Extracting insights from experience designers to enhance user experience design

Abstract

User Experience (UX) summarizes how a user expects, perceives and assesses an encounter with a product. User Experience Design (UXD) aims at creating meaningful experiences. While UXD is a rather young discipline within product development and traditional processes predominate, other disciplines traditionally focus on creating experiences. We engaged with experience designers from the fields of arts, movies, sports, music and event management. By analyzing their working processes via interviews and observations we extracted triggers that can possibly lead to outstanding experiences in the original disciplines as well as in UXD: incorporating and shaping the atmosphere of interaction, balancing new and established aspects, connecting products with attributes of living beings, providing challenge and competition, enabling inductive and multifaceted learning and interaction processes, and using souvenir artifacts for connecting user and product after usage.