This chapter addresses the following questions:

• What is the experience design process?
• How does experience design fit into the broader product development process?

We tend to think of processes as linear entities, just like stories--with a beginning, an arc of action, and an end--in our case, a successful finished product. Indeed, from a bird's eye view, experience design fits this model well, neatly positioned as the middle phase of the overall product development process:

There is practically an endless variety of products in the world--physical, digital, and hybrids. Zooming in on each phase of the overall development process reveals a spectrum of variation just as wide. The fact is that a single unifying approach to design process does not, and probably cannot, exist. Understanding how experience design processes fit into the flow of product design is like putting together an intricate puzzle—arranging an interplay of motivations, objectives, constraints, stakeholders, practitioners, users, methodologies, and tools--in and across phases.

There are, however, common approaches and methods that evolved over time, and have been continuously refined and reinvented by each generation of designers. Without this vitality, mass production would not be possible. Still, participants in the design process often feel as if they are the first ones to go through the journey. The reason for this is that in product design, doing everything right has never guaranteed product success, just as doing things wrong has not necessarily negated the possibility of big commercial success for a poorly designed product. Of course, this contradicts the basic premise according to which repeating a process formula should lead to consistent outcomes. The following key points should be kept in mind while exploring the evolution of design as a function of product development:

• Design processes have evolved over millennia, both instigating and in direct response to major social and technological changes, such as the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions.
• Changes that took decades or even centuries to take effect can now occur in months and weeks. To keep up and, better yet, to thrive, product owners, designers, and developers are motivated to experiment and evolve their methods and processes.
• The faster the process, the more critical it is for all participants in the process to collaborate effectively. This drives the formation of multi-disciplinary teams and rapid iterative design processes, which are informed by continuous team communication and ongoing feedback from real users.

Although this chapter looks at physical products, many of the events and examples described here are equally relevant for experience design of software-driven tech products. Technological innovations have increased the significance of experience in the products they made possible in the past as well as recently, as is the case with the internet and smart mobile devices. As a consequence Design has emerged as a critical element that unifies the entire lifecycle of a product.