What is it that makes experience design different from user interface design? The vast majority of user experience designers out there spend their time worrying about navigation, layout, buttons, fonts, colours and icons – all working at the level of features or capabilities and viewed strictly from the screen or product’s perspective. When asked which design they prefer (or consider to be best) many UX designers will be forced to answer “It depends, on who is trying to do what (and maybe where, why and with whom)”.
Such a cautious answer reflects the common problem that the UX designer is not really designing the UX, but is designing the UI for an (assumed to be) known and understood experience.
But when one starts to look at who is trying to do what (etc), one quickly finds that the experience isn’t well-bounded – just where does the experience start and stop? Do two people doing a task together have the same experience? Where does the experience actually happen (in the world, in the product or in the person’s head)?
These are not just academic or philosophical questions – they go to the heart of what User Experience Design is about, and they catch the key questions about which people are we actually designing for.
The perspectives and stories shared here address these kinds of questions … and reach the conclusion that experience is almost always infinite, reaching outwards through other people and other products into numerous other experiences. The goal of defining an experience strategy for a product (service, etc) is to examine this infinity and reach agreement on the boundaries for the current design process.
