Why This Book?

You may find hundreds of books describing how to create good usability, how to listen to customers, and how to create consumer insight. And you may even find a lot of literature describing how to involve users in your design process. But you will find very few books giving very concrete methods on how to create ideas and innovations around user experiences.

To fill the gap in the literature, I will in this book describe tangible and straight-forward methods on how you can create potentially successful user experience innovation. The methods and approaches are all based on methods that I have created, used, or applied successfully during my 18 years of creating user experience innovations for the mobile device industry, most of those years with Nokia. And even though the methods may seem simple, I can assure you that they work.

This book starts by giving guidance on how to achieve the basic foundation for all successful user experience innovation—namely how to identify target users, how to identify user needs, and how to find core tasks that the user performs when using your product.

Based on these three core elements—target users, their needs, and core tasks—I describe how to easily create successful user experience innovation in 17 different ways, spanning from how to directly use core tasks to create user experience innovation to how to create positive surprises and playful user experiences for the end user.

User experience innovation is an approach that can be applied to any business—from situations such as purchasing tickets at a train station, to the experience users get when entering physical shops, to the experience when operating a specific device, webpage, or system.

However, in this book I focus primarily on methods that can be used to create and design true and successful innovations for devices, webpages, and systems—which in this book will be called products. And I will mainly focus on products that are designed for consumer-focused markets.

My hope is that you will find one or ideally several of my methods and approaches useful and applicable for your specific design task, and I will look forward to seeing more great user experience innovations out there.