Have you lately encountered something that has left you thinking or created a strong sense of aspiration and purpose? After you have thought about that, maybe you can take a brief moment to retrospect on what about that experience was so special? What was that unique element that you could relate to and be rekindled? How did you choose to capture that experience and share it with others? If it is a product that you have used, do you think it improved your life in any way? Do you think it served you more than just its purpose of fulfilling your needs?
Questions like these cloud the minds of any Experience Designer. They work with the constant quest of improving the customer journey beyond just traditional analytics data. Experience Design helps in creating a customer journey that is extensive, integrated and humane. Keeping customers engaged and addressing their demands of a transparent and personal interaction is the key idea behind Experience Design. It is a discipline to make interactions with complex applications simpler hence enhancing its usability and its actual value.
A Challenging Discipline
This discipline is often challenging to put into concrete words and understand what it is worth. It is often interchangeable with other terms like service design, product design, User Experience (UX) etc. This debate over the nomenclature is still ongoing. But it is essential to understand that they are not all similar. Each is distinct in its own way, each forming a different element of the overall Experience Design. Like many interdisciplinary fields, Design has also grown a lot where specialising in particular aspects help forming the larger picture.
Let us dive into some of the semantics which will help you better understand Experience Design.
When we talk about interaction design, we are primarily referring to the low-level architecture dealing with the essential interactions on the Human Machine Interface. For example, in the case of a web page, it focuses on the different interactions on the screen. It may be clicking on a drop-down menu, clicking on a navigation bar, clicking on the next button thereby mainly concentrating on the technical aspects of the design. Every click or touch or action of any form define how we interact with a particular screen.
First Step into the Human aspect: User Experience
UX design or user experience it is very much in line with interaction design with a fine line of difference. Here we start touching upon the human aspect of the design beyond the technical boundaries. For example, if a client clicks on to next does he have the option to go back, in case he has made an error. User experience is the first step towards adding the humane element with technology. It is about making the user feel rewarded for having completed his task. Giving the user the ability to seamlessly explore a system, making it easy to discover, easy to use without overwhelming the user is what user experience sets to achieve. As we move from interaction design to user experience, we already begin defining the interactions on one particular screen to flows between different screens of a website.
The overall picture: Product Design
Next, when we move to the level of product design. Here we are defining design in terms of different flows put together to formulate the overall product. Product design deals with creating a consistent experience amongst the different flows. Product Design also touches upon the team aspect where we have agile squads and product owners. The job of the product owner is to deep dive into the understanding of the product. The in-depth understanding gives him the freedom to take a call on prioritising the release of different features within defined timelines.
Thus we can say that the product design stage already starts touching upon a lot of business aspects like team planning, negotiating with clients on the sequence of feature releases and occasions also defining if a feature is at all necessary and useful to attain the final product. Product designing is about achieving a good MVP (minimum viable product). It is about finding the right balance between business and user needs.
Summing up all the experiences: Service Design
We step up one more level to discuss service design. When we mentioned the product design above, we were referring to one particular product, for example, one product owner will focus on the banking app, whereas another product owner with another product designer aims at delivering the website of the bank. Hence every product becomes a way for the user to interact with the bank, in this case strictly speaking digital ways. But the consumer also has the scope of communicating with the bank people in person or over calls. Every such experience sums up the service the bank provides to its customers. Thus any point of contact between the customer and the service provider becomes the touch points. Incorporating the experiences of the customers under different scenarios via different touchpoints help carve out the customer journey map.
Service design is still a level up which helps to improve the overall customer journey. Service design can begin right from the introductory phase, or it may be an improvement of an existing service. A significant part of it involves social listening to try to understand changing consumer needs and at the same time communicating with the businesses as well with the aim of achieving a balance between business offers and consumer needs.
Finally, what is Experience Design?
Experience Design is a combination of product design, service design, and branding. Branding in itself plays a vital role in creating a brand image through its storytelling, its tone of voice, its logo, all to reflect the core values of the brand. Several marketing strategies can be applied to position a brand in the market based on its target audience. Experience Design which is the larger umbrella introduces the aspect of empathy and emotional touch to a brand’s image and help it distinctly stand out from its competitors.
Experience Design is that unique ingredient that can help consumers identify their perfect brands. Although some of its aspects can still be quantifiable, a more significant part of it remains an abstract form of feeling, an emotion that lingers with our consumers. It is an experience nonetheless, a journey of a consumer that connects a brand’s core values with its consumer’s identity.
We will delve more into Experience Design Thinking and the tools we use at graphility to make our customer’s journey unique and exclusive. Stay with us to know more about why graphility is your solution to Experience Design.
Have you come across Experience Design before? If yes, how has it helped your business? Share with us.