The Importance of User Experience

User experience is basically the sum or flow of feelings that the customer gets when using your device, webpage, or system. In many businesses, the user experience of the product is already the key battlefield. Forget about launching the newest technologies unless you have designed a great user experience around them. Being first is no longer enough, and the winner is often the company that makes the new thing better than anyone else has.

Just look at the mobile phone industry. Was Apple the first company to apply touch screens to a smart phone? No. Touch screens existed in the mobile phone industry at least ten years before Apple launched the first iPhone. But Apple managed to create an excellent user experience for this old technology. Nokia, which used to be seen as the leader in user experience, failed for several years to create even an acceptable user experience for touch screen devices, and this is now reflected very much in the market situation and in which companies run off with the profits.

I will not claim that the methods described in this book are perfect, but I can say that these methods have helped me personally to create more than 100 filed patents, and they have helped me to create a number of truly successful user experience innovations for Nokia when Nokia was still seen as one of the top ten most innovative companies in the world. And when I say successful user experience, for me that means that I have seen or heard of a large number of users that actually loved my contributions to the mobile phone industry. My professional happiness does not depend on what my managers or the CEO says, but what I hear from real users.