Experience design for users or user experience design?

UI/UX designing with Adobe Experience Design

Experience Design by Lego

Creating weekly content for the course of Hyper Island as Experience Design can be hard, time-consuming and meeting deadlines. The so-called ‘mini-makers’ are about the things Hypers have learned, projects you worked on, stuff that have created new insights or things that are questioned. Within the other mini-makers projects, there was a lot of noise about what experience design (EXD) is, how it is interpreted and explained by my fellow classmates as user experience design (UXD).

So, what is designing an experience? Is it that about designing a new visual, video or building in order to create that experience? What is an experience online? And what means design in this? And experience design is also about users, right? So why does it differ from user experience design? The answers on these questions were found by doing research on how other people see it, how I see it and how scientific research is defining it.

UXD (User Experience Design)

When I tell people about what user experience design is, I explain it as the psychology of the internet. It is the strategy of how you can meet the attitude (and the behaviour) of your audience who are willing to use your digital product. It is questioning why humans make certain choices and how you can influence this choice by conditioning it with new features, videos, new buttons, colors, text size and many more aspects. User experience design is a process, where improving the user satisfaction level by centralize usability, accessibility and pleasure in the interaction between the user and the product (Kujala et all, 2010). Especially the terms process and improving are essential in this field of expertise. In order to gain empathy and interaction with the design of your new product, you should always consider how you can improve it and it will always be in a loop of processing these improvements.

Rockstars are continuously doing experience design. The dilemma in music is about if your new design composition should be focused on what you as an artist like or what your audience likes.

EXD (Experience Design)

Experience design is basically designing an experience. So what is an experience? A collection of events, activities or actions from which an audience or group may gather knowledge, opinions and skills. Something that is important to notice is that in the context of experience design for organisation you want people to influence or change their behavior when they are gathering their knowledge, opinions and skills. Designing is about how you are using the process (for example design thinking) in order to concept, structure and iterate the experience that will meet the requirements of the briefing. Two basic things in experience design are human-centered and problem solving. Human centered can be explained as that all decisions, aspects and structures are pointed on the user and nothing but the user. Problem-solving is that the how has the priority of the what (Process and Content Model). The questioning why the problem is stated as it is formulated can derive new insights on how to solve the problem. The result and what the concept is that you want from experience design is that you want to create an added value for your audience with a product, service or initiative.

Process and Concent Model or Nutshell Model

Discussion

The biggest difference between user experience design and experience design that I found after doing research for this article is that user experience design is mainly about discussing and improving the satisfaction level of users in digital products or services. At the other hand, experience design is how to solve different kind of problems by making use of design methodologies to create new opportunities and let users decide what is most essential. The difference is that UX points on analyzing human behaviour and generating new insights, so you can improve your product, where as EXD is about solving a problem in order to make improvements. At last, UXD is mainly focussed on digital products, like apps and websites, where as experience design can be any kind of product that is suitable for a certain problem.

Sources

Kujala, Sari; Roto, Virpi; Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Kaisa; Karapanos, Evangelos; Sinneläa, Arto (2011). “UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience”. Interacting With Computers 23 (5): 473–483. doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2011.06.005