The question is, how to use the term user experience?

First of all, you can never use it alone. Never ever again. You are no more allowed to talk about user experience as is.

You can talk about the user experience of a company, or the user experience of a form field, or of the customer service at a bank, or of the steering wheel of a car, or of a web page. User experience is a term that you can use when you don’t want to talk about specifics: when you’re not referring only to the usability of the form field, not just the copy of the form label, not just the look of the field border, the fonts and the colours, nor just how the tab ordering has been programmed. When you do want to talk about all of these artifacts and how they combine to create a good experience for the users, you talk about user experience.

You can talk about the user experience of any level of detail. When discussing the user experience of a company it’s not just the product user interface, not just how the call center answers your call, not just how the packaging looks, not just how the marketing speaks to you, not just how the company handles your privacy, but all of these combined. It can include anything that affects how users experience stuff.

User experience is a short-hand for situations in which it would be too cumbersome or repetitive to list all the ingredients that go into creating a good end product.

Here’s a how-to example:

We’ll be designing the website of ABZ company by gathering customer needs, listing user requirements, creating inventories of important content, designing perfectly navigable wireframes and user flows, working in tandem with the development to create a highly usable interface, and perfecting the details to make sure our users will be so pleased they will send a link to all of their Facebook friends. Mary Johnsson will be handling the project management, and Alf Simons will be supervising the user experience of the website.

This is to say Mary Johnsson will be in charge of schedules, and Alf Simons will see through that the customer needs are actual needs of customers, the user requirements reflect what the users require, the content is relevant to users, the wireframes and the user flows look solid, usability of the interface has been checked, and no minor irritating detail has been left unfixed.

Does this feel like an acceptable definition of user experience? What do you think?

Three weeks ago I came to the UX Lx conference in Lisbon with one goal in mind: I wanted to find out if there’s a consensus on what User Experience is. My verdict after three long days of workshops, talks, coffee breaks, and beer towers: there isn’t. Nobody knows what UX means.

Actually, that’s wrong. Almost everybody is pretty sure of what UX is. The problem is that there’s no shared meaning for “user experience” and the opinions are varied enough to make the term vague, even irrelevant.

Taking a page from the amusing Eric Reiss and his Copywriting for the Web presentation, we (as the UX community, if there is one) have no shared reference for UX among us. We share common beliefs but not a common reference: we want to use our design powers to fix broken experiences and make the world better by creating new, good experiences. And because of these common beliefs, we slap the “UX” tag on basically any concrete activity that furthers our beliefs.

Not sure if this is a cause or a consequence of the above, but I feel there’s an aura of magic around UX.

This aura is good for the enthusiasm it creates in people: a junior pixel pusher can get energized when skinning buttons becomes user experience design. After all, the visual look of buttons is a highly relevant issue of user experience — one highly relevant issue, that is. A usability researcher is no more doing an interview after another, but they’re actually making observations about the the user experience. The vagueness of the term evokes a sense of whole, that makes the work of a peg feel all the more important, and thus rewarding.

And if you’re into the kind of marketing that promises heavens on earth with such clever wording, the advertiser will never get caught lying, “user experience” is a silver bullet for you. Just push out the next version of your product with a “now at least 27% better user experience” sticker on it.

But the magic aura of UX is also a bad thing. The fluff of the aura, and the self-confidence of UX practitioners, makes it difficult to discuss anything labeled “user experience”. The aura clouds progress, and slows down change, apart from cosmetic improvements in the details.

I have no idea what to suggest people do about this. Maybe we just need to let all voices be heard, and wait for a clear and shared definitions to appear in the long run.

In a client-vendor relationship, this struggle nearly always get framed as “the client against the user”. The vendor sides with the users, accusing the client of ignoring the needs of the users. The client accuses the vendor for ignoring the business constraints. The usual consequence is a compromise that isn’t valuable to the users, nor does it satisfy the client’s needs for business results.

But clients and vendors are not at opposing ends. In reality the choice between business or the users doesn’t exist. There is no competition between the two. The goal is common, and seeing this is a matter of agreeing to do a cost-benefit forecast of sorts. If there is zero value for users, if the users get nothing out of the client’s products, why would they spend a cent of their money or a second of their attention on the products? Even if the vendor designs the greatest user experience of the world, isn’t it worthless if the client cannot affort building and maintaining it?

