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Discipline

Experience design

Designs the experience a person has with a product, a service or a place: what they do, what they feel and what they remember afterwards.

In Spanish
Diseño de experiencias
Origin
Pine and Gilmore (1998); Hassenzahl (2010)

What it deals with

A product can work well and still leave people indifferent. What people remember and talk about is the experience, not the features.

Principles

  • The why first

    What need or emotion lies behind what the person does.

  • Then the what

    What they can do with the product.

  • Finally the how

    The buttons, screens and gestures they use to do it.

Applications in design

  • Use it like this

    Ask why someone would use your product before deciding what it will do.

  • Avoid

    Confusing experience with aesthetics or with adding surprises.

  • Don’t fall for it

    What the person remembers may differ from what they experienced: design the ending too.

Especialidades

Specialty

Fan experience

Designs what the audience of a sports event goes through, from getting into the stadium to leaving.

Specialty

Customer experience design

Designs how a person experiences their relationship with a company, before, during and after buying.

Methods and tools

  • MethodJourney mapA map of a person's path through a service, with what they do, use and feel at each step.

Authors and works

  1. 1998

    B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore

    Argued that experiences are an economic offering of their own, distinct from products and services.

  2. 2010

    Marc Hassenzahl

    Described experience as a story that is remembered and proposed designing from the person's needs.

Sources

Original sources

  • Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review, 76(4), 97–105. View source: Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1998)
  • Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience design: Technology for all the right reasons. Morgan & Claypool.

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