In recent years you're likely to have met a person or company saying they do "User Experience".
It's one of the most sought-after services at the moment by companies in Sydney, London and San Francisco. Possibly because you can no longer just compete on price, or throw money at a clever marketing campaign. Sustainable success depends on a happy customer.
It's also slowly hotting-up in New Zealand as User Experience (UX) gains recognition as a smart way to engage and satisfy customers.
However, UX faces a communication problem. It's tricky to explain and comes in a wide varierty of colours.
At Click Suite for example, we refer to the people driving the User Experience as 'Information Designers', but another person doing a similar job in another company might call themselves 'Usabilty Consultant', 'Interaction Designer' or 'Experience Designer'.
It can be a bit confusing.
I like the
Nielson Norman Group's definition:
"User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.
There's even arguments within the software industry itself about User Experience, its meaning and the besy way to describe it.
As a response some people have started to get creative in their attempt to explain it and at the same time celebrate the benefits of User Experience.
Here's a few gems...
An animated tribute to UX design
Information Architecture explained (another field related to UX)