Know the resources, find out what value (user benefits) can be built with the resources at hand, and estimate and track the value users give back to the client in return. Clients should be happy, and users should be happy (enough). If not, you don’t have a working business plan.

Bumped on this bit in a discussion thread about user experience practices and agile processes:

Do architects design the buildings while the bricklayers are laying bricks? Would you fly in an airplane that was designed as it was built? Of course not. So why should complex systems be any different? Larry Marine

I’ll start with the second most important reason: It should be different because the user interfaces and web apps we’re mostly talking about in conjunction with user experience are evolving, dynamic things. The basic functionality of a modern airplane was designed tens of years ago, for buildings you can add a couple of zeros to that number. Even the modern details of an airplane were probably designed, and specifications locked years before starting constructing planes for clients.

What about a social networking site then? The “must have” functional details are changing every week, and you can’t really talk about an agreed framework of basic functionality.

Let’s take a car for another example. A car model is first designed, then built hundreds of thousands of times. This doesn’t mean the first prototypes of the car were not built while it was designed. And redesigned while it was built.

The beauty and curse of building “live” software is that you only build one copy. You design and then build. But you also build and then design more. It has versions and iterations, but unlike mass produced things like cars or airplanes, there’s (usually) only one product in use. If requirements change, you don’t start a new design process which ends with a locked spec, then start a new manufacturing process. No, you change the product live. And that’s why agile works for software design, but not necessarily for buildings and airplanes.

The first most important reason is, that in the heat of developing a cool new web app, it is often forgotten that unlike with an airplane, a mishap in the design doesn’t kill anyone. In fact, even the worst possible outcome of neglect is often insignificant, considering life at large.

When learning a new UI, choice creates anxiety. Anxiety creates a bad experience.

And to be honest, this isn’t true only for your parents. It goes the same way for everyone.

If it were my choice, I would not have a TV. In fact, for the most part when I was living alone, I didn’t have one. Now that I’m sharing a flat, I do not get to make these decisions, which means I watch quite a bit of TV, even if I don’t want to. I just can’t resist the allure of the moving image……

Well, onwards.

I hope no one minds me using such delicate wording, but I think the current TV experience is fucked up. The digital TV we’re “enjoying” in Finland surely plays a big part in this assessment.

Minimalist Bang & Olufsen Home Theater, originally uploaded by ikatu_projects.

Here’s what I’ve seen happening to the TV experience:

• At least two remotes is the standard in every home. The TV remote is rarely used for anything but switching the TV power on and off.
• Switching channels has become slow.
• Previously problems in the TV signal transmission made the picture slightly fuzzy. Now the picture cuts off completely, or at minimum goes into an artsy mess of pixel vomit.
• Subtitles are not guaranteed to be displayed.
• Picture and sound are not guaranteed to be in sync.
• No matter what TV or digital receiver you have, it is too difficult to find settings for getting the aspect ratio of the picture right. If I could get one euro for every movie geek with a 4000+ € hi-fi home theatre setup and a video image that’s unnaturally stretched and probably also cropped at top and bottom, I would go and buy a soy latte with double espresso. Obviously having full HD resolution and 200Hz refresh rate is more important than seeing people on the screen in their natural proportions.
• If you really want to see a certain show, it is rather likely, that your digital receiver will start a software update on the moment you turn it on. It is even more likely the software update is made so, that you cannot watch TV while it’s updating, you cannot abort the update, and you don’t get any feedback as to how long the update might take.
• And when the update doesn’t help, taking your “video” (that’s DVR now, folks) to repairs, will most probably wipe out your whole collection of recorded shows.
• But hey, you got a slightly sharper image. So slightly though, that it’s nearly impossible to see the difference if you don’t have an old TV tube for comparison.
• Any improvement in image quality is offset by buying a flat screen TV, which most likely doesn’t really display any dark colors, and basically turns everything else into a pixelized flicker. Yes, the man in the store says that’s not true, and yes, your friends who paid thousands for top notch TVs a couple years back say that’s not true… but there’s a reason the refresh rates in the newest LCD TVs top at around 240 Hz.
• Having all this new technology added to the TV viewing setup certainly doesn’t make things easier. There’s an increasing number of user interfaces, but unfortunately not an increasing quality in UI design. Quite the contrary. Our particular digital receiver / DVR (Humax) is so bad, that I wonder how many of those boxes the engineers behind that shit-pile have tossed out their own windows, in frustration.

