Principles of Experience Design, The Series - Introduction

Q: What do Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Ray Nitschke, Tim Allen, and Winky Dink have in common?




A: They were all part of Categories of Fun and Experience Design, a post I was really proud of writing, but which has never generated any traffic. That's a shame, because it's a darned good primer on experience design. I guess there's just not a lot of call for information by that name. The funny thing is that I get lots of traffic from searches for "customer delight", leading to The Theory and Practice of Customer Delight in a Nutshell.

Why is that funny? Because customer delight is all about experience design! The latter post talks about creating surprise as the key to delight, but doesn't say how. Categories of Fun provides a set of tools for doing just that, but remains an undiscovered treasure, like the Rosetta Stone prior to Bonaparte's arrival in Egypt.



My post Mini Confectioner's Haggis - A Tale of Experience Design was actually about designing THREE experiences:

1. Pot luck attendees'
2. My own in creating a dish
3. Yours in reading the post

In this series of blog posts, we will explore the principles and tools you can use to design experiences, using the 3 Mini Confectioner's Haggis experiences as examples.

This series will answer the questions:

• What kinds of experiences can I design?
• What secrets can I learn from game designers?
• What is the difference between process design and experience design?
• How do I design for customer delight?
• What does Harry Potter have to do with all this?

and more! (We take requests, too.)