The Fuzzy Front End of Experience Design: Eliciting and Communicating Experience Goals

When starting an experience design process, designers should first determine the experience to aim for. In the fuzzy front end of the experience design process, there are often several alternative sources for gaining insight and inspiration in defining this experience. In this paper, we describe our findings from two surveys about experience goal setting and approaches to communicate about these goals with stakeholders. The results from researchers working on 9 different experience design cases suggest that "empathic understanding of the users' world" is the most used source of insight and inspiration in defining experience goals. As an end result, we propose the model for Experience Goal Elicitation Process to clarify the fuzzy front end of experience design and instructions to support designers in defining and evaluating experience goals.