EU Experience Lenses

design Method product Project tool user experience ux Service design design thinking

This is the result of my doctoral thesis in Design at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.

You can finde more about this project here:

The EU Experience Lenses is a tool that aims to help designers and project teams analyze the aspects that make up the user experience in the evaluation of products, services, or digital interfaces as a way to generate experience design guidelines. As the Lenses help with the analysis and evaluation of user experience, they can be used both in the development of new projects, analysis of existing products, services, or digital interfaces, and for redesigning processes.

The tool has a user-centered approach and is composed of the four lenses of the Aspects of Experience, and as complementary tools are the Experience Reference Blocks (prepared by the author based on Merino, 2016) and the Experience Mapping Canvas User (drafted by the author based on Kalbach, 2017; Balderson, 2019). The figure below illustrates and summarizes the tool's components.

Components of EU Experience Lenses

The GODP methodology has a user-centered design approach and guides the organization of data and information throughout the project into three Reference Blocks: Product, User, and Context. From this, it is considered that everything that is designed generates an experience from the product-user interaction (ELMANSY, 2014; MERINO, 2016). Thus, the EU Lenses of Experience tool makes use of Reference Blocks, weighing the experience as a result of the joining of the three elements - Product, User, Context. Thus, the tool can be incorporated along with the GODP methodology and uses the internal subdivision in the Product, User, Context, and Experience blocks to organize the information.

There are different diagrams or ways to map the user's journey, as well as their experience (KALBACH, 2017). To address the need identified during the development of the tool to map the user experience, an Experience Mapping Canvas was created based on the experience maps brought by Kalbach (2017) and not Map of the journey of the Balderson's final customer (2019). The canvas created collects information such as Company/Brand analyzed; User information (photo, description, goals, expectations); Main actions of use of the product/service; Descriptions of actions; Physical evidence (points of contact); Emotions / Mood (oscillations between positive, neutral and negative emotions). All this information is isolated in pre-consumption, during consumption, and post-consumption situations.

The Experience Aspects Lenses (physical tool) are structured by two discs:

 Disc 1: serving as a cover for the physical tool containing instructions for use and clippings to facilitate the reading of information regarding each aspect of the experience;
 Disc 2: containing information on the front and back of the disc regarding Aspects of Experience (descriptions, concepts, reference questions, examples).

The two discs are joined at the center by an eyelet that allows the cover disc to rotate on-axis, allowing the tool user to navigate between the four lens aspects of the experience.

On the cover disc (Disc 1) a QR Code was inserted that gives access to an Instagram profile of EU Lentes da Experiência. An Instagram profile was created as a way to complement the updated tool information and improve the tool use process with complementary instructions, examples etc.