The Experience Designer Diary. Creating a memorable experience for a target group

This semester I attend the Experience Designer course. It is a specialization study worth 30 credits where I learn to create Super Experiences, which truly enhance customer engagement.

The first phase of the course which is called "The Tutorial" ended last week. First, I learned about the mindset of a designer. Then together with my amazing team, we created a memorable experience for our target group by applying five steps of the design-thinking process: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

At the empathize stage we learned about our target group by conducting interviews. We also contacted an expert to ask for insights on what to prioritize in the data during the design thinking process, to get ideas on methods to use and how to create experiences.

In the define stage, we analyzed our gathered data in order to find pains, gains, etc. to focus on for the gamification solution ideas. We came up with our "How might we...?" question and started the ideation process.

After several rounds of active team brainstorming, we chose our best idea to create a gamified networking experience for creative professionals. Then we started to work on creating a prototype that we can use and be deployed with the target group.

First, we tried a prototype ourselves. And then we arranged an actual test with creative professionals.

The participants were generous with compliments and chose a variety of different favorite challenges. This shows that the tasks we created did fit a wide spectrum of interests. 5 out of 6 stated they would definitely participate in such an event again.

I contributed to the team work equally. We worked together during our meetings in Zoom and a couple of times met in person in Porvoo for the Define and Ideation phase. I did some tasks individually as well. For example, writing chapters for our project plan, conducting 2 interviews, searching for participants for our test experience, creating a digital prototype of our game, and writing a script for the presentation video.

Me (on the right) with my teammate Elizaveta during an actual test with creative professionals. (February 11th, 2021, Pasila)