Experience Design

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Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, and environments -- each of which is a human experience -- based on the holistic consideration of an individual's or group's beliefs, knowledge, and perceptions. An emerging discipline, experience design is the culmination of traditional and avant-garde research and design modalities including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, product design, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking. It is the most human-centric approach to design. Another term for experience design is experiential design.

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. Today, successful companies are adopting a more holistic and customer-centric relationship model built upon dialogue and interaction between brands and consumers. In doing so, they are considering and designing the "total" experience of their brands, often without knowing that they are practicing experience design. 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.

In the broader environmental context, however, relatively little formal attention has been given to the design of the experienced environment, physical and virtual -- but though it's unnoticed, experience design is taking place. Mark Hurst's [This Is Broken blog] graphically illustrates many problematic and failed experience designs, in non-commercial as well as commercial settings.

In fact, 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.

But so far, most experience design has been applied in the commercial sector and relatively little in the design of non-commercial and non-institutional experiences. This may be changing as the field acquires greater prominence.

Experience design is not driven by a single design discipline. Instead, it requires a truly cross-discipline perspective that considers all aspects of the brand/business/environment/experience - from product, packaging and retail environment to the clothing and attitude of employees. According to the authors of [Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences], 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) -- the more successful it's likely to be. Enhancing the affordance of a product or service, its interface with people, is key to commercial experience designing.

External links

[Experience Design Newsgroup] An independent and lively discussion of experience design from the standpoint of the designers, led by Paula Thornton.
[AIGA Experience Design Newsgroup] The AIGA's newsgroup covering experience design issues, mostly from a Web perspective.
[Total Experience blog] Corante.com's blog on experience design, featuring commentary, issues, case studies, and news, co-authored by Bob Jacobson and Paula Thornton.
[Design Council on Experience Design] Design Council one stop shop information resource on Experience Design by Ralph Ardill of Imagination London.
[Experience Design Glossary] Evolving glossary of Experience Design terms by author Nathan Shedroff.
[Book: Experience Design 1] A definitive book on the subject by Nathan Shedroff.
[Experience Design Resources] Books, websites, schools, organizations, and other media resources about Experience Design.
[Putting People First blog] Mark Vanderbeeken's insights to the broad field of experience design, user experience, and innovation through a daily digest of news stories, web sites, and publications.
[Experience Design Conference] International conference about experience design (in French only).
[EServer TC Library: User Experience Design] An annotated bibliography of online resorces in experience design.

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