UX travels

Abstract

Designers generally use human-centred design (HCD) methods to gain insights on the needs of the people they are designing for, and keep focus on these needs when creating solutions. In keeping with this focus, designers use their insights on User Experiences (UX) when making design-decisions.
The focus of human-centred design expanded in the last decades from designing user-friendly products to designing a system of products and services (PSS) that provide good user experiences (UX). In a PSS design process, many actors and disciplines are involved: various professionals with different values depending on their expertise in the process of product design, service design, or business development. Put differently, PSS design can be seen as a networked process with many actors involved who are potential design decision makers in addition to the design professionals. Next to designers, e.g., product managers, marketeers, and service engineers make design-decisions that influence how products and services will be experienced. These design decision makers seem not to continue using the earlier gained UX-insights in decision making. As a result, changes on the original design are made that reduce UX quality.
This research addresses the challenge of supporting design decision makers to continue the use of UX insights in networked design projects. The main research question guiding the research is what designers can do to prevent UX insights from getting lost in a networked design process. The research addresses this main question by exploring how and where UX insights get lost in networked design projects, and what barriers and opportunities can be identified to make networked design a human-centred project.