A customer is defined as a person who pays a business for goods and services. If a person does not pay, they are not a customer. The nebulous term of “user” is assigned when a person is accessing goods and services without directly paying for them. Call them a visitor, a prospect, a constituent, whatever you want. Until they pay you, they’re no customer of yours — and you have not fulfilled upon your purpose as a business.
If Seth Godin were me…
Is Seth Godin reading my blog? His piece last week titled “If I were you…” is a booming echo of my mantra “The user is not like me“: “If I were you…” But of course, you’re not. And this is the most important component of strategic marketing: we’re not our customer. Godin has written a [Keep Reading…]
We Don’t Know Anything
We don’t know. We believe we know. Our experiences, education, instincts and values all add up to our beliefs. They also include assumptions and misperceptions and past truths. We believe something once and then we “know” it forever, because that’s easier than always having to ask. Asking isn’t easy. It takes time. It introduces risk. [Keep Reading…]
User Experience is Not Enough
Designing the product is all for naught if you don’t first take the time to design the organization. — Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) April 20, 2012 I’ve been a user experience designer for the entirety of my career. And in the decade I’ve spent doing this work, I have discovered that there is only one universal [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 16
Thank you so much to the ~22 people who showed up for the sixteenth week of Whit Hour — my weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. Tune in every Monday night from 10-11pm Eastern Time at http://www.livestream.com/whithour. Whit [Keep Reading…]
Old Guard Versus New Guard: An Interview by Tom Johnson
While at STC Summit in Dallas a month ago, Tom Johnson, a technical writer for the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, asked if he could interview me for his blog I’d Rather Be Writing. From Tom’s blog post: In this videocast, I talk with Whitney Hess at the STC Summit in Dallas about her [Keep Reading…]
Reaching outside the UX tribe at STC’s Technical Communication Summit
In Transcending Our Tribe, my closing plenary at this year’s Information Architecture Summit, I asserted that in order for the field of user experience to survive, we need to stop spending so much time looking inwards, and start reaching out to the larger business and technical communities. Because I’m a big fan of practicing what [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 6
Thank you so much to the 41 people who showed up for the sixth week of Whit Hour — my weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. I really appreciate everyone’s flexibility in moving over to Ustream at the [Keep Reading…]
Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of IA
The very first issue of the Journal of Information Architecture was published yesterday, after much dedication and tirelessness from contributors around the world. The Journal of Information Architecture is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture. The long [Keep Reading…]
IA Summit 2009: A functional family reunion
Families fight. When you share that much time with the same people, and put your faith in them, and share a common history, and become reliant on one another’s successes, it’s very easy to feel disappointed and confused and argumentative when things don’t seem to be going right. But ultimately what allows you to express [Keep Reading…]