoints so that they produce the desired outcome.
Broader context
In the broader environmental context, there is far less formal attention given to the design of the experienced environment, physical and virtual — but though it's unnoticed, experience design is taking place. Ronald JonesRonald Jones (Interdisciplinarian)
Ronald Jones an artist, critic and educator who gained prominence in New York City during the mid-1980s...
, describes the practice as working across disciplines, often furthest from their own creating a relevant integration between concepts, methods and theories. Experience designers design experiences over time with real and measurable consequences; time is their medium. According to Jones, the mission of Experience Design is "to persuade, stimulate, inform, envision, entertain, and forecast events, influencing meaning and modifying human behavior."
Within companies, experience design can refer not just to the experience of customers, but to that of employees as well. Anyone who is exposed to the space either physically, digitally, or second hand (web, media, family member, friend) may be considered in the application of XD. This includes staff, vendors, patients, visiting professionals, families, media professionals and contractors.
Focus debated
There is a debate occurring in the experience design community regarding its focus, provoked in part by design scholar and practitioner, Don Norman. Norman claims that when designers describe people only as customers, consumers, and users, designers risk diminishing their ability to do good design. Given that experience is so totally an affective, subjective, and personal process — not an abstract — it would be ironic, it's been argued, for experience designers, when designing experiences, to approach people merely as objects of commerce or cogs in a machine. Experience design, perhaps more than other forms of design, is transactive and transformative: every experience designer is an experiencer; and every experiencer, via his or her reactions, a designer of experience in turn. While commercial contexts often describe people as "customers, consumers, or users," this and non-commercial contexts might use the words "audience, people, and participants." In either case, for conscientious experience designers, this is merely a semantic difference.Multiple dimensions
Experience design is not driven by a single design discipline. Instead, it requires a cross-discipline perspective that considers multiple aspects of the brand/business/environment/experience from product, packaging and retail environment to the clothing and attitude of employees. Experience design seeks to develop the experience of a product, service, or event along any or all of the following dimensions:- Duration (Initiation, Immersion, Conclusion, and Continuation)
- Intensity (Reflex, Habit, Engagement)
- Breadth (Products, Services, Brands, Nomenclatures, Channels/Environment/Promotion, and Price)
- Interaction (Passive < > Active < > Interactive)
- Triggers (All Human Senses, Concepts, and Symbols)
- Significance (Meaning, Status, Emotion, Price, and Function)
While it's unnecessary (or even inappropriate) for all experiences to be developed highly across all of these dimensions, the more in-depth and consistently a product or service is developed across them — the more responsive an offering is to a group's or individual's needs and desires (e.g., a customer) it's likely to be. Enhancing the affordance
Affordance
An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling...
of a product or service, its interface with people, is key to commercial experience design.
See also
- Customer experienceCustomer experienceCustomer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. From awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy...
- Human factorsHuman factorsHuman factors science or human factors technologies is a multidisciplinary field incorporating contributions from psychology, engineering, industrial design, statistics, operations research and anthropometry...
- Industrial designIndustrial designIndustrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product's marketability and production...
- Information ArchitectureInformation ArchitectureInformation architecture is the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems. Among these activities are library systems, Content Management Systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming,...
- Interaction designInteraction designIn design, human–computer interaction, and software development, interaction design, often abbreviated IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Like many other design fields interaction design also has an interest in form but its main...
- Interdisciplinary
- MarketingMarketingMarketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
- Transdisciplinary
- UsabilityUsabilityUsability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job...
- User experience designUser experience designUser experience design is a subset of the field of experience design that pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models that affect user experience of a device or system...
- User interface designUser interface designUser interface design or user interface engineering is the design of computers, appliances, machines, mobile communication devices, software applications, and websites with the focus on the user's experience and interaction...