Valorem Visions 2.18 – Experience Design

In this episode, our design expert, Charlie Barr discusses his vision of how UX Design and design thinking are coming together to create a more holistic Experience Design methodology for the new year.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Charlie Barr. I'm a design manager at Valorem Reply and my Valorem Vision is around experience design as a practice.

So, in the new year and this is something that we're already not necessarily rebranding in the app Innovations group, where we're really positioning ourselves around experience design. In experience design, and I'll briefly go through, there are so many different design terms that are thrown around. So, one quote I do love and that is, “if you make stuff or if you're involved in making stuff, experience is an unavoidable outcome, whether you intentionally design for it or not. And the trend was more to design thinking and UX design or user experience design. Now there's no issue with UX design, there's no issue with design thinking, but UX design as understood in the industry it's sort of.. it's the breadth and depth of methods and disciplines that make up sort of this applied design for surfaces. So if you if we're looking at flat surfaces, the goys, flatscreen design. With Experience design, this is a bit broader and what is really looking at doing is, looking at the people that the products are serving and trying to get a more holistic view. UX design would do that also but this is really trying to understand not just how people interact with a product that's being designed and built but also having a better understanding of what's going on in their lives around them. Day in the Life, what other products are they using. At the same time, how does it impact them in different types of environments. A good example of experience design would be working with a leading Aerospace manufacturer. Covid hit and Pilots that I talked with, they weren't using our client's product but they're using a different product. But what they found was, they learned to use the product as best they could when they're using it frequently. Then Covid hit and then next thing you know, they're not flying as much and when they return back to that product after a few weeks, they all of a sudden didn't know where to go. They didn't understand how to navigate through the application as well as they did before. And part of that's because we look at frequency of use and the more that we understand the environment if we know something's going to interrupt the frequency of use then we have to make sure that we're creating something as usable as possible. So so that way even if they come back to it at a later date it will be just as intuitive as it is when they're using it today. And another would be the idea of talking with mechanics and even looking at products that seem to be user friendly, there was a lot of navigation, a lot of layers and what we had found talking with the mechanics is that they are operating in different weather conditions, high stress environments have to turn the planes around they're using multiple products at the same time. So there's a lot of content, Tech switching. So, it's really understanding what does it mean from multitasking. So we have to understand the mechanics world during that day, what are they dealing with and then we need to ensure that in the product that we're designing that when they look away from it for four minutes they come back they have a clear understanding where they're at with the product. So if the trend is around experience design and experience design is a practice we've already shifting over to using the terminology and really outlining our direction with experience design. So part of it's going to be messaging and the other is some of the key areas just the investment for arms put into other key areas that are really supported under experience design and that is immersive AR VR. Especially in, you know, augmented reality world, you have to overlay digital content onto the real world. This is something that goes beyond UX or traditional screen design. You emphasis on context with augmented reality. Is it distracting? Are we creating a dangerous environment, hand gestures, eye tracking, hand-held devices. Things like the hierarchy how to guide a person's attention when they are looking at their entire world around them and that is where we're trying to direct the users to accomplish a task. Other areas that really fall under the experience design umbrella would be designing for AI which is sort of … there's going to be unconventional approaches to design which will take a tremendous amount of knowledge about the user creating the personas going through and testing out Solutions will be inventing a lot of design solutions. And then also when it comes to the work that we're doing… a lot of our clients, they may come to us and they're going to have a need for a design of a system. So this could be just a backend system, but we still need to understand who's going to be interacting with it. So we may not be doing the actual screen design but we need to understand the users, so there's a number of areas that we're already working in that fall under the experience design umbrella.