Experience Design - More than digital March 29th, 2013

Experience Design is commonly applied to pure digital products and services. If dismissed as only capable of defining the digital delivery channel the capabilities and potential of Experience Design have been miss understood.

Experience design based on User Centred Design (UCD) principles places the user at the centre of all design decisions. A UCD process therefore allows an organisation to be enlightened to what their users expect when they turn to them for answers, help or direction.

The UCD process importantly helps define the content and what this ‘content’ needs to be to support the user.

At inception a brief that prescribes technology requirements, approach or associated constraints will adversely impact the effectiveness of the eventual service. This is not to say technology and current business processes have no place in supporting the eventual solution. But instead this view acknowledges that most service design briefs and requirements are content and communication challenges.

The solutions and answers themselves define the necessary technological requirements. These combined create a delivery platform capable of connecting with all the identified service points having understood the detail that forms the unique problem space.

When user turn to digital content channels service level expectations increases continually. Expectations increase at such a pace that even those services that were well defined during conception can fall short when eventually released to the world. Success and differentiation are no longer possible from recreating whats gone before or mimicking comparable services.