User Experience, or UX, has become a real buzzword amongst internet professionals in the last few years, with every digital agency seeming to have added it to their list of available services, alongside the usual suspects like SEO, E-marketing and design. Everyone’s offering UX but what’s less clear is what this actually means.

A quick Google pulls up a bucket full of results and even entire websites dedicated to answering this, a sure sign that UX is now accepted as a mainstream phrase rather than a bit of geek jargon. There’s even articles debating the death of UX, although that’s ridiculous in my opinion. Frankly that’s what you’ll get from most of these pages, opinions, some ridiculous, but many well-informed and well argued, and yet a clear definition remains intangible, a bit like the internet itself. This quote doesn’t make a lot of sense, (go to the site, it’s completely devoid of context) but that only serves to more clearly illustrate my point;

“User Experience is a focus, a thread that runs through all of our disciplines, and which no discipline owns or controls.”

It’s perhaps not a bad thing that UX is such tricky term to nail down, since we’re dealing with a discipline in it’s relative infancy and is continuing to grow and change as the digital landscape continues to expand. But it doesn’t help the non-digital-industry-types understand what it means, or more importantly, how it can help their website be more successful.

Sifting through the debates, the rants and the hyperbole is no easy task, but simply put, User Experience is planning for the end user or “the human side of human-computer interaction”

In a couple of weeks a few of us from Soak will be attending the UX Brighton 2010 conference, so further ideas will undoubtedly flow from then, however for now here’s a few more thoughts.

Even though the term “User Experience” is thrown around like it’s a unique area of expertise, it crosses over with other areas of web design; Information Architecture (IA), Accessibility and Usability, which are all part and parcel of any comprehensive design process.

User Experience should be considered at every stage of a website’s production, from inception through planning and design to development, launch and maintenance beyond. It’s not a bolt-on service, it’s an integral part of building a website.

UX results are difficult to measure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. A better user experience enhances the perception of the site and by extension the brand, another qualification that is pretty abstract but immeasurably useful in harnessing customer loyalty.

Tags: User Experience, UX