I’m not really as frustrated as it might sound, probably because I don’t really care about watching TV. I’m just amazed at how we’ve come to where we are with TV technology, and how fast the change has happened. Knowing so many great designers, and knowing there must be at least tens of thousands of brilliant designers out there in the world, I’m amazed at how it seems not a single one has been hired to design a TV or a set-top box.

As a side note, I would salute Samsung for the UIs in their digital TV products — unless I wouldn’t have seen how impossible it is to get a Samsung home media box to talk to a Samsung TV.

First, ReadWriteWeb asks:

Can you imagine a news-delivering web application so compelling that you would pay a couple of dollars per month for it? What would it look like?

They then go on about The Information Valet Project, which, while not necessarily a great answer to the above question, doesn’t make the question less interesting. What would such news service look like?

Next, Nicolas Nova points to research with this interesting quote:

For example, rather than using “ease of use” as a guiding principle, elders described difficult, yet enjoyable aspects of housework that technology removed

Ease of use is not necessarily the most favorable end goal. It’s probably outside good manners to even hint at the idea that usability and simplicity are not necessarily a favorable end goal. Making something simple might remove the part of a task that made the task worthwhile. Is it so that usable can equal dull?

People keep telling me that my presentation on user experience needs to be more concrete.

The problem is that I am not a “user experience professional”, in the sense of being someone who spends his days doing UX research, design, usability, etc. I see myself more as a keen observer, somewhat like a journalist trying to make sense of the developing story of user experience (and worth).

Why am I interested? Why do i want to report on this story? Because I want to do what I can to influence the creation of better things — products, services, brands, workplaces, everything. I might not be a practitioner, but I can do my tiny part, I can try my best to drive change. My UX efforts are about change management.

I believe in the importance of the first step in Kotter’s change model: an urgency of action needs to be established. People need to be inspired, people need to be motivated, they need to be told that they cannot wait before making their experiences better, before increasing their worth to users.

Cockton talks from the viewpoint of human-computer interaction design and defines the word with academic precision. If I tried to summarize in short, worth is synonymous to value, except with less distracting associations. You can play with the word in useful ways: is a product “worthy”, “worthless” service, “for what it’s worth”, etc. Worth is the level at which something deserves to be valued. How much value does a product create for users? How much is a product worth to users?

When I talk about the value of the total experience, the sum of experiences a user has had of a product, “worth” is not far off (in fact, it might be spot on, I’m not quite sure yet). You can have good days with a product, you can have bad days with a product, and all it does is to change the subjective worth of that product to you.

It’s the sum total of the interactions that a customer has with a company’s products, people, and processes.

What have we learnt since 1999? Is there something we know now and did not know then?

Sales management is setting and maintaining…

• a supportive environment — making it possible to sell well
• requirements — making sure the sales people are striving towards the intended goals
• motivation of the sales people — very important, considering you have to be happy about losing if you want to be a good seller

This is pretty much the same triad I have thought about regarding the management of designed experiences. To maintain and manifest an intended experience throughout a company and its activities, you need…

• a supportive environment
• to make sure people are working towards the common goal (this includes the harsh job of yanking people off the wrong path, steering or even killing pet projects), and finally
• to keep people motivated about the intended experience and their ability to provide the experience and make it real in what they do.

Maybe it’s just a basic lesson in management. Period.

2007 BMW M6 Convertible front grille, originally uploaded by exoticcarlady.

Audi A5 LED headlights, originally uploaded by janandersen_dk.

How could you use the idea of design cues in Experience design? What kind of “experience elements” could be re-used in experiences provided by various products of a company?

IKEA could provide an example. The IKEA experience is (or used to be) that of cheap, good looking, and easy to assemble furniture. The rationale was that they could cut prices by not pre-assembling the pieces. Instead, the work of assembly was left to consumers. Part of the promise was that anyone could assemble any furniture they bought from IKEA, with a single universal tool that came with every IKEA product. A great example of maintaining the chic, cheap, and simple experience throughout the whole product portfolio.

Over the years the IKEA experience has changed. No doubt do they still have cheap furniture, but the one-tool simplicity has gone. Many of the furniture pieces now need a plethora of tools to come together (none included).

Does the IKEA promise still reflect the actual experience? Are the expectations set by marketing aligned with the product?

