The Fundamentals of Experience Design [3]

For some time, I've described the design of experiences with this potent little phrase:

It's all about People, their Activities, and the Context of those activities.

That's it, really. Whether we are designing a Web app or new office building, simply ask: Who are the people we are designing for? What is the activity (or activities) they are trying to do? And what are the contexts in which they are trying to operate? And 'people' can be an individual or group. It's that simple. On the surface…

Behind every explicit piece of information, we can dive much deeper for a richer understanding of the space in which we are designing. People are much more than users (or markets, prospects, players, stakeholders, or…). An exploration of activities yields more insights than simple task or use case definition. And context is so much more than a device or platform— from the environment we as information architects define to the environmental and economic context in which we work.

It's these ideas that form the basis of my "Fundamentals of Experience Design" Model, which I had the pleasure of unveiling at the recent IA Summit 2009 conference . Think of this as my "grand, unified model" of experience design. Or something like that!

Download The Fundamentals of Experience Design model

(10M print quality pdf file!)

Download The Fundamentals of Experience Design model

(not quite so large 2M png file)