Challis Hodge’s UXblog

So, I’ve been having a number of conversations about Friday’s post: What is Experience Design? For the post I retrofit an old diagram to illustrate the many different ways people are defining experience design. Each blue star represents an area I have heard regularly defined as experience design. In a brief conversation with Marc he made a couple of good points. First, the AIGA Experience Design SIG took up the term experience design to represent the newly emerging digital interactive design space. Second, he avoids conversations about experience design whenever possible. Third, He’s completely satisfied with the old term of interaction design.

One of the problems I have with using the term experience design to define only the digital interaction design space is that it isolates digital interactive experiences when businesses are focusing on unifying, coordinating and designing experiences across all channels or customer touch points. As a random example, I opened a marketing brochure this morning and two illustrative phrases jumped out at me.

“Learn to: Profitably optimize the experience these core constituencies have with your organization”

“Melinda Nykamp will cover these topics and help you understand that CRM initiatives and ultimately customer experience is driven by a combination of provider and channel.”

This is the model I have been recently using to illustrate experience design for the Internet or digital interactive space, I envision similar vertical models for all customer touch points (where levels 2&3 are adapted as appropriate), as well as horizontal models that define the relationships in a customer-centered business.

I sent the following comment to Beth Mazur at IDblog after reading an entry that described a distinction between so called “information designers” and “experience designers”.

“Quick comment: … I definitely think information architects and information designers are necessarily a sub group. Not a separate group. FWIW.”

Beth Mazur then responded on IDblog.

I quickly amended this diagram to illustrate my view on experience design/user experience (ED/UX). First let me say that if it were left up to me I would eliminate the term. But it�s not! That said, I think there are a number of problems in the current discussions about ED/UX. First, the term is being used to describe a range of things from skills to roles to processes to departments (See diagram marked with blue stars). It can�t be all of these things. Frankly I think ED/UX has arisen as a catch phrase to describe the latest challenges we face in designing products and services for people. It is the �new design�. I don�t think it�s the �new Design� because there are a number of disciplines, roles and skills needed that must come from outside the traditional Design disciplines.

In the above diagram I am describing a segment of a user-centered business, specifically the Internet channel. I believe the only practical and useful way to talk about ED/UX is at �level 2� where I�ve labeled it �Experience Design: Community of Practice� (EDCP). In this model I�ve also left room for some areas of strategy and technology to fall outside the EDCP although I believe ultimately as the customer-centric perspective is forced up to the highest levels, entire enterprises will necessarily be customer (user) focused. I believe differentiation and competitive advantage will leave businesses no other choice.

So yes, I do see information design/information architecture as a member of the EDCP–a sub group if you will.

To summarize, I don’t feel that experience design stands up as a discipline or even role at the level of information design. If experience design is happening at level 2 and not just limited to design and research then it stands that all of the disciplines or roles in level 3 are experience designers.

Freeplay and Motorola to Market a Wind-up Power Source for Wireless Phones
Freeplay and Motorola today announced an exclusive, worldwide co-branding and distribution agreement to develop and market a Freeplay-driven wireless phone power source (Freeplay makes those great hand-cranked flshlights and radios). The wind-up accessory, which is compatible with a variety of Motorola and other popular wireless phones, is expected to provide between 3-6 minutes of talk* and several hours of standby time*, for each 45-second hand-cranking session. More here…

Did Video Games Influence the Attack on America?
Concerns about Microsoft’s Flight Simulator game being used as a tool to teach terrorists have caused two major retailers to yank the program from their shelves. Marc Prensky has posted an essay that discusses the uses of flight simulators by the terrorists in learning to fly a 757. “Now that we have seen their formidable power used for evil, it is our duty and obligation to turn these same powerful, learning tools to as many good and positive uses as possible,” said Prensky. “This clearly includes the task of fighting terrorism in all its forms.” More here…

Also see the essay, “Video Games and the Attack on America” published by Marc Prensky, author of the book Digital Game-Based Learning and master of twitchspeed.com, a portal devoted to the topic of games as educational tools.

Photo Phones and Customer-Centricity
“Researchers from Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP) are working to help realize a futuristic wireless world with a 10-gigabyte hard drive the size of your thumbnail. While such things won’t be on the shelf next year, other companies are repackaging current technologies to see what consumers really will buy when that future arrives.”

“There’s a lot of emphasis on ‘how can you take the existing technology and make it better,’ rather than waiting for the next big thing,” says Rob Hayes, director of Palm Ventures.

[Read: we’re finally getting the fact that we must align our products and services with real customers’ needs.] Now lets hope they don’t repeat past mistakes with an intermediate technology. In some ways an economic slowdown could force companies to look more closely at their customers. We’ll see. More here…

Email on the Rise
IDC estimates that the number of person to person emails will hit 36 billion worldwide by the end of 2005. The IDC also predicts that 50 percent of all email accounts will be accessed through browsers and that the number of email mailboxes will exceed 1.2 billion during the same time period, up from 505 million in 2000. More here…

Search Engine Optimization Strategies
“When designing your Web site pages, especially the home page, pay particular attention to the content of the page. While images, fancy technologies like Java, Flash, and sound help with conveying the brand and culture of your company, they do not help with getting good placement in search engine results. Today, the words that appear, on the home page, in ‘clean’ html (paragraph tags), play an ever increasing role in determining your position in search engine results,” stated Coll. Read more…

Practice What We Preach
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy, we here in the United States have the opportunity to show the world how we (Native Americans, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Baha�is, Hindus, Atheists and Agnostics) can live, work and pray together in peace. Before all else we must first be an example to world–right here at home.