User experience (UX) is the set of perceptions and responses a person has when using a product, system or service. It is used to understand how people interact with what a company offers, remove the obstacles that stop them from completing what they came to do, and make the experience so easy and memorable that they return and buy again.
Imagine a Tuesday board meeting at a company that sells safety footwear to industrial customers. The chief executive asks why the website, which cost a considerable amount to build, generates so few orders. The marketing director answers that the form on the home page captures plenty of requests. The sales director adds, a little uncomfortably, that those requests are answered within a day or two, and that by then many of the buyers have already purchased elsewhere. Nobody in the room had designed that waiting time as part of the customer's experience, yet it is precisely what the customer remembers.
That scene captures what user experience is for. A great deal of competition exists among products in the world, so people live comparing one with another and often pay for convenience, or even out of habit. When a company does not know how people will react to a new product, how to introduce it to the market, what to do if it does not sell or how to make it stand out from another, user experience offers a way to find the answers. This article explains what UX is, the four situations in which a company should evaluate it, and what leadership teams should do with the findings.
User experience is the different perceptions and responses a person has when using a product, system or service. The idea is standardized in the international norm ISO 9241-210, which defines it as a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service. The definition is deliberately human. There are many people in the world, and for one person the experience of using an object can be very different from the perceptions and responses of another person, of someone from a different country and culture, or of the neighbor across the street.
The Nielsen Norman Group, which has shaped the practice for decades, describes user experience as encompassing all aspects of the end user's interaction with the company, its services and its products, and stresses that the first requirement for an exemplary experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer without fuss or bother. In other words, UX is studied primarily on digital platforms such as websites, blogs and applications, but it is not confined to them. It takes into account the emotions of people as well as the usability of the product, meaning the ease with which tasks are completed, the speed at which they are done, the functionality and the number of steps required.
The purpose of the user experience discipline is to improve, in every area, the perceptions and responses that people may have when using a product so that they return because they want that experience again. It continues to evolve constantly, in part because people access platforms in many different ways, so a good practice covers all types of users, always in relation to the target market of the product or company.
User experience evaluates people's different perceptions when they use a product and finds an approach that lets the largest number of people have an excellent experience. The ideal is an experience that is memorable, accessible, intuitive, fast and straightforward, so that users want to repeat it, keep using the product and buy the same product again. For an executive, those adjectives translate into commercial terms. Memorable and intuitive means lower acquisition and training costs. Accessible means a wider market. Fast and straightforward means fewer abandoned purchases and fewer calls to service.
The wider point is that UX turns opinions about a product into evidence. Rather than debating in a meeting whether a new feature will be valued, a company can observe real users, measure what they do and adjust. That discipline reduces the most expensive kind of error in product development, which is to complete a launch before learning that customers do not want or cannot use what has been built. For related guidance, see our guide to implement the UX methodology in your company.
UX evaluates the product throughout its creation and runs several tests before it reaches the market. Changes are made, the product is evaluated again, and the cycle repeats until it meets the requirements defined at the beginning by the UX team, the designers and the company that owns it. When it reaches the market, thanks to those tests it is likely to be chosen over competing alternatives, and its users will recommend it. A bank that tests a new mobile onboarding flow with real customers before launch, for instance, discovers in days the confusing step that would otherwise generate thousands of calls after release.
If a product does not sell, it must be evaluated to find what can improve the experience, adjusting one aspect or another. The company should also assess whether it or its target audience needs to redesign the concept. The value of this approach is that it replaces guesswork with diagnosis. A manufacturer of household appliances whose new model underperforms might find that the product is excellent but that the instructions, the registration process and the packaging create frustration in the first ten minutes of ownership, which is where reviews are formed.
A new version builds on the features and qualities of a previous product, but UX is used to make improvements by considering the functionality, usability and experiences that a person would have. The earlier and the future features are evaluated through different tests until the final product emerges. Software companies know the danger of skipping this step, since a redesign that moves familiar functions can alienate loyal customers more than it attracts new ones.
Often a company has good sales only in certain seasons, such as Mother's Day or Christmas. For sales to be constant, it is necessary to analyze the UX of the product and of the sales process, that is, the contact with the customer. This is why a key part of the sales cycle is related to UX, as we explore in our article on what is happening with the user experience in retail. The analysis often finds that the largest losses are not in the product but in the moments between interest and purchase, such as slow responses, unclear prices and complicated payment steps.
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Consider a company that sells safety footwear. The first contact with the customer is its website, where the visitor must fill in a form so that the sales agent receives an email. The customer then waits for an agent to get in touch, and that can take hours or even days. If the customer loses interest within two hours of submitting the request, the result is one sale fewer for the seller and, in aggregate, for the company. The case involves contact through a digital platform, but to understand its true impact the percentage results in sales would have to be analyzed, so that UX is linked to the company's sales cycle.
