To quote a Japanese proverb, vision without action is a daydream.
I was working on dashboards within a logfile collection last week, when I was challenged how to determine the right components for the dashboard, and had several insights.
An analogy that caught the industry interest recently is a comparison of IT delivery styles with how we treat pets versus cattle.* In a nutshell:
- Pets are owned in small numbers, uniquely named, hand reared and lovingly cared for — they are, by all considerations, members of the family. When they get ill, you nurse them back to health.
- Cattle are owned in large numbers, tagged using a standard system, identical, managed in herds, and bought and sold as a commodity — they are, in effect, food. When one gets ill, you replace it with another one.
Clippy was ahead of his time.
I'll let that sink in.
Clippy, the infamous Microsoft Office assistant, was introduced in November 1996. He was refined three years later, in Microsoft Office 2000. He went into retirement two years later, when he was turned off by default. And he finally departed this digital veil in 2007, when Microsoft Office dismissed him all together.
User experience will happen. Whether it's designed up front, or a product of users interacting with your product after the fact, the human and product will interact. Good UX happens when we make decisions in a way that understands and fulfills the needs of both our users and our business.
It's important in this definition to recognize both sides of the equation; the user and the business. UX design strives to produce positive emotions in the user, whether it's through delight or just satisfaction in getting the task performed efficiently. On the other hand, anyone working for an organization has to ensure the organization goals are met as well. Sometimes negotiating between the two stakeholders can be tricky, when the needs are in conflict.
So why do we need UX? To ensure someone is looking out for both sides equally.
If you ask ten people where user experience belongs in an organization, you will likely get eleven answers, but first, you might get asked what you mean by user experience (UX).
- Client (or Customer) Experience (CX), refers to the impression you leave with your client, resulting in how they think of your brand, across every stage of the customer journey. This involves every step from advertising, brochures and public websites to forms, call centers and correspondence.
- User Experience, the way I am defining it, is focussed on the time the client is interacting with the website or web application to accomplish a task.