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Experience Design is one of those new terms that has sprung up in the past few years, especially among people involved with websites and online systems. If you ask ten different "experience design"-related professionals what experience design is, you're likely to get ten different answers. Many people believe experience design is concerned with usability, graphic design, or functional design. And the discussion usually involves the internet as well, or some kind of online system.

If you were to stop there, however, you'd be missing a lot of what experience design should encompass. In the business world, the customer experience includes all of the interactions that a customer has with your company or its offerings (products/services). The brand image, the advertisements, the products themselves, the sales experience, the service or support, the context in which the offerings are used -- they all impact the customer, and therefore, they all must be managed in order to optimize the experience and deliver the maximum value to customer and the company.

The term design is defined by Webster's as:
1. To conceive or fashion in the mind; invent.  2. To formulate a plan for; devise in a systematic way.  3. To create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect.  4. To create or execute in an artistic or highly skilled manner

Combining the business-focused view of customer experience above with this description of design, we end up with this combined definition: To fashion or create the company branding, offerings and customer service interactions in a highly skilled, systematic way, in order to achieve a particular purpose or effect.

This definition has a variety of implications for businesses that are concerned with maximizing the value they can extract from their customers, and consequently for those professionals who are challenged with achieving that goal.