Understanding the ecosystem of Experience Design.
By: Marcos Arruda
Tags: Human Centered Design, Ux Design Process, UX Design, Experience Design, Service Design

"The notion of ‘experience’ is open to interpretation, and experiences are diverse. What is an experience? It’s different for different people." (Leung, 2010)

1. UNDERSTANDING EXPERIENCE DESIGN

A central idea in Experience Design is that it is important to pay close attention to situations of use. Experience Design is site-specific. It is necessary to understand the people and the situations that designers design for. (Benz, 2015). It is crucial to keep in mind the necessity of understanding the user while we get deeper into this topic. The more specialized the experiences, the more meaningful it becomes.

“In order to deeply understand experience and the life-world in which it takes place, it cannot be simply observed, it must be experienced.” (Benz, 2015)

“Experience Design exists wherever a Business and a Person interact in the pursuit of fulfilling that persons needs or interests”. Kendall (2020). Designers need to understand, imagine, and fulfil human needs and desires. This implies building empathy, watching what people do and how they interact with things, environments, and each other; engaging, ethnographically, for example, with real-world users in real-world situations. (Benz, 2015).

Therefore, it is clear that it is essential to establish empathy with the user. To research, observe and understand behaviours, characteristics, motivations and needs, so designers can apply specific tools, create solutions and design meaningful experiences.

“The differentiating factor nowadays is the experience and that touches all facets of that business from brand to products to marketing and customer service. Experience design needs to reflect on the whole picture not only one output but how a person can experience that company or brand and therefore all elements need to be designed.” Ray Mosley. (Kendall, 2020)

Sense is the continuously moving intersection between body and consciousness, between human and world.” (Benz, 2015). Experience design comprises three main central points: thinking, sensing, and feeling. The user has a mind to think, physically interact to sense and emotions to feel. These elements combine together and affect each other during the design for experiences.

2. THE INTERPLAY WITH OTHER FIELDS

The Interaction

“There are different types of experiences, e.g. user experience, customer experience, brand experience, employee experience etc. where we have different conditions, audiences, objectives and outcomes.” (Callaghan, 2020)

Experience Design is frequently utilised interchangeably with terms such as Service Design (SD), User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX), Interaction Design (IxD) and, Industrial Design. Given its continuous growth and innovation, several practitioners and titles are continually emerging in this inherently interdisciplinary field, creating and developing experiences through design.

Thus another picture emerges; although “experience” is clearly a design issue, Experience Design remains “stuck” in playing a poorly defined service role for other areas and, in this sense, is merely one approach among a number of competing concepts. The full potential of Experience Design as a distinct creative discipline in its own right still needs to be articulated and recognized academically and professionally. (Benz, 2015)

Next, the graphic with the 4 layers of the design will be presented to illustrate better how the following terminologies and areas of operation are grouped.

“4 layers of Design” (Adapted from Buchanan, 1992)

“Experience design is often very close if not exactly the same as service design and is much needed in any company that doesn’t have a completely singular and unique business”. Ray Mosley (cited in Kendall, 2020)

According to the 4 Layers of Design” this structure:

Service Design, Business Design and Organisation Design describe the macro view that acknowledges the eco-system of experience, including the feasibility and workability considerations.

UX Design is centring on the “user experience”, including usability, user interface and frequently involves designing an experience through a device. Interaction Design (IxD) is about interactive products, services and systems in which a designer’s focus goes beyond the item in development to include the form users will interact and connect with it.

User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function. (What is User Experience (UX) Design?, 2020)

Experience is a much broader field than User Experience. Experience is just more focused on the user, in his or her psychology and emotions. (Hassenzahl, 2020)

However, Industrial design is focused on the problem-solving process, develop the product designs and prepares them for production, exploring products, systems, interactions, experiences and services with business value at its core. At the 29th General Assembly in Gwangju (South Korea), the Professional Practice Committee unveiled a renewed definition of industrial design as follows: Industrial Design is a strategic problem-solving process that drives innovation, builds business success, and leads to a better quality of life through innovative products, systems, services, and experiences. It is a trans-disciplinary profession that harnesses creativity to resolve problems and co-create solutions to make a product, system, service, experience or business, better. (WDO — Definition of Industrial Design, 2020)

In the symbolic ecosystem, Information, Visual, and Graphic Design will act with more emphasis on the aesthetic while also considering the cognitive aspect.

The central relevance of Experience Design is its potential sensitivity to the complex combinations of heterogeneous elements, which are at play in practices and situations of use. (Benz, 2015)

Nevertheless, Experience Design acts as an umbrella for all of these disciplines that are at their core “human-centred” and develop an experience that performs exceeding and transcending simplistic interaction.

3. HUMAN CENTRED-DESIGN

Experience Design may thus act as an umbrella term for a number of design approaches that take the point of departure in actual situations of use — and are “human-centred.” (Benz, 2015).

Human-centred design is in multiple forms comparable to the interpretation of experience design. According to IDEO, “Human-centered design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design with communities, to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve, to dream up scores of ideas, and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.” (IDEO, 2015)

Human-centred design has been used by IDEO for decades to create products, services, systems, experiences, and social enterprises that have been adopted and embraced because they have kept people’s lives and desires at the core.

Human-centred design is premised on empathy, on the idea that the people you’re designing for are your roadmap to innovative solutions. (Kolawole, 2020)

The fundamental component of human-centred design is regarding interaction with people, to recognise how brand-new products or services are affecting and changing them. By examining behaviours, promoting empathy and comprehending impulses and motivations, it is possible to recognise patterns to support the development and enhance their design.

Being a human-centered designer is about believing that as long as you stay grounded in what you’ve learned from people, your team can arrive at new solutions that the world needs. (IDEO, 2015)

Human-centred design is not a perfectly linear process, and different projects will have different forms and characteristics. Independently of the design request, designers will pass through these three principal phases: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

By taking these three phases in turn, you’ll build deep empathy with the communities and individuals you’re designing for; you’ll figure out how to turn what you’ve learned into a chance to design a new solution, and you’ll build and test your ideas before finally putting them out into the world. (IDEO, 2015)

Inspiration: In this phase, designers will develop the hypothesis, gather inspiration and develop empathy. In this time, it is essential to learn how to better understand people, their hope and desires, observing their lives and frame the design challenge.

Ideation: It is time to generate numerous ideas and solutions, identify opportunities, test and refine these ideas and think narrowly.

Implementation: During the implementation phase, the main point is to develop, produce and deliver the final idea. It is also important to create strategies to release the solution and analyse learnings to maximise its results.

4. THE DESIGN PROCESS

Various designers guide the process of design in different ways. It is crucial to explain why designers should follow a design process: there is a need to examine and understand the problem to design the best solution. At the heart of the framework for innovation is the Design Council’s design methodology, the Double Diamond — a clear, comprehensive and visual description of the design process. (Design Council, 2020)