Exploring Experience Design: Fusing business, tech, and design to shape customer engagement

The design of products and experiences is closely connected to the processes underlying user-product interaction, which in turn are influenced by ongoing social and technological changes. In this section, we will explore the relationship between the evolution of products and changes to the nature of the user experience they engender.

The world transitioned rapidly from the industrial age to the information age. Today, many products and services are digital and data driven, as is the manufacturing of most physical products. Slow and linear human-controlled processes have been replaced by real-time, parallel, computer-controlled processes. Some of the trends that have emerged are as follows:

In 1989, a single invention set off a chain of events that transformed the world and consequently, lead to the recent prominence of user experience design within the product development process.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The invention standardized how documents and other resources can be identified, searched, and accessed on the free internet. While it enabled people and organizations to connect with other people and organizations without limitations of place and time, it introduced technical limitations associated with the hardware and software that made access to the internet possible; it was all quite technical.

Initially, the internet was viewed as an entirely virtual space, distinguished from the physical "brick and mortar" world. The model in the preceding diagram illustrates a change in role of design, as companies and organizations moved into the digital domain and software development business.

Traditional "brick and...

The internet was created in the 1960s, and it spread gradually from government and academia, to commercial and personal use. Important milestones include the emergence of secure online payments via encrypted browsers, Amazon's shopping cart, advances in warehousing and shipping logistics involved in the fulfillment of online orders, media streaming, the emergence of social networks, and a transition from slow dial-up to fast high-speed connections, which radically improved the experience of being online. In developed countries, a reliable and persistent internet connection has tremendous importance. It is comparable to utilities and is needed almost like water and electricity. We will expand this point later. 

Robust but relatively small, virtual communities formed in the 1980s through the early 1990s were propelled by the availability of personal computers and dialup connections to the network. The main form of interaction occurred on bulletin board forums...

Designers work with two types of products--completely new inventions and updates to existing products. Both can be catalysts for revolutionary changes in people's lives.

For example, Motorola produced the first handheld cellular phone in 1973. This invention changed the experience of voice and written communication for people worldwide. The first iPhone, a rethinking of the cellular phone, was introduced by Apple 34 years later, in 2007. The release of the iPhone marked another tectonic shift in the role of experience design in product and service development. 

As described in Chapter 1, Experience Design - Overview, in the iPhone and the products that followed it, physical and digital experiences were fused into a powerful, beautiful, easy-to-use, multipurpose personal device that could handle work, personal life, and entertainment. This, of course, also meant a blurring of the boundaries that separated the personal and private from the public...

New scientific knowledge leads to new technologies, commercial opportunities, and eventually to social changes and individual adaptation. Changes in the role of design were presented in this broad context. This chapter followed the trends that lifted design from a supporting role in a fragmented product development process to that of an equal partner in a process that is unified by design.

The trend toward multi-disciplinary design teams that collaborate throughout the entire product lifecycle, allows teams to partner around a unified process that is infused with multiple forms of feedback from users. However, the most radical change that occurred in this context, was the evolution of experience design processes, methodologies, and tools, which helped create a new emotional framework for the relationships between people and the smart products that know something about them. 

Increasingly, experience design helps transform products from being mere artifacts to becoming extensions of...