Supporting frame for experience design in front-end methodology Ivo Dewit a* and Els De Swert a a Department of Product Development, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium *Corresponding Author: ivo.dewit@uantwerpen.be ABSTRACT Decades of technological advancement forces companies to differentiate themselves from others in a progressively competitive arena. At the same time, merely functional products are no longer satisfactory to an increasingly demanding audience. To tackle this shift in consumer behavior, a focus on experience design, integrated in the front-end of innovation of new product and service development processes, can offer a manageable approach. In this research, we clarify our perspective on experience design and present a case study approach of four experience driven design processes (XDDP) in design practice. Finally we identify twenty tools that support XDDP, with the conceptual framework of Roozenburg and Eekels (1995) as a reference point. Future research aims to build and test the conceptual framework and identified tools in design educational and organizational context. Keywords: experience design, product development, service design, front-end of innovation, conceptual framework 1. Introduction 1.1 Scientific and social relevance Due to the market’s technological evolution within the past decades, there’s a growing need for companies to distinguish themselves from others by designing interactions and experiences instead of merely functional products. Pine and Gilmore (1998) describe a consumer behavior shift towards wanting products and services with a story and introduce the experience economy. By consequence companies increasingly try to adopt this view, creating offerings that stimulate the imagination, amaze the senses and touch the hearts of their customers (Boswijk & Peelen, 2008). Simultaneously, we can see product and service development growing closer to one another. Little distance is often left between the two because very few products these days go without services and vice versa, but not without difficulties in knowledge and organization of product and service design processes. Furthermore, experience design is still quite fuzzy and unknown, even to designers. The reason can be found in the multiplicity of theoretical models about experience design, from product design to marketing to sociology. Though the term is often misunderstood, misplaced or unknown and undermines its intended purpose, we propose an approach that