“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” said William James. Although James wasn’t talking about user experience as designers think of it, this is my favorite UX quote, and one I believe every UX architect, designer, or strategist should keep in mind. Today I’m writing about the implications this has on where we should focus our attention.<\/p>\n
Where a person’s attention goes, there goes their experience of the world. In other words, UX happens everywhere.<\/p>\n
Your product may be the ultimate experience you want your users to have, and your web site experience may help get them to purchase it (or be the goal itself, if you’re a social network or some other online service). But long before they land on your site or purchase your product, every interaction of the user with your brand is UX.<\/p>\n
What people say about your product on social networks or blogs, your advertising (online and off), how your competitors represent you and your service. Your content lives everywhere, and your existing users and prospects can potentially encounter it everywhere. You can’t control this, but you can add to the milieu in a variety of ways: blogs, forums, social networks, videos, mobile applications, gadgets, rich media advertising, news, and choosing to advertise on more targeted sites.<\/p>\n
Why does this matter? Because people make decisions in an all-or-nothing manner. Neurologically speaking, every encounter creates a positive or negative moments in a user’s head—a yes\/no binary decision. A user’s overall impression comes from the preponderance of the individual binary choices associated with a concept.<\/p>\n
Further, in the absence of knowledge most people tend to go with whatever information gets in first with the most. In this way informational cascades are spread across a population which may or may not be accurate. (This may be why car salespeople are trained to get customers to say “yes” more than once, and to speak to more than one salesperson. You can read more about binary decision making and informational cascades in The tyranny of dichotomy<\/a><\/em>.)<\/p>\n If you expect users to “agree to attend” to ultimately experience your product, one way is to create more positive binary moments about your brand and product than there are negative ones. Every encounter with your brand weights a user’s interest in one direction or another. As UX strategists, it’s clearly in our interests as UX strategists to create positive user experiences in every relevant context possible. <\/p>\n Update: I don’t think I said clearly enough here that “positive” requires an experience to be honest and to the user’s advantage. So I’m saying it now.<\/em><\/p>\n Originally posted on the alexfiles (1998–2018) on January 1, 2011.<\/p>\n
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