The internet is weaving itself into our daily lives; it has changed from something ‘out there’ to visit when you like, to something ‘right here’ at your disposal when you need it. Or, as the Rathenau Insitute puts it in their book Check In / Check Out: “We no longer surf on the net, we live in the net”.

The changing role of the internet for users is also a game changer for UX professionals. The hardware which we use to access the internet is diversifying. Apart from the ‘screens’: mobile phones, tablets, picture frames and navigation devices, a range of more specific ’smart products’ such as Nazbatag, the Nike + hardware and Disney’s Clickables have reached the market. These products differ from normal products (and from websites) in the sense that they do not offer a stand-alone user experience. Rather, they try to extend the web experience into real life or vice versa. Because of their intermediary role between the real world and the web, we call these products: embedded media. Embedded media enable brands to engage users for a longer time, more intimately and across more contexts than a standalone web experience can ever do.

In our experience, designing embedded media is quite different from product design, web design, and service design. However, there is little guidance for UX professionals who meet the challenge. Although the emergence of embedded media is not entirely unexpected - at least the growth of the number of smart and connected products on the marked are predicted by long term technology visions like ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and the internet of things- most research programs in this area have focused on the technology or on investigating sensible future use cases rather than on UX guidelines. In this void, we introduce the concept of experience blend. If embedded media acts as an intermediary between real life and web experiences, we believe the relation between the designed and the existing experiences should be the central question for UX. The notion of experience blend helps to make this relation explicit and to organize best practices.

The paper is organized as follows. First, we discuss our integrative and iterative design approach, which we advocate for embedded media design and which students used in all of the projects which we discuss in the paper. After that we discuss concrete examples of student projects, and use them to illustrate the concepts of embedded media and experience blend. We end the paper with some general conclusions.