Experiences: Software User Experiences

Marketing is no longer an intuitive aspect of business, with brands spending money on open media platforms that offer no measurable outcomes or tangible data to ensure their success. Since the advent of digital marketing, marketing has not only become data driven but has also evolved. Now brands can tailor personalized digital experiences to each of their customers and get actionable insights along with measurable outcomes.

But with this increase in information, insights, and outcomes, the role of marketing has become more complex. Marketers are not only designing macro-market campaigns, but must also create micro-personalized campaigns, create reliable and relevant digital data points, and create brand-centric customer interactions. Their Key Result Areas (KRAs) are not just about conversions and sales, but also about creating unique brand experiences that can create lasting impressions on the minds of their potential target audience. Read More

For most people, sound is an essential part of everyday living. Sound can deliver entertainment—like our favorite music or the play-by-play call of our hometown baseball—and vital information—like the traffic and news reports on the radio as we drive to work.

Audio signals also help us interact with our environment. Some of these signals are designed: We wake to the buzz of the alarm clock, answer the ringing telephone, and race to the kitchen when the shrill beep of the smoke alarm warns us that dinner is burning on the stove. Other audio signals are not deliberately designed, but help us nonetheless. For instance, we may know the proper sound of the central air conditioning starting, the gentle hum of the PC fan, or the noise of the refrigerator. So, when these systems go awry, we notice it immediately—something doesn’t sound right. Likewise, an excellent mechanic might be able to tell what is wrong with a car engine just by listening to it run.

Since people are accustomed to such a rich universe of offline sound, it’s notable that our digital user experiences—while far from silent—do not leverage audio information to the same extent that they do visual information. When designers and developers create user experiences—be they for Web applications, desktop applications, or digital devices—audio is often a missing ingredient. Read More

The word experience has gained significant traction over the past 15 years. Beginning with the mainstreaming of the term user experience in the software industry and, later, extended to the work of marketing professionals who began thinking about marketing as being experiential, the idea of experience as a focused professional area of endeavor is alive, well, and growing rapidly. However, the more our space grows, the more confused and chaotic is our collective understanding of the meaning of these terms. To try to help clarify this murkiness, I want to share my definitional model for the fields of experience and provide guidelines for the use of various terms.

Who am I to be providing these definitions? I believe my background uniquely suits me to presenting a holistic solution. During my career, I’ve spent at least a few years in each of the following professions: advertising executive, management consultant, product designer, and entrepreneur. I’ve thought in depth about the concept of experience and been professionally engaged in creating experiences from the product, marketing, and business viewpoints. I’ve worked on and written about things impacting experience as diverse as the restructuring of companies, the design of complex 3D environments, and the development of various forms of creation—ranging from software to marketing collateral. More, I’ve been actively involved in the thought leadership of these fields. My various board appointments include serving as President of the User Experience Network (UXnet) and as a Director of the AIGA Center for Brand Experience. To be honest, since I’ve understood these terms and their relationships for a long time, all of the professional confusion and conflict out there has been a source of perpetual frustration to me—ultimately providing the impetus for me to write this article. With that in mind, let me share the three core experience terms I advocate and show how they interact. Read More