About

Introduction

The Handbook is a searchable collection of experience design case studies. It is organized so you can find a specific reference or stumble onto something new. It aims to make the work of designers more useful to students and to organizations that design opportunities for experience.

The collection grows through a public database and a shared framework. Input and submissions from the wider community will make it an open-source handbook for experience design.

A common framework is the first step. It gives every case study the same structure, so the work can be compared. The framework came out of an introductory experience design course at Boston University and a professional practice in design strategy for consumer-facing businesses. It began as a teaching tool that gave students a more specific way to approach designing experiences. It was then adapted for business leaders building customer experience strategies. It is now a working database and tool.

Students started the collection. Over four semesters they catalogued hundreds of rough case studies as a learning resource for the classes that followed. The framework has been refined since, and the database reviewed.

The current state of the database

The Handbook is a beta release. It holds 215 published case studies today. More are moving in from the draft database as they are reviewed, and existing entries are still being refined. Feedback is always welcome. Public submission opens when the project is ready for it.

A note on accessibility

The site is not fully accessible yet. Typography, navigation, and image descriptions are still being improved. More updates are coming.

A note on credits and sources

This began as an academic homework assignment. It did not have enough structure to credit sources properly, especially for imagery. That is being corrected. If anything is missing a credit, or you would like it removed, please get in touch. The goal is to put this work in front of more people.

Acknowledgments

Much of the thinking behind this work was developed with Amanda Rock, my wife and partner, through our work at Station and over many years of collaborating with Epic Decade.

Thank you to Jake Camara for your continued help and consultation on the development of the site. Thank you to my former research assistants Jacqueline Mang and Anna Lee. They pushed the content and design hard enough that development, and continued refinement of the framework and database, could begin.

Students in the course contributed case studies over many semesters while we tested the framework.