This morning I read an article in Billing & OSS World Magazine about User Experience. The title of the article was Copping the ‘Customer Experience’ Buzzword and this is how the article began…

“I hate when I succumb to the use of buzzwords. So I came reluctantly to the term “customer experience.” It always struck me as psycho-babble B.S. — and I don’t mean Bachelor of Science — that some precocious second-year grad from the Acme School of Business Management came up with to get a bunch of old techheads to stop thinking about their icky old networks. And thinking it impossible to ever accurately measure the quality of individual or collective experiences, I cringed every time I let the phrase slip into an article, thinking myself a shill for whichever nameless marketeer had coined it.”

So my question is what has happened to this individual and to usability that would create this type of impression to anyone. One of my goals as a UX Evangelist has been to take the mystery out of usability and to make it understandable and digestible by everyone. I mean usability affects every aspect of our life, why would it be so intimidating, or what would have caused it to lose credibility, and be described as a buzz-word of all things?! Is it because good usability makes things so seamless to use that people don’t even notice it?

By the end of the article the author acknowledges that usability is becoming more credible and that more companies are investing in it. But it still seems like this is an area that remains mysterious to many of whom do not understand it. People seem to understand the concept of convenience, why do they not understand ease of use?

As this blog grows, I hope to take away some of the mystery of usability. I know I haven’t gotten into it very deep so far, and most of my messages have discussed methodologies, and the whatnot without getting very detailed, but this is because I’ve been waiting to practice some of the processes, and provide some real feedback about my experiences and have some real content to discuss. Hopefully this will all come to fruition next week as I will be in NYC on customer visits.