The focus of this master’s thesis is the emerging field of IT-based experience design. The objective of the thesis is to understand the characteristics of developing IT-based experience design, and how these characteristics can be presented, and operationalized, as a pragmatic framework to facilitate the development of experience design in an academic and practical context. This topic is examined using theoretical analysis in order to create a theoretical framework for the development of IT-based experience design.

This thesis focuses on which theoretically based design requirements characterize the development of IT-based experience design, and how these design requirements can be connected to the design process. The thesis statement is derived from the authors’ experience that, in practice, there is a lack of focus on the characteristics of developing experience design. Furthermore, the thesis suggests that the transition between academics and practice is lacking. Experience designers are, in practice, integrated into the everyday work processes of companies, and thereby into a company’s pre-existing design process. Or, they are integrated into a company with a non-existing guideline for planning the design process. This suggests that the experience designers lack a framework with which to plan a design process that will ensure and incorporate the characteristics of experience design, both in a practical and academic context. This thesis takes a theoretical perspective on the problem, setting as its goal, to create said framework, which experience designers currently lack.

The theoretical work is based on the election of theory within IT-based experiences to extract design requirements for developing IT-based experience design. The design requirements are extracted by analyzing theory with regard to eight criteria for qualitative experience design, labeled as follows: ‘understanding of users’, ‘effective design process’, ‘needed’, ‘learnable and usable’, ‘appropriate’, ‘aesthetic experience’ and ‘mutable’ and ‘manageable’. By extracting design requirements, the theoretical foundation for developing IT-based experience design is created.

The experience design framework is built using the design requirements extracted during the analysis. The design requirements are grouped with regard to elleven categories as follows: ‘purpose’, ‘user’, ‘context’, ‘sensuous design’, ‘emotions’, ‘behavior’, ‘test and evaluation’, ‘reflection’, ‘design process’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘interdisciplinary’. These categories are then connected to five phases of a design process to create the final experience design framework. The finale framework’s usage is exemplified to validate its purpose and function, as well as to discuss its pros and cons.

It is concluded that the experience design framework has the potential to be operationalized in practice, and contribute to adjusting pre-existing design processes to ensure the characteristics of experience design. Furthermore, the experience design framework also has the potential to be operationalized in an academic context, by creating an initial framework for planning and constructing academic projects. However, empirical studies must be made of the framework’s pragmatic qualities before this conclusion can be fully validated.