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In this week’s Radar Podcast episode, I talk with Mary Treseler, director of strategic content at O’Reilly, about our new investigation into experience design and how it’s shaping our future. Treseler notes a couple of key factors driving the investigation:
“What I’m seeing here and what I’ve been watching is the focus move from technology to design. Experience design or interaction design has always been around, but there are a couple of factors that are really pushing it into the spotlight. One being that we’re seeing more widespread support of design as a corporate asset, as something that could be a competitive advantage to businesses. The other is the Internet of Things, looking at the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, and what that means for designers and how they can impact the future.”
Treseler calls out two main components in the emerging design space — experience design and empathy — that are setting the foundation for what really is a tangible shift in design processes and our approaches to design:
“Experience design is interesting. I view experience design as this umbrella of looking at a user’s experience holistically. So, whether you’re online or offline, a connection of the two is the umbrella by which we all live. I think the design community is full of different names for things, but experience design to me means any interaction, whether it’s human to device and or device device to human.
“Empathy is a word that’s getting a lot of play in different communities these days. I think the reason for that is the focus on the user and knowing that you need to know your user in order to create products that they need. But it’s not just about knowing the user. It’s really about understanding and feeling what their pain points are and what it is they need.”
As the design space begins to shift, and companies start to recognize its fundamental importance to products and services — an importance that extends well beyond what a product looks or feels like — designers are finding more opportunities at earlier stages of development.
“We’re starting to see that designers have a voice outside of their own departments…they are now part of early product meetings, for instance,” says Treseler. “They’re finding a seat at the table with management, with their engineering and business counterparts — I really think it’s a great time to be a designer.”
Also in this podcast…
O’Reilly director of online content Mac Slocum talks with Trina Chiasson, co-founder and CEO of Infoactive, about typography in visualizations and the state of maturity in the visualization space. Chiasson also shares interesting insights into the question of whether everyone should learn to code.
You can listen to the podcast in the player embedded above or download it through SoundCloud or iTunes.