This example reveals why UX belongs in the commercial agenda. The website design may be impeccable, and the damage is done by a process that sits behind it. A response time that matches the customer's expectation, an automatic acknowledgment that confirms what happens next, or a chat option for urgent orders would change the experience without altering a pixel of the design. It is also a reminder that an experience is only as good as its weakest link, and that the weakest link is often an internal handoff.
The second example comes from an entirely different sector. Take a color-matching game in which winning adds points to the story, opens the next level and earns coins that can be used to buy bonus items to pass difficult stages. The game often begins very easily, but when a player reaches high levels, such as level 100, the application tends to make the challenges more complex, causing the user to spend more coins and sometimes make in-app purchases to continue.
The UX question is what happens to players who earn bonuses and still cannot pass a level, who spend more than a week stuck in one stage or who buy items and still do not win. They are likely to abandon the game, so it is essential to define what a hard level and a manageable level mean and how often the algorithm should intervene so that people find levels they can complete instead of getting stuck and leaving. This is a superficial analysis of UX within an app, viewed from the marketing side, with the aim of keeping users playing and interested. The lesson applies far beyond games. Any subscription, loyalty program or digital service that increases complexity or cost over time faces the same equilibrium between challenge and frustration.
The three terms are often used interchangeably, and the confusion leads to poor decisions about who should be responsible for what. Usability is the narrowest. It describes how easy and efficient it is to complete a task with an interface. The interface is the layer people see and touch. User experience contains both and adds what happens before, during and after the interaction, including expectations, emotions and the service that surrounds the product. A company can therefore have a usable interface and still deliver a disappointing experience, as the safety footwear example shows. We examine the distinction in depth in our comparison of UX design and UI design.
In practice, this means that responsibility for the experience cannot sit exclusively with the design team. The sales force that answers requests, the logistics team that delivers, the finance team that issues invoices and the service team that resolves problems all shape what the customer remembers. Companies that manage UX well appoint an executive owner for each key journey and review it with the same regularity as financial results.
For the chief executive, UX is a mechanism for protecting growth. It reduces the probability that large investments in products and platforms fail because they ignore how customers behave, and it provides a shared language across product, technology, marketing and service. For the chief marketing officer and the commercial director, it identifies where demand is lost between interest and purchase and shows which moments of the journey deserve investment, whether the response to a request, the clarity of an offer or the simplicity of payment.
For the chief customer officer, UX is the basis for retention and loyalty. Customers remain with companies whose products they find easy, and they recommend them. For service leaders it is also an efficiency argument, since a clear experience reduces the volume of contacts that exist only because something was confusing. The chief financial officer can ask for a simple translation of UX into numbers, such as the conversion rate of a key journey, the cost of calls driven by usability problems and the revenue from customers who return. When the board sees UX expressed in those terms, it stops being a design preference and becomes an investment with a measurable return.
A seasoned consultant would advise starting small and concrete. Choose the product, page or process that matters most to revenue, whether it is a quote request, an onboarding flow or an ordering portal, and ask five representative customers to complete a realistic task while someone silently observes. Record where they hesitate, what they misunderstand and what they say. Five observed sessions usually surface the most serious problems, and the patterns are often more persuasive to skeptical executives than any report.
Next, agree on one metric for the experience you want to improve, such as time to complete the task, success rate or response time to a request. Make a limited set of changes, test again and compare. To evaluate how efficient the UX of your digital product is, we offer a checklist that will help you decide whether your development needs a different approach. Our Heuristic Tests Toolkit is a practical starting point for a first review.
ICX Consulting links user experience to the commercial results a company needs to reach. Our UX research services reveal how customers and employees actually use your products and channels, and our UX optimization work turns the findings into improvements that can be measured in conversion, adoption and service cost. Where the experience crosses several touchpoints, we map it with customer journey consulting so that the digital and human parts of the relationship work together.
If you want to know where your customers struggle before they tell you by leaving, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant.
No. UX is evaluated mainly on digital platforms, but it applies to any product, system or service, including physical stores, call centers and delivery. The concept covers any situation in which a person interacts with what a company offers.
UX concentrates on how people use a specific product, interface or service. Customer experience is broader and covers the entire relationship with a company, including marketing, sales, service and billing. UX is a major component of it, particularly in digital channels.
For finding the main usability problems in a defined task, a small group of representative users is often enough to reveal the most serious issues. Larger samples are useful when you need to measure performance or compare alternatives with statistical confidence.
As early as possible, before and during the creation of a product, because early changes cost far less than corrections after launch. It also pays to review the experience whenever sales stall, a new version is released or customers begin to complain.
Companies that listen carefully to how people actually use their products tend to be the ones that people choose again. If you want to make that listening a routine part of how your business decides, our consultants are ready to work with your team.