Experience Design’s Missing Deliverable?
by Leah BuleyLast weekend at the Dwell on Design conference I had a minor revelation when I passed by a collection of sample boards and wondered to myself, why don’t we make deliverables like that?
For those of you who aren’t frustrated DIY decorator types like me, sample boards are used in interior design to convey the general feeling of a space while showing proposed materials, colors, finishes, furniture, etc. They’re a bit like mood boards, except that instead of a general visual design direction, sample boards focus on the real thing – real materials, real layout. Imagine a big poster board covered with floor plans and fabric samples and little tile cutaways and sketches and product images – basically a gestalt of structure, texture, feeling, and visual richness.
There are a lot of deliverables that interior design and experience design do have in common, but as far as I know, there is no equivalent for this type of holistic view in the work that we do. This is a real shortcoming.
At Adaptive Path we talk a lot about how to communicate the feeling and, well, experience in experience design. And yet our deliverables are often focused on very specific aspects of a project – a site architecture, a set of wireframes, a content inventory. These are surely all important things, but rather narrow in purpose. This often puts a burden on our clients to do some mental synthesis to imagine the resulting experience. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t.
Perhaps we could alleviate some of this burden with a sample-board-like deliverable (experience boards, anyone?) that blends structure, design principles, core behaviors, characteristic interactions, and even, maybe, a little bit of feeling. Preferably involving poster board.
I actually think Adaptive Path’s recent movie for Charmr is a good example of a deliverable that brings together feeling, specifications, and experience, but movies like this take some effort to put together. Are there simpler ways to accomplish the same thing with less overhead? Is anybody out there producing deliverables that communicate the gestalt? If so, please share.
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October 7th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
At Ideo they have a ‘videographer’ role which I believe involves bringing to life early-stage design ideas among other things. Cooper have role called ‘Design communicator.’ Not sure what deliverables they use, but I like the idea of design communication being seen as an activity rather than a deliverable.