What is Experience Design?

It seems like experience design has been a trending topic of interest amongst people recently, but experience design has always been part of our lives without us even realizing it. In fact, experience design is everywhere—whether it be at a customer call center, a mobile app, or even at your local restaurant.

Experience is defined as how someone’s feelings during said experience can alter his or her future outcomes, memories and insights. And because we live under such a time constrained age, businesses have been evolving more than ever to match and satisfy our needs as customers.

Companies are now realizing the importance of experience design to prioritize customer’s journeys if they want to continually retain or bring more customers into using their services. Initially viewed as a cost-center, experience design is now seen as a revenue generator. In fact, organizations can discover solutions that are tailored to customer needs which will eventually provide opportunities for design to bring more ROI to the table. And after going through a series of testing and alterations, experience design can gain customer insight and minimize risk associated with innovation. With this realization in mind, companies are trying to understand and discover where their customers find value.

To achieve such goal, your organization could work on creating an environment that fosters creativity and innovation amongst your workers while properly training your employees about human-centered approach to design regardless of which department they belong to. By eliminating silos, your organization already has a much more diverse team to provide an inclusive experience to a much more diverse customer base. And once your organization start engaging such strategic talent, it can only help generate “customer-centric, cultural movement” driven by design.

However, most companies often struggle in transferring over an easy user experience because they fail to break out of the traditional business thinking shell. They often will differentiate “design thinking” and “business thinking”, but it is critical for all departments across the organization to learn how they can all contribute to the “design and delivery of the holistic customer journey.” And most importantly, this whole process will require patience. Transformation cannot just happen overnight, but it is something that will take time to truly see the results of long-term innovation.

Check here to learn more about the basics of experience design!