User Experience Design at Sony Ericsson - Introducing the Virtual Pet

To identify opportunities, ethnography is combined with business objectives and goals to see where users current
needs and wants are under-supported and how the company can solve these problems. When a specific
opportunity is identified, the company’s core competencies are considered so that these are used as effectively as
possible when inventing solutions to the opportunity. Embodiment brings together the two final threads of the
POSE model; a particular solution and the materials needed to make the idea manifest in the real world. What is
traditionally seen as the design problem should have been addressed in the invent solutions step. Successfully
done, the results of the create embodiment step should be measured by how well a form embodies a solution, and
by how well that solution, in turn, addresses an opportunity and a problem.
Comments
User Experience Based design – including the POSE model - is a promising framework that helps designers focus
on users’ problems rather than technology. Unfortunately, the framework - as presented here - is not as pragmatic
as designers could hope. Cain has left out more detailed methods for how to proceed in the different stages. For
example, “invent solutions” is not an instruction specific enough, and his paper does not give explicit instructions
on how to progress when performing ethnography studies. Nevertheless, if these methods are developed, the
EBD could help companies organize their design so that solutions, to a degree as high as possible, are based on
users’ actual problems, needs and wants.
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