WEEK 3 On the ground running: Lessons from experience design

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On the ground running: Lessons from experience design

From Adobe DesignCenter’s Think Tank, May 2007

Many products are no longer function as an isolated entity, but are being integrated into part of a network. The product-service ecology creates new types of problems for the designer as products or services in the network are dependent on one another.

In the examples outlined in the article unforeseen problems arose when experience designers had poorly considered the dimension of time and how it would affect the disparate components in a product eco system that were subject to change, rendering the design experience a failure.

Essentially, if one component in the system fails or is revised the entire design experience and all connected components are affected.

"A problem anywhere in the densely-interwoven mesh of connections cascades through the entire system. When it all succeeds, it’s magnificent, but if any aspect of it fails, the whole thing falls apart."

Applicable to this semester’s project;

• Be wary not to over-design an experience; in the examples cited the experience design was enhanced but the tasks were made needlessly complex or unable to be conducted smoothly.

• Ultimately, control must remain in the hands of an individual user to be a successful design; the individual user is the most knowledgeable in regards to how they would like their experiences shaped. Designs should allow people to configure the experience to their own liking with all individual components open-ended, and effortlessly extensible. 

• Conceptualize design experiences as overarching but essentially open narratives, into which individual consumers can insert or demount components at will.

• Designs in the ecology should be resilient to the failure of individual system components.

• In designing an experience, designers risk needlessly complicating a user task in the process of attempting to enhance it. Identifying key movements or gestures that are unique to a specific task is an optimal way to conceptualize inputs for the interaction.

• How the individual product is experienced will change over time; Flexibility can be designed into a product component to anticipate changes and afford a more satisfying long term experiences to the user. 

 

-Darcy Storr