The User’s Experience

At the IA Summit, Peter Merholz commented that one issue with the phrase user experience is that it’s often misused as synonymous with user interface. I’ve heard this as well, and feel it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing, ‘The user experience is too green, can you make it more blue?

Perhaps simply adding an apostrophe-s could rectify this, speaking in terms of the user’s experience. Suddenly it is the user that has ownership and not the designer. It turns out Peterme already thought of that, but we haven’t given it a thorough try. I’m starting to.