SensoryMetrics

Be careful for what you wish for. Inglorious Basterds, indeed! We’ve always believed the value of good experience design was under-appreciated in the product world. Over the past year, it seems the pendulum has swung. It’s become a business cliche – and has even made it onto Seth Godin’s Encyclopedia of Business Cliches.

What hapenned? Well, here’s another cliche – it’s Apple’s fault. Many people theorize that Apple’s recent boom is a case study in investing in user experience as a means to the end: high margins, and big profit. Microsoft provides loads of case studies that disproves the theory: Vista, Zune… Web 2.0 apps and their glossy UIs often obscure the fact that the product isn’t all that useful…

User Experience is now used as a marketing tool. It sometimes makes the error of focussing only on the UI. It’s also used as a crutch to explain a product’s commercial failure. But the reality is, a product’s dominance is beyond just user experience – it’s whole product experience. A former manager of mine once called it WPE (as in makin’ whooppee).