Xperience This!

Xperience This is the new company blog of MISI’s Experience Design (XD) group. Its purpose is to create a place where our employees can share their experiences and insights about their craft: the design of interactive experiences that align the needs and desires of the audience with the business needs of the companies we work for.

Among the questions I anticipate many readers having are: 1) What is Experience Design? and 2) Why should I care?

Wikipedia provides a serviceable answer to the first question. I’ll paraphrase here adding a few edits based on my own language bias. Experience design (XD) is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the entire experience and the facilitation of the desired outcome.

XD methodologies help a business answer three fundamental questions any time it sets out to evaluate or to develop an interaction with its audience: Who is my audience, really? What are they trying to achieve? How can I help them achieve it? The answers to these questions form the foundation of the solutions we design and develop.

Why should you care? XD is founded on the principle that business success is directly dependent upon the successful interactions among the business and its various audiences. These audiences can include customers, employees, partners or vendors. Experience has shown us that understanding what your audience wants to achieve and how they can best achieve it empowers a business to focus its interaction design on facilitating the achievement of those desired outcomes.

Take, for example, the XD exercise of creating detailed personas or profiles of target audience members. A large pharmaceutical client of ours used this technique to help guide the development of communications and training required for an international change mangement initiative. A recent article in the NY Times describes how Ford Motor Company used personas to drive the design of the 2010 Fiesta, Ford’s best selling car in Europe and number 2 seller overall.

Most of MISI’s current XD customers know of us by the handle UX, for User Experience. Why have we changed our initials? Because user experience is a subset of experience design that focuses on human-computer interaction. We’ve broadened the application of our research and design skills to include interactions that do not necessarily take place with a computer interface, such as the aforementioned change management engagement or a hospital way finding study.

We welcome you and your comments to Xperience This. As much as we want to share what we’re thinking, doing and learning, we want to hear what you think. To this end, it is not a daily diary. If you choose to participate you won’t receive alerts of new posts more than a few times each month. Our motto is if you don’t have anything to post that has value, don’t post anything at all.

So, welcome: we hope you find this a rewarding Xperience.