Why the car references? I spent the day at the Nokia factory in Salo, having been invited to give a short presentation on Experience to the current IDBMpro students. The teacher of this particular two-day assignment was Toni-Matti Karjalainen who works as the Research Director of the IDBM program at Helsinki School of Economics. He has studied the design processes of car manufacturers, and the term design cue came from his presentation. Thanks for everyone present, it was all very interesting — not least to see how rolls of components (yes, the components come in rolls) become a finished and packaged mobile phone!

Here’s a fictional story:

Johanna works at a Big Company. She has been tasked the fairly simple job of entering data from a pile of paper forms into the company intranet. Knowing the amount of paper and her typing speed, Johanna has a fairly good idea of how long it will take for her to finish the task.

Suddenly, her software starts crashing and she starts lagging behind her intended schedule. She’s mad at the computer for crashing — but she’s also mad at herself for not getting the task done in an adequate time, for being inefficient. And it’s not her fault! Johanna ends up doing overtime to accomplish the goal she set for herself in the morning. On the way home she blames the company for not compensating for the overtime, and at home she’s tired and snaps at her family.

Software needs to be better than this. If you develop things people use, you have a responsibility.

Providing Good Experiences is the responsibility of everyone, not just of the designers who think how systems should work for the user, or what systems should look like. It’s as much the responsibility of those who build the designs — in the case of software, us programmers. But it’s also the responsibility of the managers to make time for everyone to do their best work. To ask the programmers to deliver three months worth of work in two months will result in technical problems, which will turn into user experience problems.

My ultimate (and idealistic) goal with the presentation is to change how people think about designing, creating, selling, and marketing products, services, and even companies as whole. There’s a lot to think, starting from finding the right audience for this presentation.

As of now I have given the presentation a few times to clients, friends, and a room of students at the Helsinki School of Economics ITP program, and I’ve had a lot great, and very varying feedback. If you think this presentation might interest you, your colleagues, or maybe your clients, I would be glad to hear from you.

What I’m really excited about is that the presentation was selected for the Web 2.0 Expo Europe, and I will be speaking in Berlin on October 22nd (more details on my session at Web 2.0 Expo).

I’m also pushing for the presentation to be included in the SXSW Interactive 2009 program (not least because I’ve heard so many good stories about Austin ;). So if you want to help me, please vote for the presentation at the SXSW Panel Picker.

• Perceived simplicity, the “look” of simplicity, makes products attractive
• Experienced simplicity, simplicity of use, the feel of simplicity, makes products convenient

Right..?

What about User Memories? This would refer to the things a user remembers about a product.

Personally I can relate to the analogy of the User Memories being a sum of User Experiences: If a product is not outright bad, does its thing, but feels slightly awkward every time I use it, I tend to think of it as a “bad product” (our digi-tv box comes to mind). The sum of small negatives makes up a large negative.

On the other hand, the User Memory of a product could be colored by a single more significant event: A hard disk video recorder might work great with a pleasant user interface, except that one time it suddenly erased all the shows recorded on it. A large negative experience outweighs the small positives, even when summed together.

How to design the User Memories — that is a challenge.

Somehow catalysed by the introduction to Markkinoinnin musta kirja, a Finnish book on much the same subjects as our own book.

For those readers who have no idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a brief summary: A Finnish bank, Sampo-pankki, was bought by a Danish bank. They decided to unify their IT infrastructures to everyone’s benefit. All branding material was to be changed as well during the four days of Easter 2008 — each logo, outdoor signage, and leaflet in every city in Finland.

What happened was, to list some of the widespread symptoms, that:

• Debit cards stopped working.
• ATM cards stopped working.
• Online banking was completely inaccessible for a few days.
• Paying bills was not possible for some (many) customers, even after two weeks since Easter.
• Some bank accounts disappeared from customer’s online services.
• All pending payments for Sampo customers were paid instantly, wiping out customer’s accounts without warning and putting them on red until the next pay day (on which they might, or might not have been able to receive their salary…).
• Some users had completely random numbers on their balance sheets; some seemed to have tens of thousands of euros, some had none.
• Information about loans was absent.
• Payment categorization feature, introduced and hyped a year before, vanished without warning.
• Customer service was flooded an incapacitated (they have now said they can return to regular service level in June)
• New Java-based, more flexible security measures were introduced to the online services, blocking out a significant amount of users. And who wants flexible security anyway?
• Apparently Sampo does, as a potential exploit was identified in the Java security system within two days.
• Sampo dismissed this threat basically by saying “it is not a security threat if it has not been exploited”. Looks like they have some real professional hands in the security department.

