Experience Design is an area of the creative industry that can be very hard to understand and fully comprehend its function. Ironically, is the area of design that I feel more attracted to since its studies consumer demands and find solutions for their needs.
According to Wikipedia, XD is a term used to describe a design that is driven by consideration of the moments of engagement, or touchpoints, between people and brands, and the ideas, emotions, and memories that these moments create. Commercial experience design is also known as experiential marketing, customer experience design, and brand experience. Experience designers are often employed to identify existing touchpoints and create new ones, and then to score the arrangement of these touchpoints so that they produce the desired outcome.
XD is often mentioned in articles and in the industry along with User Experience (UX). The two works together, along with other areas of design, to build the concept, create and deliver the experience to the audience. Whereas XD is a more broad concept and focuses on the context of the brand and overall customers' feelings, UX Design relates to the process of enhancing user’s satisfaction with a product by improving usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in interacting with the product.
UX Design | source
Now, what do we need to know or have in order to build strong XD concepts? A nice way to understand the skills needed to work as a UX designer is by researching what companies' expectations on the professional and also by researching design communities.
Skills are often categorized into Soft Skills and Formal/Hard Skills. On one hand, soft skills are skills and abilities that are much harder to measure and blurry to define. These are interpersonal skills that help people get along with each other and collaborate. On the other hand, hard skills are those talents and abilities that can be measured. They are usually specific to a particular job, and they can be learned through schooling or on-the-job training.
Soft Skills UX Designers need
1. Empathy: UX design leads with users in mind. You’ll need to investigate and completely understand the motivations, anxieties, needs, and problems of the people who will use your design. If you want the result to be functional and meaningful, it needs to be built with empathy. Forget about yourself. Listen to and understand what your users want.
2. Organization: UX design is like a puzzle. You can’t miss a single piece of research if you want it to be complete. Put all of those (user research) pieces together in a way that makes the most sense for the goal of the product, and you’ll have a successful design. Good organization is essential to get you there.
3. Curiosity: UX designers need to stay curious. If you want to discover that last piece to your UX design puzzle that ties everything together in harmony, a certain amount of curiosity is needed. This means you need to be comfortable in challenging assumptions and looking for alternative solutions to those that seem the most logical.”
Hard Skills UX Designers need
• UX Research
• Wireframing & prototyping
• Visual communication
• Interactive design
• Design thinking
• User flows
• Interaction design
• Testing designs
• Decision mapping
• Information architecture
• Mood boarding
• Visual & UI design
• Coding—up for debate, more on this later
• Wireframing & prototyping
• Visual communication
• Interactive design
• Design thinking
• User flows
• Interaction design
• Testing designs
• Decision mapping
• Information architecture
• Mood boarding
• Visual & UI design
• Coding—up for debate, more on this later
It’s not easy to conquer all of these UX design skills, and it’s certainly not easy to become an expert in all of them. But we can always research and take courses to build up our set of skills!