All Experience Design disciples share common themes that help drive the development of each individual discipline towards a unified and holistic experience approach.

The following are themes that are common to all Experience Design disciplines:

• Context: Focus on creating a good, positive emotional experience that is intended for real people, as opposed to impersonal categories such as 'consumers', 'buyers' or 'customers'. Context involved an awareness of and adaptation to personal and social experiences, communities and cultures, global and local, public and private, biases and stereotypes.
• Purpose & Scope: How complex is the design problem we are looking to solve? Is it a global application meant to serve a wide and diverse audience, or a very targeted one? Does the design need to scale and grow?
• Efficiency: Balancing the needs of the experience, with environmental and sustainability concerns. How to create more with less? How to simplify without losing track of complexities that are important to the user? Often in design, 'less is more'.
• Methods: Multi-disciplinary collaboration, fast-paced iterative cycles of design, validation and refinement of concepts, anticipation of emerging trends and technologies and their incorporation into the evolving design.
• Research: The ethical means of knowing what people needs and wants from a product. Measuring the experiences of individuals without infringing on their dignity and privacy. Assessing the cascading effects of social media on the experiences of the individual.