The Social Media MBA Blog by Karl Long

I believe Experience Design is a rich source of competitive advantage for business. I would like to create a definition around Experience Design that describes its unique strengths in a way that is relevant to business.

One challenge we face is that the multidisciplinary nature of the Experience Design community is there is a lot of contention around what defines it.

I find a lot of this contention comes from the discipline (process) focused nature of the definitions. Experience Design is a huge group of disciplines and any disipline/media/process focused definition will tread on someone’s toes.

The other challenge is to make it understandable, and relevant to busienss. How does it make products better, more relevant, more profitable. How does it keep customers engaged, how does it extract additional value from customers, engender loyalty etc.

I’ve found these four characteristics useful when thinking about Experience Design in the context of business:

1. Observation: ethnography, framing the design problem in the context or actual use, instead of asking what people want, observing what they need. (Contextual inquiry, observation, ethnography, participatory design are example methods)
2. Balance the value equation: the essence of experience design is to balance business value and customer value. A common statement is “balancing the goals of the business and the needs of the user.”
3. Users as nodes: interactive means involvement, participation; the product is not consumed but created at the time of use between the user and the system. Use the experience of customers to create value in the system (amazon, ebay etc.)
4. Products as nodes: make sure the design takes into account the wider context of use (other offerings, other customers), or the wider context of the network.
   Ôø?Customers experience an organizations output in one integrated spaceÔø?
   (Vandermerwe, 1996)

Source: in depth interviews and adaptation from Songs of Experience (Azhar, 2001)

Comments?

Vandermerwe , S., (1996), New competitive spaces: Jointly investing in new customer logic, Columbia Journal of World Business, Vol. 31 Issue 4 , Winter.