Experience Design: A current perspective

As different digital disciplines have evolved over the years, its unsurprising that there are so many different perspectives, definitions, misunderstandings and opinions about what is meant by the term Experience design. Rather than pour fuel onto the fire of that debate, we have clarified what we mean by Experience design here and why it should matter for organisations.

Experience design is a design practice focused on the Customer Experience and customer outcomes, it is a mindset and approach that has evolved from the shift in technology-driven innovation to more human-driven innovation. It considers the experience as a whole, and the understanding of the customer, their needs, mindsets, behaviour, environment and context. Collectively this provides a foundational frame of reference on which improvements and solutions can be designed.

The improvements and solutions can span a wide variety of applications, products, services, environments, propositions, and communications. As these elements are often intertwined through a series of physical and digital interactions, experience design strives to create relevant and meaningful journeys for Customers that are highly relevant to their needs and context. It focusses on the touchpoint interactions that collectively solve challenges in a coordinated and consistent way to deliver better outcomes and make solutions more usable and compelling.

Experience design will also directly influence the technology and operational choices that need to be made to underpin the delivery of the Experience. It manages the tension that can exist between optimizing the Customer Experience, and the technical dependencies for enablement, ensuring that as a result we optimise the outcome for both the business and the customer.

However Experience design is also about questioning the model behind ‘what’ the customer does, to understand the behavioral motivations, choices and stimulus that will inform the way we intentionally design experiences and improve solutions in the wider context for the customer.

As an example, when applied to a Digital solution, Experience design thinks first about the customer, how their experience can be influenced, and how we shape that experience to deliver the right outcomes. It then informs the UX design activity which focuses on how the interface is designed. Experience design ensures these approaches are seamlessly combined to design relevant solutions, bringing together different but complimentary skillsets to deliver better outcomes.

Whilst our focus at Profound is primarily Digital, we recognise that design challenges can arise in any channel and our approach considers this wider context, and the dependencies across channels, and in the operational environment.  We work with organisations across a broad range of industries, helping them define customer challenges and find impactful solutions to meaningful problems.