What's user experience?

Some may consider user experience a trendy term, soon to join the oft-mocked verbiage of the tech implosion.  For me, it's here to stay. Under whatever name, more and more businesses are competing by learning about and designing for their customers' needs. 

Explaining usability to business folks can be troublesome, because how a product can be effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily used resists easy quantification.  Usability depends on the user first: knowing them through customer research, designing for them, and testing the product with real users.

When you expand usability techniques beyond the product, to touchpoints such as advertising, fulfillment, and customer care, you're in the user experience zone. Bringing a user focus to the traditional business areas of customer service, marketing, and sales can optimize all your business practices.

So, what's the opposite of user experience?  Companies that make decisions not based on customer needs, but to serve their own internal processes. Designs based on what the design team prefers personally, or what the CEO mandates on a whim. Poorly trained customer service. A marketing team that doesn't know its customers, and a sales force that speaks the wrong language to prospects.

Good companies will all get user experience, because it makes so much business sense.

Comments

[James Breeze]

Hey Joshua, I agree with you here. I like to way you write about customer experience stuff. Very clearly and simple. It is frustrating to see people who make it so and high brow.

In your article here it all comes down to strategy. Making the customer perspective 'flow' through all touchpoints in the same way.

Drop me a line please.
James

[Jackie]

Nice post. Explaining usability is often best couched in simple terms that folks can get their heads around, language they'll understand — what works and why. Pointing out potential pitfalls (and how to avoid them) can be as effective as pitching the case for a particular, favored feature.

So where is design in that model? Implicit in the external forces?

Hi Jackie, I'm glad you got value out of the post. My goal is to avoid jargon and speak in language a typical tech businessperson can relate to.

I would say design is in sync with user experience if the design process is user-centered. In other words, the design is based on empirical knowledge of user needs, not what the business thinks users want, or even what users say they want. Designers use this knowledge to inform choices about features to include or leave out, and even certain aesthetics (e.g., if our users skew older, our fonts need to be larger).

Check out my post about working with designers.