UX Definition – What User Experience Means for Different Company Departments

Although UX definitions change greatly from one department of a company to the next, user experience does apply directly to any given department, team or individual, as a company is a closed ecosystem. As such, everything that an individual does affects the outcome of what a team does. This in turn affects what the department does and a department affects the image of the entire company and the product or service rendered by said company. Ultimately, this leads to affecting the user, their experience with a product or service, and ultimately with the company itself. With this in mind, the individuals within a company, through a step scale of relevance, affect user experience equally, but differently. Therefore, user experience has a definite meaning within any given department, team, or job within a company. There are many preconceptions as to what UX definitions are in various cases, and how they are affected by individuals, or what it means to individual departments within a company. Without a clear understanding of this, disaster can happen, and this has occurred within companies throughout business history. In the spirit of a limb in aiding this misunderstanding of user experience, and pinning a clearer picture of what it means to different departments within a company, let’s take a moment to meditate on this, and give a couple examples of commonly existing departments within general companies and industries, and what user experience means to these departments. For customer service, it’s pretty straightforward. User experience for customer service simply means quick resolution of problems, quick answering of questions and overall minimize wait time and ease of communication between the specialists in the customer. If a customer leaves satisfied, and their issuer question resolved, then a good user experience has been had by the definition applying to customer service. If customers must wait for a long period of time, their problem or question is not resolved quickly, or a mishap in communication occurs, then the user experience is diminishing quality exponentially with each of these issues that arises. For research and development, it’s also relatively straightforward. For them, user experience means designing how a user will interact with a product or service, what it means to utilize a service and what should go on during the use of the service or product, and any given easily predictable problems that may arise. Research and development designs a user experience by designing the product and how it will be identified. Conveyed to a customer, how outreach works, and how sales and payments are handled to purchase the product or service on a regular basis. This includes advertising, price points, presentation, and outlets for said product or service. Also entailed in user experience for these people are calculating overhead and how much internal cost is paid by the company, or deferred to the customer in the price which they are expected to pay. As you can clearly see, UX definitions are distinctly different between commonly existing apartments within most companies, but they all share in existing, core factor, that being held the customer experience is the product through their contributions to the service or product rendered. All departments must consider user experience in one way or another, and they’ll determine whether not a user experience is positive, negative or simply forgettable.