The User Story is the User Experience
When I work with a team designing products, I always try to start the exploration in the same place. A blank screen.
The ideal user experience is “none”.
A perfect user experience on any product would read your mind, and from that execute what you’re asking it to do, without shipping “work” to the user. When I was at Live Nation, the premise would be a website that knew your taste, your location, your favorite bands and the date you wanted to see a show.
Of course, nothing could read your mind to that extent, so you have to incrementally add elements to the UI/UX to extract the information from the user. Start with a search box. With the right natural language processing, one search box should be able to extract all that information.
Except usually it couldn’t. So you add a date and location selector. But then how do you promote certain shows?
Suddenly the perfect user experience is a bunch of individual user stories, shipped to screen. Every redesign after will endevor to get back to just a search box. The rest is just furniture in a crowded room.
But what happens when the user story, the “job” you’re trying to solve for the user, ends up being the user experience?
That’s where we are at now.
“My favorite band is Coldplay, recommend me some shows in the next two weeks with tickets still available”
I could type that in, but I could also speak it. It can also be inferred. Either way, the result is the same. As a fan, I like a band, and want to see similar bands. The user story is now the user experience. We’ve moved from interactive manipulation toward desired results to just being able to declare intent and have it executed.
If I was to sit down today and redesign Live Nation, or Fender, or any of the thousand band websites I did, the user interface would just be an empty text box asking:
“What can I do for you?”
