Web Biz Strategy

When you work in the web business, the concept of “user experience” comes up a lot. That makes sense since real people (web “users”) have to interact with web sites, and someone has to design the interface for those interactions. Good user experience means happy visitors and thereby happy shoppers, customers, volunteers, and leads.

But user experience is way bigger than the web, and has been around way longer. Every day we all perform tasks that are made easier or harder by good or poor user experience design. The “You are Here” maps at a mall? Good user experience! A large building complex with no signage indicating where the restrooms are? Bad user experience! 

Good user experience tips are worth sharing. Despite a lot of interest and research into user experience, we all run into bad practices routinely, sometimes multiple times a day. If all businesses started adopting better user experience practices, we’d all be happier because we’re all customers too.  

Here’s my contribution to better UX globally. Introducing #goodux and #badux

On Twitter, users put a “hash tag” (#) to flag or “tag” a topic. I propose two new tags that will allow people to share best and poor user experience practices that they’ve seen companies implement, both online and offline.  Since user experience is often referred to as UE or UX, I will use “ux” to stand for user experience in my tags.

Use #goodux for a great idea that companies or organizations can implement. A great web site feature, a nice in-store practice, anything. You can name the company if you want to, or just describe the practice. 

Use #badux for a bad experience that companies should avoid. You don’t need to call out the company if you don’t want to, just describe the practice.

To make sorting easier, you can add the type of experience – online, instore, e-mail, support, etc.

Like this: #goodux Instore – they offered to store my bags for me while I shopped

From now on, anyone who wants to do research on user experience can go to http://search.twitter.com, search for #bestux or #badux and get some good ideas on making users happy! I’ll collect good ones that I find and post the collections here periodically.