DDE

Two Great Book Reviews of Designing the Digital Experience

by David Lee King on December 11, 2008

Designing the Digital Experience was reviewed!Book News and The Tech Static recently mentioned my book, Designing the Digital Experience – cool! Book News said the book is “for web developers who are looking to enhance the customer’s experience with ordering and browsing online, stressing the fact that Internet consumers are looking for a pleasant and positive shopping environment as well as bargains.”

And The Tech Static wrote a great review. They said the book “is an entertaining introduction to web design, usability, and Web 2.0 for the beginner, as well as a stimulus for those with previous experience.”

Go read both – then buy lots of the books… they make great stocking stuffers :-)

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Excerpt of Chapter 5 up at Webjunction

by David Lee King on November 16, 2008

my book arrivedWebJunction recently excerpted chapter 5 of my new book in this article: Designing the Digital Experience: What is Community?

Here’s an excerpt of the excerpt:

Chapter 5 – What Is Community Focus?

What exactly is community focus, and how does it facilitate experiences in the digital space? To answer these questions, let’s consider what community focus means in the context of physical spaces, such as in a town hall meeting. In such meetings, people are focusing on one another: listening, sharing opinions, and discussing community needs. This type of interaction allows community members to voice opinions and concerns, providing a voice for the community. In this context, we can say community focus is an emphasis on participants’ ideas, concerns, and interactions.

The town hall meeting is just one example; people obviously hold many different types of meetings, from religious gatherings to departmental business meetings to family reunions. We tend to think meetings are important. Why is that? Because we find conversation important, and meeting together facilitates conversation.

Conversation inherently facilitates something else, too. It allows us to interact with members of our community with whom we wouldn’t normally interact or even know. This type of interaction allows us to feel as if we are participating in the “grand scheme of things.” The challenge, then, is to usher community into our digital space.

Go read the rest of the excerpt (or buy the book :-) ).

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Podcast about Designing the Digital Experience

by David Lee King on October 11, 2008

Sarah Long, Director of the North Suburban Library System, interviewed me a couple weeks ago about my book, Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love on her Longshots podcast series (part of the Library Beat blog).

Give it a listen!

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Designing the Digital Experience: Chapter 1

by David Lee King on October 8, 2008

my book arrivedMy book has been reported in the wild! Someone told me via twitter that she’d received my book, Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love, from Amazon a few days ago – so that’s cool.

What else is cool? How about giving you chapter 1? Here’s a snippet:

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Experience Economy

“What’s my daughter playing on the computer this evening? Oh, she’s on the American Girl site, and she’s playing Kaya’s Catch of the Day. She also sent an American Girl ecard to her cousin and looked at this year’s new doll. We receive American Girl catalogs and magazines in the mail and check out the latest books from the library. We even visited American Girl Place in Chicago last winter as a birthday surprise (the girls and mom watched a musical, had ate a party, and shopped, while my son and I checked out the science museum and LEGO Store).

What’s going on here? Why is my daughter so into this stuff? Because American Girl is all about the experience. It focuses on the fun of exploring and living as a girl in America’s past. The American Girl people are engaging their market in creative ways -  specifically targeting grade school and middle school girls. They know how to delight their customers. I know – I’ve seen my daughter’s smiles. As we continue to think about experience, let’s consider the experiences of a trip to an amusement park and the purchase of a computer.”

Want more? Here’s the rest of chapter 1!

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Designing the Digital Experience: the Foreword

by David Lee King on September 19, 2008

Designing the Digital ExperienceDavid Armano, the guy who writes the Logic + Emotion blog, was kind enough to write the foreword to my new book, Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love.

Want to see a sample of it? Here’s one paragraph: “So if you went out and bought this book, you’re heading in the right direction. The reason why social networks are such a big deal these days is that they act as both the great equalizer and amplifier. Customers who have a crappy experience with a company’s products or services now have a virtual arsenal of communication methods to be heard.  Often times the search engine’s powerful algorithms (Google) finds their content and links to their complaints.  When a certain “power consumer” couldn’t cancel his AOL account despite several pleas with the voice on the other end of the phone, he decided to take matters into his own hands and record the horrendous experience.  What resulted was a PR nightmare for AOL that started online, gained momentum and was quickly reported on several national news stations. What starts digital becomes something much bigger, and it all starts with an experience.”

David has a bit more on his blog … so this is still a teaser – you’ll need to get the book to read the rest!

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My New Book: Designing the Digital Experience

by David Lee King on September 12, 2008

Designing the Digital ExperienceI wrote a book! The title is: Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love. It should be out this October.

What’s the book about? Here’s a snippet 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:

Bear with me – I’ll be posting book-related updates (along with my usual posts) for the next couple of months. I’m excited about it! More later…

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