Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Allurent, Design, Experience Architecture, Experience Design, User Experience
So, what the heck is “Experience Architecture?”
The name came out of my attempt to get rid of the word “design” in what we do when we figure out what a new shopping experience should be like, how it should behave, what it should try to accomplish, what its emotional impact should be, etc, etc, etc. The fact that we used to call the group of people who do this “Allurent Design” made this this task kinda challenging.
The problem with the D-word is that a lot of people seem to have the impression that “Designers” will only go so far in terms of getting their hands dirty in the actual blood and guts of really making an application work, and no further. Designers do Graphic Design, User Interface Design, even User Experience Design, but there’s an assumption out there that when you move beyond static mockups and wireframes, there’s a complete handoff to a different set of skills. The reality, at least in Allurent, is that our “designers” follow their visions all the way through from gathering business requirements to prototyping to launch and beyond. There is, of course, a whole slew of other highly talented project leaders, coders, graphic artists, copy writers, QA specialists, analytics gurus, etc. that team together to launch a new and innovative application, but there’s no conceptual line in the sand.
The other problem with “Design” is that a lot of our clients already have an internal design team or agency of record that handles branding, logos, and imagery, and calling ourselves a design group made their designers wonder if we were going to be competing with them in some way. In fact, we usually end up relying hugely on existing designers and agencies so that our new experiences fit seamlessly within the existing site.
We feel that “Experience Architecture” captures more of the essence of what we do… We like to do a thought exercise when we are creating a new experience of whether shoppers would recognize the application if we replaced all the images and logos with blank “X’s.” I.e. would you know you were using Borders’ magic shelf if you never saw the word “Borders” or saw any books? We focus on the experience itself: how it feels, how the functionality is exposed, what it “says”, what it accomplishes for our client, and what’s changes in a shopper’s mind between when she started and when she finished. It’s “design” in the broader sense of the word, but closer to “architecture” when you mentally separate the way something works and how it’s built from its skin.
Plus we think “xA” will make a cool logo… Too bad we no longer have a design group! 
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