Experience Design as a discipline becomes reality through the people and organizations that actually focus on designing experiences instead of just products and services. That’s why it is always interesting when companies share their experiences and knowledge about experience design.

Adobe recently launched a new website and publication with the name INSPIRE.

This site will help us get that message [about the importance of “experience” in application design] out. But we hope it will do more – that it will also be a valuable resource for everyone who visits. In addition to videos and articles about everything and anything related to experience design, you can also expect to find content produced for MAX, demos, presentations we give here at Adobe, interviews with industry leaders who visit us, and more. We chose to name the site Inspire because that’s what we hope all this content will do – inspire you, our colleagues, customers, and users.

If you have time you should also check out the video "Why are we doing this?" where Chris Heimbuch, XD Practice Lead, and Ty Lettau, XD Design Manager, discuss the whys and wherefores of Inspire.

The challenge of experience design in organizations

Ty Lettau also shares some of the challenges of experience design Adobe and in general in his post titled Why experience?

We have over a hundred designers, researchers, and developers all putting the experience first. This means that our priorities list contains a lot of stuff that isn’t tangible. Experience isn’t measurable. You can sort of evaluate it in the abstract or rely on users saying things like “it’s fun” or “that was easy,” but at the end of the day, there’s no chart that can be drawn to show experience metrics. And that’s the problem. If experience isn’t measurable, then how do we know what it costs? How do we value the cost of creating a good experience, and how do we know the cost of not doing so?

By contrast, Adobe has around 7000 employees. Save a few extra hundred who really understand and fight on behalf of the experience, this leaves roughly 6500 people who have priorities that are measurable. Shipping on time, being free of bugs, making profits, etc… Each of these agenda items is tangible. At the end of the day, these things can be measured with numbers and charts. Their cost is known. The costs of not shipping on time, or having to release a patch to fix a major problem, are clear.

I do not mean to suggest that these people and their agendas are wrong, or evil in any way. But those are terrible numbers to be stacked against when you cannot really defend your position. Experience design is much like a religious or political debate… Easy to assault, impossible to defend.

Frank statements from Adobe and the role of experience design within the organization. Is this a unique problem to Adobe? I don’t think so, but it also shows that even though experience design becomes prevalent in more and more organization a lot of questions remain:

• Where does experience design fit in an organization and how can you make it measurable?
• How can you measure the “process” of experience design and not just the “outcomes”?
• Do we need to measure the process at all?

I am trying to answer a few of these questions as part of my research, if you have an opinion about these topics, let me know in the comments.