(The Emerging) User Experience

Things come and go at an ultra speed nowadays, I have seen and heard a lot about responsive design recently. What’s next? I would like to see user experience (UX) be the next responsive design. Indeed, user experience is not as new as responsive design. Below is the Google trend comparison between “user experience” in red and “responsive design” in blue.

There is no doubt that responsive design is a new rocket but user experience is an old flagship with continuous increases of interest as well. The word “experience” is being used in many customer-related aspects, such as user experience, customer experience, digital experience, and whatever you can put before experience. The experience could perhaps date back to an article on HBR titled “Welcome to the Experience Economy” in 1998, but we are seeing the mentions of experience more and more now and it should be attributed to the maturing of the Internet.

Experience is all about the memory of interactions and engagements. There was little or no experience between organizations and users in the old days before the Internet unless they had face-to-face interaction. Mass media cannot help, people forget and never recall. However, face-to-face interaction is expensive, and bringing the level of interaction to engagement is even more expensive, and limited by time and location. As the Internet matures, moving from mass media like websites to interactive services provisioning, one-to-many information dissemination to many-to-many sharing, organizations can build a continuous interaction and engagement with users across various channels, with lower cost and without no limit on time and location.

This brings the user experience into the picture regarding what users are experiencing across those multiple channels (or touch points), such as websites, social networks, physical stores, call centres, and even the design of products/services. The awareness of user experience is rising in the digital age and organizations are finding ways to improve the user experience across multiple touch points and along the entire user journey.