The Experience Design Factors framework (XDF) brings together fundamental concepts from disciplines concerned with understanding human experiences and designing things involved in those experiences. Five levels of factors define components in experience design scenes. Research at the Characteristic and Dynamic levels can produce descriptions of components that can be documented, such as physical size and style. Components’ characteristics and behaviors directly define what they are and how they change. The nature of experience design requires a different kind of seeing to inspect them carefully (Gilmore, 2016). Experience-level factors involve people’s emotions, climate temperature changes, and design affordances.
Factors that comprise people’s experiences live at many levels—some at the surface, others a little further down, and others deeply buried inside contexts, people, and objects. James H. Gilmore’s Look: A Practical Guide for Improving Your Observational Skills challenges readers to use many lenses to observe the world around them. This concept helps study and design experiences. When we put on different lenses, we can better understand contexts, people, and objects within experience design scenes.