In short, the change didn’t go very smoothly.

What I find interesting is, how an incredible fuck up of this volume affects the user/customer experience, and indirectly via the provided experience, the whole business. On the first day of problems, I murmured to my girlfriend “it will be interesting to see how many people abandon the bank and switch their accounts to a competitor, all because of a bad experience.” My guesses were either “nearly no-one”, or “a significant number” of customers. Significant as in an amount that has even the slightest significance to Sampo’s operations.

On April 4th MTV3 news told even companies are leaving Sampo. They went on to say just one of the competing banks was receiving hundreds of new customers from Sampo each day. Considering the general level of local news nowadays and the seemingly complete illiteracy of journalists regarding statistics, these numbers could as well be true or not. In fact, two days later MTV3 news reported that hundreds of customers are considering leaving Sampo bank. A third number is, that over 12.000 people have contacted the customer service at Sampo about problems they are having.

So this is the kind of IT merger you get for 200 million euros. Perhaps this is no surprise to anyone who has worked on IT projects in the last 10 years. From what I’ve heard, this project has been going on for at least three years, and the eventual problems in deployment were well known at the beginning (my source of rumors can correct me if I’m wrong ;). Every project manager dreams to stay in budget and deliver on time, even though all their gantt charts, projections, excel charts, issue trackers, and one-on-one sessions with programmers are telling them otherwise.

200 million is a big number. It would be interesting to know how it compares to the amount of branding and tactical marketing the bank does. How many millions of euros have been spent during the years in building the brand, and what are those millions worth in the head of a customer who can’t get their money out of the bank, because of “new and massively improved services”? What about when the customer finds out the “new and improved” service is actually a stripped down version of the old service? In a year from now, do you think any random person will remember the great TV spot I had the honor of scoring or rather this Easter’s fiasco? How many thousands or millions of euros are required to revive the trust of customers? Was the “done in a hurry” 200 million IT investment worth it at the end?

I don’t know, of course. But it would be interesting to have the numbers.

Consumers cross roads with companies in many occasions and in many different ways. People and companies meet at various times and places. More accurately, people meet with representatives and representations of companies. To give you some examples, people can come across advertising, websites, products, self-service kiosks, or customer service personnel.

These encounters form the dialog consumers have with companies. To put it in the words of Joseph Jaffe who was speaking in Helsinki yesterday: this is the conversation people have and companies should join. You could also say companies inevitably start conversations by putting out products, services and marketing, and the difference is in whether the companies continue the conversation after the consumers join it. Another Jaffe line Jaffe borrowed from Hugh McLeod, and which I really liked concerns how the conversations get started:

If people would talk to you in the way advertising does, you would punch them in the face. If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face. (see the original cartoon)

It comes down to the “persona” of the company and how the company discusses with consumers. You probably recognize the kind of person who keeps talking, never stops to listen and is generally obnoxious. Or the person who is quiet and you never seem to get a decent answer out of them. Many companies act like those persons.

The revelation I had this weekend is that I’m interested in how user experience lies at the intersection of marketing, usability and business. (I initially wrote “business strategy” but it might as well be “business tactics”.)

All those little encounters combined, and the way the company converses with the consumers, creates the user experience, or the thing I like to call user experience. Every little snippet of experience created by marketing and the user interface or product designers creates the total user experience — in effect, how consumers experience the company. Which in turn makes user experience (and hence marketing, design, etc) highly relevant for business.

The question then becomes, which encounters are worth financing? Is it better to spend on outdoor billboards, or training the customer service? Is it better to have another month for user testing the product design, or would you rather hire a Hollywood actor to appear in your TV ad? There’s no one answer, of course. But thinking in terms of these encounters and conversations, you can make up these (in my opinion) more relevant questions than “where to spend the marketing money”, for example.

Branding is about mind share, and minds are conditioned more by memorable and personal experiences than by “sensory branding”, exposure to visual, aural or other sensory inputs. If you don’t know what I mean about these inputs, I’m talking about logos, colors, typography, branded spaces, audio branding, even smells or creating brand-specific tactile experiences. All of these are secondary if the experience a customer has sucks. Bryan Eisenberg asks does usability actually sell anything. I would say it is pivotal to creating good experiences, broadly speaking with any device.

Jared Spool says exposure to brand identity keeps the brand in mind of the customer for a good 24 hours. During that time, the customers are more likely to associate their needs with products of that given brand. This is called dispositional branding.

