University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Designing Experiences
Book

Designing Experiences

J. Robert Rossman Ph.D. and Mathew D. Duerden Ph.D.
Columbia UP, 2019
Buy book or audiobook

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×

Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

This well-structured and well-designed guide to experience design assembles more than a decade of hard-knocks learning into one dense, brief volume. By providing readers with a framework for creating exceptional and memorable experiences around events, product, services and work, the authors fill an enormous gap in the literature. While most leaders have heard about the experience economy and may appreciate the importance of customer and employee experience, few have any idea how to design meaningful experiences.

Summary

Leaders increasingly tout the “experience economy” – the importance of weaving meaningful, memorable experiences into the customer and employee journey.

Customers and employees today often look beyond price, features or wages to the experience a product, service or work assignment provides. Firms may go so far as to appoint a Chief Experience Officer; yet many don’t know precisely what they expect this executive to do. Little guidance exists on how to design remarkable experiences.

More than ever, people and employees seek easy-to-use, engaging, attractive and functional products. Diners seek full sensory restaurant experiences, where the music, decor, wait staff uniforms, smells and tastes all come together to transport them. Employees expect to build on their competencies, feel appreciated and develop real relationships with their co-workers. To accomplish these things you must intentionally and painstakingly design them.

Great experience designers think through a series of diverse microexperiences that combine to create the macroexperience.

Experiences must do more than hold people’s attention. Like ...

About the Authors

Professors J. Robert Rossman and Mathew D. Duerden have focused their careers, research and teaching on the art and science of experience design.

Comment on this summary