Chris Heathcote has it in mind that there is "no such thing as user experience," by which, I take it, he means that there's no single thing that we can call "user experience." User experience is made up of a lot of things, and all these things need to be designed, and Chris' problem seems to be that a lot of people who say they "design user experience" actually just do something like create user interfaces or write the script that the employees at the Apple store run on, and that this is demeaning to the actual breadth of the concept of "experience."

Chris Heathcote makes his point at his Flickr Photostream

Just as the words consumer and user are condescending to people, the word experience is condescending to the activity of people, or life. And it's condescending to the people who work hard to create the products and services. Everyone seems to be an experience manager these days...Don't try and fix everything (or be the one person who has to fix everything): find a company that believes in user experience, and find your niche and craft that lets you optimize your particular interaction for your customers. Play your part. Do your job.

I certainly agree with Chris that user experience is a catch-all for a bunch of different jobs, and is as such, that "Experience Designer" is a job title that belies either a timid bureaucrat, a flagrant social-climber, or a web designer a lot more often than someone with concrete design responsibilities in any kind of broad sense. But look: In the last year, I've also received business cards for "Experience Manager", "Creative Executive", "Futurist", and the list goes on. In lieu of concrete responsibilities, people give themselves stupid, self-important job titles. Point taken.

Michiel T responds to Heathcote in the comments

But that hardly means that user experience is nothing. In fact, reading Chris' post, it's everything. So, rather than letting the inevitable pretensions of marginally-valuable creatives ruin a perfectly good framework, we need to first accept that any useful construct is going to be exploited, and second to continue to use it where it's most valuable: as a lens through which we can evaluate the work of those disparate managers, designers, and service providers that make up the concrete elements of a product out in the world.

For my part, I think there can be real value in a "user experience coordinator," someone who can provide vertical coherence and quality assurance in customer experience. But, with Chris, let's do call a spade a spade.

I read a nice article today over at the Customer Experience Design blog, which traced over a fairly well-drawn distinction between two schools of customer experience.

The two schools, given by example in this case are:

The "Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.

and

The "IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company's products and services.

Thinking about this, I started to wonder: How can you be the IKEA of web design firms? Working strictly from the definitions, it's easy: The IKEA of web design firms is your client's web-designing nephew. He's cheap, the benefits are basic, and his relatively uneducated customer's percieved value is high.

But, of course, that's not the whole story, because IKEA stuff is well-designed, it's broadly applicable, and (most importantly to the failure of my analogy) it's contemporary. IKEA is, at least to some degree, premised on the fact that its customers have some aesthetic taste.

Wait a second. My client's web-design nephew couldn't have come up with this.

Taking a look, it should become instantly clear that if you want to be IKEA, having IKEA's customer experience philosophy doesn't cut it. You also have to be a good designer. And this is a problem, as most designers recoil at the de facto idea for a web design IKEA analog, a template-driven web design business.

Here's what that tells me: templates are not the web design analog of what IKEA does. IKEA is based on customers combining cheap, well-designed elements to their own satisfaction. Which means there's still potentially a good web analog out there to be found.

And you can be sure that when the IKEA-of-web-design-firms-to-come comes, there's going to be a huge market right there waiting for them.

If you haven't checked out Google Insights yet, and you run a website, you probably should. The idea behind Insights is that you can compare and evaluate a handful of metrics — volume, regional interest, top search terms — on search results, given a particular topic and/or geographical area. For example, I took a look at the search patterns and volume in my area (Omaha) for "web design," a key item on the DLB menu, and promptly established that we're in the wrong business.

This is clearly an unproductive metric. (From top: Generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, generic search term.)

All glibness aside, Insights could certainly be used smartly to provide agile firms with a real-time look at trends in their geographical areas. These trends could be used to indicate growth markets, and this information could inform rapid-SEO strategies (aka. blog post keywords). Here, for example, I noticed an incredibly steep rise in interest in the search term "social networking" over the past year in Omaha, while interest in "web design" has leveled out at around 20% of what it was in 2004.

Search volume increase for "social networking".

With fast, targeted and high-volume data like this, the right kind of companies can move quickly to fill niches as local interest in particular services ebbs. But not us. We're committed to fixing advertising and reinventing search.

We take these things seriously.

"Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."
-Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

Taxi Key to the City makes these nice Taxi Cards, cards you give to a taxi driver in a foreign country (here, China) to explain to him or her where you want to go, as almost certainly you don't speak Chinese, and on my experience, Beijing taxi drivers in particular speak just enough English to make it very dangerous to try to communicate.

DLB loves this diagram, from the Beijing Taxi Cards website.

When I was in China, I stayed with a family of American ex-patriots, and they lived in an ex-patriot community. They give out packages of these kind of taxi cards when you move in. The ones they give you are specific to your neighborhood, whereas the ones sold here are more general (they are mainly targeted at tourists for the 2008 Olympics).

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For several years, I worked with a startup, which, more than anything else, is really just a process of convincing yourself that all the pain now is worth the rewards in the future. Or else your startup is privately funded, in which case you basically work for a corporation with a policy where employees can give themselves their own job titles, but I digress, and anyway, this was not the case for me.

From my experience dealing with people in both situations, though, I think it is safe to assume that either way, you are surrounded by people thinking about money. I did this. I inadvertently surrounded myself with people who thought and cared a lot more about money than I did.

And you know what? Slowly but surely, I started to care about money. It crept up on me. I started thinking about it. I started using it as motivation for myself and the people on my team.

I turned into exactly what I didn't want to be, and it was because I had nothing else. The hours were crap, the pay was bad, the responsibility was enormous. I had no social life to speak of, and barely any sleep. It was everything it wasn't supposed to be.

So that ended (I won't tell you how). And after a several-month tailspin coming out of the experience, I am glad to say I've finally got something else again: My little design firm, Design Less Better.

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