Experience design
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Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments -- each of which is a human experience -- based on the consideration of an individual's or group's needs, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions. An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, product design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking. Another term for experience design is experiential design.
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[edit] Commercial context
In its commercial context, experience design is driven by consideration of the "moments of engagement" -- touchpoints -- between people and brands, and the ideas,emotions, and memories that these moments create. Commercial experience design is also known as experiential marketing, customer experience design, and brand experience. 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Focus debated
There is a lively 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" -- instrumentally, as businesses do -- the 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.
[edit] 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)[1]
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.
[edit] References
- ^ Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, Darrel Rhea (2005): Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences. New Riders Press ISBN 0-321-37409-6
