User Experience Applies to Everything

User experience can be applied to almost all kinds of businesses. The user experience may seriously influence your brand, customer loyalty, and the amount of new customers considerably. Hence, it makes sense to take user experience very seriously for any kind of business.

For example, customers certainly get an impression of and feelings about a train company (Figure 1-9) if they have to wait 20 minutes in line to buy a train ticket, or if the trains are delayed frequently.

Figure 1-9. Example of user experience when purchasing train tickets

Likewise, customers will remember the atmosphere, interior, staff, waiting times, and service when using a bank. And people will certainly have good and bad experiences when they use a product or visit a web page.

People rarely use strong words such as love and hate about a product, but I am sure that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world that would say that they love their social network service. You will also find thousands of people who love their iPhone, their Android product or similar, or even their bank. Finally, I am sure we have all hated our computer or a specific program when it crashes and decides to throw away the data you've been working on for the last two hours.

As mentioned, however, this book will focus mainly on how to create successful user experience innovations for devices, web pages, software, systems, and the like. But the book may still be good inspiration for organizations or companies who want to design a new shop interior layout, a better consumer experience when buying train tickets at the train station, and so on.