Knowledge Hub
The rise of experience design
Using experience design to understand the user’s needs, emotions and motivations
What is experience design?
Experience design is a multidisciplinary approach to creating meaningful, engaging and memorable interactions between people and products, services or spaces. It’s the art of crafting amazing customer journeys that leave a lasting impression. Whether it’s a website, an app, a physical product or a service, the goal of experience design is to create an unforgettable encounter that delights the person using it. It’s about creating an emotional connection with the user, making them feel valued and giving them a sense of purpose.
Why does experience design matter?
Making things look good is only part of the capability of experience design; it’s not just about creating a visually appealing website or a user-friendly app. It’s about understanding both the digital and physical customer journey from start to finish and creating a meaningful experience tailored to customers’ needs and expectations. It involves a deep understanding of their motivations, emotions and behaviours and crafting a journey that meets their needs while delivering value to the business.
Experience design is important for a number of reasons:
- Increased satisfaction: a well-designed experience can increase user satisfaction, leading to increased engagement and loyalty. When users have a positive experience with a product or service, they are more likely to recommend it to others, so increasing brand awareness and driving growth.
- Improved experience: experience design focuses on creating a seamless and intuitive user experience, making it easier for users to achieve their goals. This can lead to increased efficiency, reduced frustration and improved overall satisfaction.
- Increased revenue: experience design can lead to increased revenue by improving conversion rates, reducing bounce rates and increasing customer lifetime value. A well-designed experience can make a big difference in how users perceive a brand and their willingness to make a purchase.
- Competitive advantage: experience design can help businesses to differentiate themselves from its competitors, creating a unique and memorable experience that sets them apart. By focusing on experience design, businesses can create a competitive advantage and gain a loyal customer base.
What does experience design involve?
- Insights: the first step in experience design is to truly understand what the customer is thinking, feeling and doing. This involves researching their needs, behaviours, motivations and pain points. This information is then used to understand their journeys and missions, which help to define the target audience and success metrics for the experience.
- Design thinking: this is a problem-solving approach that involves understanding the user’s needs, exploring different solutions, and prototyping and testing ideas. Design thinking helps to create a user-centred design that addresses needs and meets expectations.
- Prototyping: this is the process of creating a working model of a design concept. This can be a physical prototype, a wireframe or a functional prototype that allows users to test and provide feedback on the design.
- Testing: user testing is the process of evaluating a design with real users. This helps to identify any usability issues and provides valuable insights into the user’s experience. User testing can be conducted in person, online or using remote tools.
- Iteration: based on the feedback from user testing, the design can be iterated and improved. This process is repeated until the design meets the user’s needs and expectations.
It starts and ends with people
One of the key elements of experience design is empathy. Empathy involves putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. It’s about understanding what they want to achieve and designing an experience that helps them achieve it.
In addition to being simple and consistent, a well-designed experience should also be engaging. Engagement involves creating an experience that is emotionally impactful, memorable and meaningful. It’s about creating a connection with the customer that goes beyond the functional aspects of the given product and/or service being experienced.
If you start with the statement “I’ve had a great tech idea”, then you’ve potentially missed the opportunity to create meaningful, human-centred change. Experience design can be seen in many different products and services, from websites and apps to physical products and services. At Linney, we think beyond digital. We take a holistic, inclusive and accessible approach. We believe good design is for everyone. We start with what people are thinking, feeling and doing.
Customer expectations continue to rise
In today’s world, customers expect a seamless, personalised experience, and companies that fail to deliver can quickly lose market share. As we look to the future, one thing is apparent: as customers continue to raise the bar for great experiences, it will be critical for businesses to respond with insight-led creativity that gets results.
To better meet and exceed the expectations of their customers and colleagues, businesses will need to be both creative thinkers and problem solvers. Above all, they’ll need to evolve creative ways to inspire their teams, boost efficiency and improve their services by aligning their people, processes and technology.
So, what’s our capability?
We create engaging experiences that get results. Our strategic recommendations, inspired by customer and colleague insights, are helping to transform our clients’ businesses. Our specialist Experience Design team provides data-driven design recommendations and strategic thinking across four tightly connected design disciplines:
If you have an idea for a new product or service concept, or maybe an experience that you’d like to radically improve, contact our Experience Design team. We’d love to help with your next challenge. Get in touch.
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