As technology advances, experience design is becoming one of the most important aspects of new tech, and a huge determiner of whether or not that tech is successful among consumers. Take the battle between Apple iPhone and Android for example; the user experience is what matters in the end and why most people choose one side or the other. 

You can have all of the greatest innovations in the world, but if your product or service isn’t easy to use, and not aesthetically pleasing, chances are consumers won’t want to use it. 

Experience design, as defined in the book The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence, is “the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions.” So to put it simply, it is creating an experience for the user through technology. That experience can be negative or positive. This experience is usually the make-it or break-it for a product or service. 

Back in 2009, Google launched Google Wave. This was supposed to be the collaboration tool of the future. Many waited patiently for their invite only to finally sign up and be completely overwhelmed. Wave was cluttered, confusing to use, and easily replaced with much simpler tools. The whole project fell apart faster than users were able to sign up. More user testing and better design could have made Google Wave a staple in business life, but Google ultimately failed to truly take the experience design into consideration in their haste to launch their new service. 

An article on Wired discusses why it is so important for experience design to be a key part of development. “Experience design provides a way for the business and the designer to both discuss objectives and options. It creates a way for business to invite design to the table earlier, and understand how design can help solve problems. And it also helps businesses rethink how they engage design partners in ways that are more likely to produce success with less risk.”

The bottom line, is that in order for a product or service to be successful, the developers must seriously consider experience design and make it a priority in development. Society is so quick to move on to the next big thing without much thought about leaving their old, less easy to use technologies behind. User experience helps the new tech be able to survive in this quickly evolving world.