Blog Topic #6: What is Experience Design?

There is a very careful balance that must be made between experience design and usability. In order to create a design that is something cutting edge, by that very nature one must be doing something that hasn't been done before. This is where the dilemna between usability and experience designs. One of the main cannons of usability is to use the tried and true when designing a site. This will certainly stifle any attempt of a designer of a site with experience design in mind, who wants to create something unique. The way around this is to still follow some of the rules of usability, such as simple navigation and consistent control throughout the site. The idea is to keep the learning curve small. For a better understanding of experience design, one could look at the following excerpt from the wikipedia entry for experience design:

Experience design is not driven by a single design discipline. Instead, it requires a cross-discipline perspective that considers multiple aspects of the brand/business/environment/experience from product, packaging and retail environment to the clothing and attitude of employees. Experience design seeks to develop the experience of a product, service, or event along any or all of the following dimensions:

• Duration (Initiation, Immersion, Conclusion, and Continuation)
• Intensity (Reflex, Habit, Engagement)
• Breadth (Products, Services, Brands, Nomenclatures, Channels/Environment/Promotion, and Price)
• Interaction (Passive < > Active < > Interactive)
• Triggers (All Human Senses, Concepts, and Symbols)
• Significance (Meaning, Status, Emotion, Price, and Function)

While it's unnecessary (or even inappropriate) for all experiences to be developed highly across all of these dimensions, the more in-depth and consistently a product or service is developed across them — the more responsive an offering is to a group's or individual's needs and desires (e.g., a customer) it's likely to be. Enhancing the affordance of a product or service, its interface with people, is key to commercial experience design.

Here is an example of experience design. It is an endless zooming picture. You hit your left mouse button and drag up to zoom in, and you hit the left mouse button and drag down to zoom out.

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