Experience Design (XD) is a unique and comprehensive multidisciplinary approach to designing and delivering an engaging, cohesive, end to end experience to people. In some cases, an experience can last just a few moments where in other cases, these phases are spread out over a year or more. An experience can be a small event like enjoying a cup of coffee. It can be something bigger, like planning and taking a family vacation. Or, an experience can be a longer-term activity like buying and using software for your company.
When an organization delivers an experience, people interact with different elements along a journey. Journey phases include awareness, purchase, installation, learning, using, troubleshooting, renewing/leaving, relationship building, and advocating. Not every step will apply to every experience. It really depends on the organization and what it is trying to deliver.
The needs of the person and the tools used to deliver experiences at each phase are different. As a result, specialty disciplines have emerged such as user experience, customer experience, and service design. An experience is often made up of both product and service elements and the tools and skills from each of these disciplines plays a role in creating a great end to end experience. To truly deliver an end to end experience, additional skills such as content strategy and data analysis are needed. To be effective, these skilled roles need to working together in a highly collaborative way with the marketing, product development, and customer support teams.
- I started writing about experience design in 2009. Many of the tools used such as personas, customer journey maps, and wireframes remain the same. There have been a lot of change since then.
- More companies are working to improve omnichannel experiences, recognizing that people now move fluidly between channels and devices.
- Social media listening has emerged as a great tool to complement traditional surveys and user research to provide a real-time voice of the customer.
- Agile and Lean have been adopted by most UX and some marketing teams to help them be more responsive to the customer.
- Many products are web or mobile and can provide interaction data that desktop products never could.
- Big data analysis has emerged as a tool to help pull together better insights from both structured and unstructured data from throughout the experience journey.
In my next few posts, I plan to provide updates on some of the new best practices in experience design. I would love your feedback.
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