There was a question posted on LinkedIn asking about the difference between between user interface design and user experience design. Of course, it would help to have a context for the question, as there is little consensus about these terms - job titles are often contrivances anyway, to do with marketing and perception, not necessarily function.

I believe that “experience design” is an oxymoron, as experience cannot be designed. As per my earlier reminder that ‘we are in the experience business‘, I think that the most pressing need in many organisations is to create an awareness of user experience as a key consideration in the product lifecycle. In other words, we don’t just deliver products, we enable experiences. Hence, formal roles like ‘experience evangelist’ are important to me, as such people would be employed to continually put experience on the product roadmap and create an experience-aware culture. Many companies with a heavy engineering history and bias lack this awareness. Inevitably, the product teams will start to ask what can we do with this product to affect the experience in a positive way that leads to better customer satisfaction.

As Barbara Ballard (my nominated expert in this field) points out, this requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To find someone with a grasp of the disciplines is difficult. They are usually very experienced individuals. Because of their expansive view of the product experience issues, I would tend to think of them more as architects than designers. The distinction to me is that the architect paints the broader (multidisciplinary) picture whilst the designers go about making it happen in the detail, across the disciplines (e.g. UI design).

Inevitably, the interface will affect the experience, which is perhaps why these terms get confused or deliberately used interchangeably. We shouldn’t deny that the visual aspects of the interface - how the thing looks - can have a profound affect on the experience, which is why the aesthetics of a product is very often considered to be tantamount to the experience in its entirety, which obviously is not true. Something can look fantastic and perform poorly, leading to a poor experience. Something can work very well, and look poor. Actually, the latter is a worse position to be in, generally speaking, even though “usability” purists might disagree, but at this point the whole discussion becomes rather academic and reminiscent of literary criticism and all its navel-gazing subtleties. A poorly written book with a great story usually outsells a well-written book with an impenetrable story. Whilst the latter might be more worth of merit in some intellectual fashion, business is about making profit, like blockbuster stories.