The role of an Experience Designer

Experience is everything. As humans, we connect and grow through the experiences that we have and share. Therefore, creating experiences that are meaningful, valuable, and drive engagement is key for any business, whether the experience is targeted customers, employees, or users.

What is Experience Design?

To understand what an Experience Designer is and does, it’s important first of all to understand what Experience Design actually is.

Experience Design is the experience a user (e.g. a customer or employee) goes through when interacting with a product, event, or service. The Experience Design has a direct influence on how pleasing a product is to use.

Experience Design is about the feelings, influence, memories, and perceptions the user has when interacting with the product or service. In other words, it’s about achieving a desired impact on the end-user.
To create an experience that the end-user finds valuable and relevant, one needs to understand and discover what the end-user finds value in.

A growing concept

Experience Design is a concept and a skill that is growing in importance for businesses and organisations these days. What sets us apart from competition in the future is not just a question of product or service features, but also a question of the experience that the user goes though when interacting with the specific product/service.

That experience must be relevant, valuable, and meaningful and not least unique – something less easy to replicate and digitalise.

For instance, it is not just about how we get from A to B with an aeroplane. It is about how we do it. How the journey come to be from the idea to its fruition and how we feel about it. It is all about enhancing the experience that the user has in all the stages.

What is an Experience Designer?

An Experience Designer is concerned with how the customers, users or employees think, feel and act when interacting with a product or a service, whether it be online or offline. Because of that, an Experience Designer must be involved in all aspects of the development of the product or the service. This includes the design, usability, function, and branding.

In other words, an Experience Designer is a vital part of creating products or services as well as being part of creating the marketing, sales, and customer engagement processes that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to the end-users, regardless of who the end-user is.

No product or service is an island

Today, a product or a service is more than just a product or a service. Businesses must be able to sell experiences. From the moment a customer considers buying a specific product or service the customer experience journey begins and it doesn’t just end when the product or service has been bought.

Therefore, an Experience Designer must consider all the stages, that the customers go through. This includes the initial intentions of buying the product, final reflections, first usage, and maintenance after the purchase. All these stages must work seamlessly and that is the job of an Experience Designer.

Why is Experience Design important?

Products or services that provide a great experience for the user, will have an advantage over similar products and services that do not. If your business is able to create a meaningful, valuable and exciting experience for your customers, the likelihood that you will have success, is far greater than if you were just selling a product without considering the customer journey experience.

Therefore, products should not be designed or manufactured with only it’s consumption or use in mind, but also the entire process of acquiring the product, using it, and even the maintenance and service afterwards should be taken into consideration. In other words, a product or service shouldn’t just be useable, it should be an experience that drive engagement with its end-user in a meaningful way.

What does an Experience Designer do?

An Experience Designer is a person, or a team, who designs meaningful, valuable, and relevant experiences that drives engagement with the end-user. That could be a product or a service, for instance a course, a lecture, or anything else that involves engaging people.

An Experience Designer therefore must be involved in all the processes of creating the product or service to make sure that the product is usable, useful, and enjoyable. That means, that the Experience Designer is involved in everything from the user research before the product is even made, to the design of the product, the testing, and finally the implementation.
In other words, an Experience Designer is responsible for the entire process that a product goes through to make sure that the product is enjoyable, desirable, and useful to the end-user.

Learn how to create purposeful experiences

Are you interested in learning how to design purposeful and meaningful experiences that drive engagement with your end-users? And do you want to become a more confident and effective facilitator and leader by learning the mindsets of Experience Design? In that case, KAOSPILOT’s professional program, Experience Design, is just the right course for you.
In this course, you will learn how to design transformational experiences for you customers, employees, and users. Furthermore, you will learn the foundational experience design tools through rapidly creating experiences yourself.

At the end of the course, you will be able to create a guiding star to navigate you through the complexity of making experiences.

This unique and innovating program is for anyone who dare to ask questions that are needed to create meaningful experiences and want to gain confidence in leading the design process.
During this three-day program you will be working with challenges from the real world that you or your fellow learners bring to the program. All theories used in the course are immediately translated into hands-on exercises to ensure practical understanding.