User experience design or experience design is not completely new terminology, and yet a few interpretations still remain. Discussions around user experience design and strategy, have perhaps more recently started to emerge. Most of the dialogue relating to user experience design is directly connected to online user experiences and are frequently associated with usability and user interface design.
I prefer to take a much wider perspective on experience design, which does come with strengths and weaknesses. Here, I would like to clarify my own perspective on experience design strategy. To be reasonably short and concise, I have broken it up into three parts. As a starting point, I will focus on the interpretation of “experience”.
Experience
As I mentioned in my previous article, the product is only part of the total experience. Jesse James Garrett (@MX 2007) expressed it as:
“the experience is the product that we deliver, and the only part that our audience cares about”.
On the other hand, Peter Morville* justly questions that the user usually does not want an experience, but rather is looking for usability or findability. This is very important aspect to consider carefully when we discuss experience. Peter does, at least partially, assume that experience is directly associated with the desirability. I would prefer to say that the relevance of an experience, equally much derives from the function and value that makes up our total experience of a product or service.
Ultimately, Experience is the essence of the customer’s contextual impression of the company’s offerings, whether it appeals to their desires, functional needs or generates distinct new value.
* many other relevant points in this article, which I will come back to.
