Breaking up with the User in User Experience Strategy?

Is Customer Experience the Answer?

So, is the answer referring to what we do as customer experience? For now, there’s certainly a good case for it. But this could and likely will change at some point, too. Again, we’re going down a familiar road. Back in 2012, I was on the Board of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) when we rebranded the organization as the User Experience Professionals’ Association (UXPA). We did this to address the market’s view of usability as a circumscribed part of a larger field of work that our members were doing—which constrained their job opportunities. With the growing number of UX titles dwarfing the number of Usability roles over many years, we had become aware of and responded to the business climate. We spent considerable time discussing the shelf life of user experience as the umbrella term for our organization, acknowledging that it might also morph over time.

And, at that time, we weren’t alone in trying to capture that market demand. These days, most businesses that want an experience strategy—at least those who are less familiar with our field—tend to align customer experience and strategy. Tufte’s oft-cited quote notwithstanding, everyone knows what a customer is. Look at the rapid growth and success of Bruce Temkin’s CXPA, Forrester’s Customer Experience Conferences, and the way many in the software industry—notably those in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—have suddenly rebranded their services to customer experience. I’m not offended by this, and I don’t feel that there’s anything remotely nefarious going on. Frankly, I’m impressed.

On the whole—and I’m fully aware that this may rub some folks the wrong way—one of the key differences that I’ve observed in these and other CX-branded groups is that they just do a better job of communicating their value—just as my colleague did in his presentation. Through their messaging and marketing, they target and attract people from business, product management, and marketing, as well as software development or information technology (IT). Moreover, many of the people attending CX conferences and subscribing to CX publications aren’t necessarily practitioners, but businesspeople whose organizations have, in some way, given them experience-related responsibilities and who must purchase consulting services to fulfill them. If we badge ourselves as strategists of any stripe in the field of experience, these are the people we need to be talking to.

The Inhumanity of the Term User

Ironically, the nature of the term user may be why the argument regarding user versus customer has always been clear to me. Coworkers and partners aren’t customers in the traditional sense of the word—though, of course, it can be argued that everyone is a customer. But I have always held that user is a more egalitarian, all-inclusive term for human beings who are interacting with a product or service.

But admittedly, although the term user experience made plenty of sense to me, outside the world of IT and business professionals, the term user experience doesn’t resonate as much as customer experience. Any of us who have had a conversation with a friend or family member outside this world have probably seen glazed eyes or at least curious or confused eyebrow raising in response to our attempts to explain what it is that we do.

But does calling what we do customer experience help bridge that cognitive chasm? At a former company, we used the term audience for a while—which we liked, but failed dismally in the marketplace. What about human centric and people centric? We frequently see those terms, too. I often wonder whether we really need any such qualifier preceding the word experience. All human experience—whether physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or virtual—is the sum of a person’s cognitive life. I don’t think we need to consider the experience of pets and robots.

The aforementioned Jeff also wrote this in his comments about my previous column:

“If you want to do actual work in this field, it doesn’t seem to pay to get involved in the various turf wars, debates, religious wars, and endless reclassification of what UX/CX even means.”

I understand his position—and, certainly, the implied futility of such an exercise. The point of this column is not for me to take a particular position, but to recognize that when CX-branded companies—and even groups within the same organization—are winning the attention and work that UX strategists are seeking, it really doesn’t pay to stand still. 

Conclusion

This issue is about far more than a name. It is important to state for the record that UX titles, projects, and services remain the de facto leader for what we do, and I don’t think UX is going anywhere, anytime soon. Furthermore, many UX-titled leaders and heroes around the world are recognized as leading the strategy for how people, customers, and employees experience their brands, products, and services.  

As for Slalom, a lot of great stuff has happened in the six months since last April’s meeting. Just last month, following the recent lead of our Atlanta office—we rebranded our New York UX practice as Experience Strategy + Design. Though people still refer to us as the UX team internally, we decided that the term experience strategy would help us to align to what people had previously regarded as customer experience. Experience design services such as research, design, and evaluation support experience strategy. We’ve been working closely with other experience-driven groups within the company—collaborating and sharing information with them—and have joined Slalom’s Customer Engagement community.

During that offsite in April, we purchased and have been internally circulating about two dozen copies of Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning’s book Outside In. I’m a big fan of this book because it is one of the most philosophically aligned, business-accessible books out there.

While our group is still evolving, it is our abiding belief that, no matter what a group’s title, the importance of experience as a competitive differentiator in the business and technology consulting space really matters.

I’d be interested in knowing your thoughts on the title experience strategy and design. That’s what works for us for now. But I’m sure that, as this field evolves, there will be new names and titles, and some old ones will recede into niches or fade away altogether. Perhaps a de facto umbrella term will emerge over the next few years. Ultimately, as long as businesses recognize us as being responsible for strategic, experience-driven problem solving—and call upon us to do that work—I’ll be happy. If that means breaking up with the user in user experience, I’m ready to do that. I imagine that conversation might go something like this: “Sorry, it’s actually not me, it’s you, Baby. But I’ll always love you, you know that.”

If you’re attending the UX STRAT conference in Boulder next month, I’ll be talking more about this topic in my presentation, “Big Love: The Case for Conscious Coupling in UX Strategy.”  I’ll be suggesting something that will, I hope, engender a spirited debate to follow—if for no other than I’m on right before Happy Hour. I hope to see you there, and thanks for reading.