Another UX Definition — part 1

Instagram post on 17.9.2019

User eXperience. Everybody knows what it means. It’s a brand new complicated discipline blaaah blah blah… Nope. User experience has always been just user experience and nothing more. Through the centuries, it means pretty much the same.

Doesn’t matter if people in medieval times had an awful user experience of badly sharpened weapon. Doesn’t matter if your mother had a very bad user experience of any mobile app because nobody said her yet that she needs to “swipe” not “tap”.

User experience with a product is not a one-off business. It consists of several touch-points. Imagine you need a new wardrobe. You, as a user, are likely to search for some on IKEA e-commerce. And.. Oops the wardrobe you choose is not available for the next two months. So you look for another one.

Then you probably download their app and take a trip to your favourite shop (24/7 full of people who have nothing better to do today than to walk around IKEA). Then you have a problem with parking, the staff at the information in the wardrobes department is unpleasant. The way to the warehouse is long. There’s a mess in the warehouse and you can’t find your chosen product. The shop assistant behind the cash desk is bitchy.

And now… now you are alone, don’t want to pay the super expensive IKEA transport and you have to walk through the cash desk with all the speed of light because you have thousands of people behind you who want to kill you because everything takes you too long. And finally, you have to go with that stupid heavy shopping trolley across the parking lot and put the wardrobe in the car with damn difficulty.

And.. dear guys.. that’s just the beginning. Think of IKEA’s manuals, inaccurate number of components and the damn mini hex key that is supposed to save us all.

Here the touch-points of user experience could be then:

• e-commerce UI
• searching
• browsing
• goods availability
• app UI and functions
• parking
• an in-store experience
• employee behaviour
• warehouse experience
• meeting the shop assistant face to face
• “how the hell to put it together” manual
• furniture building itself
• using of the furniture

Underlined and Summed.. what was your user experience as a whole? Note that this post (although it’s long as hell) is just the first part of explaining user experience and user experience design.