Book

I wrote a book! The title is: Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love.

Here’s what it’s about (from the Introduction):

“Visitors to an organization’s digital space don’t want to think about interacting with its website. They want to — quickly and easily — make a purchase, find information, or do research. It helps if they can be engaged and enchanted in the process. How can we facilitate this excellent experience? It’s all about intentional design.

Consider the concept of “experience design.” Nathan Shedroff describes it as designing the “sensation of interaction with a product, service, or event, through all of our senses, over time, and on both physical and cognitive levels.”1 Simply stated, experience design is “an approach to creating successful experiences for people in any medium.”2

Designing digital experience is similar, yet unique. That’s because in a digital space, experience designers have to “compensate for the absence of a sales professional who stands ready to greet customers as they arrive [and] to cheerfully help them accomplish their goal.”3

This book introduces digital experience design for websites. I have seen great information on parts and pieces of experience design. For example, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, does a great job of exploring experience generally but really doesn’t focus on digital experiences. Other books are great at helping improve the user experience on websites but miss the broader picture of designing digital experiences. This book connects the dots. It explains how website structure, community, and customers are all parts of the total digital experience.” (Read the rest of the introduction).

Want more? There are a couple of places you can follow along with book happenings and thoughts related to the book:

• This page – I’ll update it with important stuff as needed
• My blog – I’ll mark all related posts with the digitalexperience category
• A Facebook page for the book
• the publisher’s page for the book
• The Amazon page for the book