User experience is a term that has become more ubiquitous in recent years as more and more people utilize software not only in their work environments but throughout their every day lives.

We seem to overlook, accept or otherwise discount the user experience related to software tools when leveraged for work purposes. It’s almost as is there is an expectation that they will be crappy and unintuitive to use.

This is changing. We have all heard about the ‘consumerization of IT’ and have seen the rise of salesforce.com, Google Apps for business and numerous other business centric tools that focus on a simpler design that is more similar to what people use everyday outside of work.

It is a very interesting transition as companies now are trying to create products that are more similar to these consumer products that barely existed 5-10 years ago, while enterprise software has been a cornerstone of business for decades.

This is a less often cited example of the disruption of an industry or an expected norm by a tangentially related usurper.

However, while the rise of the public’s awareness of pleasant UI and simple UX design is rising quickly thanks to the prominence of mobile applications and the quickly blurring lines between enterprise and consumer tools, this piece is to be focused on the UX of everything, not just software.

As I was contemplating writing this piece, I heard a radio program where the speaker was referring to the way in which program hosts interact with their invisible audience. This got me thinking about even another dimension of UX.

It’s not only what someone interacts with on a screen or physically, such as the user experience of a phone, it’s anything that you come into contact with. When you frame UX in that manner, it becomes obvious. Well, I am the user of this _______, and this is my experience.

There are countless examples of user experience that we overlook or do not think of as such in society today. I will point to a couple of these as examples in hopes that we will start to think of UX and to prioritize this critical process and mindset throughout all areas of our lives in the future.

The refrigerator is something that many of us have the pleasure of interacting with every day of our lives, probably many times a day. However, it is rare that we consider the UX of this device. This is in spite of the fact that in recent years, perhaps more space innovation and thought has gone into this appliance over any other kitchen fixture.

This is not only relegated to whether or not you want French doors. You can now choose French doors that sit atop a bottom freezer, a single door with bottom freezer, single door with top freezer, full French doors, in door water and ice, in-fridge water dispenser, and those are only some of the door configurations.

On the inside of the unit, a plethora of adjustable shelves allow you to fit pretty much anything you might need to chill. You even have drawers that can be adjusted for different temperatures and moisture levels for different types of food.

What I have been describing are a great number of options, some of which lend themselves to an improved experience, while others may cause confusion or angst while trying to pick the right appliance for you.

More options does not always lead to a greater sense of satisfaction while using a product. This is an important point to note. For example, does having a 10-inch touch screen with access to weather information, music downloads, etc. actually improve the experience of a refrigerator. Perhaps, for some. However, I would contend that, for the mass market, this is a distraction or a gimmick that is simply one of many examples of designers attempting to reach out further from the core goal of what their device is attempting to accomplish.

There are also several examples of choosing form over function when it comes to what many would consider to be one the core function-focused pieces of equipment that they own. One example of this comes hidden in one of the more innovative additions to refrigerators, the cold drinking water dispenser.

Some refrigerator manufacturers, for what I can only conjecture to be purely aesthetic purposes, have selected to put this dispenser on the interior wall of the refrigerator. This leaves the front of the unit clean, which does look nice. However, what many consumers ostensibly overlook is the fact that each time they wish to get water from the fridge, they must hold it open the entire time, which is quite the waste of energy, clumsy, disruptive to the space flow around the unit and cold on whatever part of your body the door happens to touch while being propped open!

The refrigerator has evolved and improved in numerous ways in recent years. The capabilities, space saving designs and numerous options have significantly increased the ways by which a consumer can tailor this object to their specific needs. These improvements have also come with a bevy or less useful iterations, the moral of the story being that more is not always better and a focus on the core functionality of the product you are designing and the needs of the user you are designing it for is critical regardless of what the product might be.