I’m left wondering if exposure to sensory branding works as an amplifier for the brand image created by how the customers have experienced the brand? After a bad experience with phone support of brand X, will every brand X logo seen keep the bad experience in mind for the next 24 hours? If so, the long wow is ever more important.

• Don’t tell me about “potentially” expiring frequent flyer points. You hold the information about my bonus points, use it to customize the newsletter. (I’ve written more about this very same issue before, in Finnish.)
• Don’t offer me bonus trips that are out of my reach with my current frequent flyer points balance or loyalty level. You’re giving me information I don’t need, information waste. It is not good for your brand to waste my time.

These tips also touch on something we write about in our forthcoming book: companies should think not only how the companies themselves can benefit from the information customers give to them, but how companies can make the information work for the customers. Either in aggregate (think last.fm or Amazon recommendations) or individually.

• In some of the new Nokia phones there is sort of an introductory video, which teaches the user of the new phone in 15 seconds about how great and snappy the Nokia is.
• When sending a text message takes 20 seconds instead of one, every message sent teaches me how slow Nokia phones are — which for me is around 400 times a month.

In both cases the user learns something, and the product is teaching the user. Even if the introductory video is not so much for instruction as it is for branding, the user thinks he learns something about the product: the product sets expectations.

When the user uses the product daily, he learns by experience. This is when expectations are either met, exceeded — or shattered. Whichever is the case, the user is left with a lasting impression of the product (and other products connected to it by branding!).

This is the area of user experience that I find most fascinating: the daily, perhaps mundane tasks, where the real opinion about a product is forged. The small difference between something you use without thinking about it and something you like to use. The difference between some-other-MP3-player and an iPod. Somehow I feel this is an area where improvement is easy — and cheap. Yet people smarter than me don’t necessarily agree. Christian Lindholm says:

What is central to Apple’s product making is high level of attention to detail. Product quality is all about the attention to detail. Those details require extraordinary efforts from the people making the products.

Whether it’s cheap and easy or requires extraordinary efforts, pushing the user experience of products from forgettable to something that elevates your everyday is what everyone should be doing.

Thanks to Tina for clearing up my head around this subject. ;)

I obviously don’t have much to base my belief on, but I do rather believe in watching the people than asking the people.

I acknowledge that a lot of bad decisions based on asking the people are a result of simply taking the answers literally, ie. not asking the five whys. Taking an example from Tommi’s post on S60 Address Book, someone asked to be able to undo edits in the address book. Well, a nice idea! But the only reason was because the user was deleting contacts accidentally — so the better approach would be to fix the problem of accidental deletion rather than do what is being asked, and add yet another feature, the undo.

I do believe (without any grounds ;) that by watching the users, more radical improvements to the user experience are possible. Improvements on stuff that aren’t perceived by the users anymore, stuff that has become status quo, things that “are the way they are because they’ve always been that way”. Improvements that take features to the next level rather than tinker with them on the current level. Revolutionary improvements rather than incremental improvements.

It sounds like I’m talking about radical R&D and experimental prototypes (which I do love) but really I’m not. I believe in small opportunities for change which — if found — can quite radically change the user experience. And I don’t believe those can be found by asking.

I could be wrong. Would love to be wrong, actually. :)

To be a good experience, the focus should be on the other person, not on oneself.

When he asked about my interests, I listed user experience as one. But at that moment I realized it never quite felt… complete enough. I wanted to say “I’m doing stuff with computers but really I’m interested in the same you’re doing to your customers”.

In contrast to use experience, customer experience encompasses to me everything a person has to do with a company, from branding to phone support to the seats of the waiting hall. That felt too broad to describe my interest.

The discussion gave me a blink moment (perhaps ten years too late) that there are different angles to customer experience and it’s perfectly ok to be interested in only one of them. His angle was how to tune the interaction between bank customers and the bank so as not to alienate the customers when they’re being sold to.

I’m interested in another facet of it, influencing better customer experience through the means of creating better software.

Maybe. I’ll swing another way if I find I was wrong.

• The consumer evaluates a product and places a pleasure value on it.
• Then the consumer evaluates the price and places a pain value on it.

That’s related to the idea I had with my original UX diagram: making a decision about a product or service requires complex and sometimes unconscious balancing of the pain and pleasure involved. Price is one factor, but only one among a multitude of other points that make up the experience the user (current or to-be user) has about a product.