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.