My Review of "X: The Experience When Business Meets Design ."

5 out of 5 stars....

X: The Experience When Business Meets Design takes the reader into a step by step process to understand how businesses should develop or transform their brand to equate to an experience, rather than just performing a function. Welcome to the Experience Economy. Coca Cola was one of the first to successfully embody it, by tailoring its ads not to just being a carbonated beverage, but associating it with fun and happiness. Think, too, of Disney taking one on a fantasy trip and Disneyland being the "happiest place on earth." The ultimate, as the book infers, being Steve Jobs and Apple, where art and technology intersect to bring customers to need functions they never before thought they needed or wanted.

It details an Experience Architecture when the customer shares the experience with the brand, Coke and Nike being examples. It is important to get into the user's point of view, to emphasize. It is also important to discard legacy philosophies and visualize the experience. We are now in a digital world and as Banksy might think, digital graffiti.

And the book explains that the customer experience is not linear, but a collection of moments
of truth, it calls ZMOT, FMOT, SMOT and UMOT....the bottom line being it is complicated

This complexity can create a Circle of Rife within a company, basically a soloing of opinions
The book quotes Leo Tolstoy, "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one wants to change
himself," as wise to ponder to overcome this problem. So, the team must "think differently," then come up with a plan. Further, this plan should be broken into "grids." This visualization will lead to an omnichannel design, several points in grids leading to desining how to fully understand the customer. The challenge for a company, being to move from managing to designing, a collaborative process, the book breaks down as 3Ds, evolving to a human centered design, it calls UCX, user centered experience, and eventually gets to UX, human experience. It really is about people and p2p, people communicating with people. The book even brings up some futuristic films, specifically, Inception, where dreams of one person are implanted in another person to let that person build on the creativity of the previous person. This collaborative designing is similar, cross breeding of ideas. The author also advocates having an anthropologist on the team to ensure the design focuses on humans using the latest understandings.

So human centered, that the process should come up with a story, amplified visually with storyboards.

I recommend the book, an easy read for a reader just interested to learn what the Experience Economy is, a more intensive read for a reader wanting to implement it at their company.