XDF was created to be used. Yes, it’s fun to taxonomize and map things to gain greater understanding—I’m a big fan. However, XDF is designed as a tool to complete activities and accomplish goals.
Experience Design Factors for Research
Experience designers often conduct field research to discover people’s needs, values, and preferences for design. This work involves observations, interviews, and surveys to gain insights. XDF helps guide research into contexts, people, and design—helping researchers use a wide range of lenses when they study experience design scenes.
Experience Design Factors for Designing
Experience Design is media-agnostic. Designers do not assume that an app or a service will be designed from the start. Instead, they identify what feelings and experiences should be facilitated, and then they select what types of design outcomes would best achieve these goals. XDF helps designers consider a wide range of people’s real and perceived sensations and how outcomes can be designed to make them happen.
Experience Design Factors for Teaching
Traditional design privileges the artifact—a poster, a typeface, an app—as the impetus of the design process. Emphasizing artifacts often means that people’s uniqueness and contextual factors can be neglected. Experience design expands the concerns for design beyond the artifact and usability. XDF helps educators and learners consider a broad spectrum of factors that shape people’s experiences and design in experience design scenes.
Components of Experience Design Scenes
Whenever a person completes an activity, three components interact on stage: context, people, and objects. Contexts are unchangeable settings that surround people when they use designed outcomes. People are experiencers—their identities and relational selves frame how they interact with design and others. Design is the product, service, or system people use to complete activities.
The makeup of each component in an experience design scene shapes how it affects the complete experience. Factors of a context, such as weather, can make people feel uncomfortable, or factors of objects, like small typography on a menu, can make them difficult to use in low light. Careful attention to each component is needed if designers hope to create a relevant and meaningful design.
