Daily Archives: July 15, 2010

What is the opposite of UX?

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Thanks to the Web, more and more we are hearing the acronym UX (User Experience) in marketing discussions, referring to how one experiences and navigates a website, game or other interactive property. In the print world, UX was tied solely to art direction — things like reading from top to bottom, left to right, or where an eye fixates first on a page.  But with so much to see, read and do on a webpage the science of UX has become legion.

Metrics and Tools

So what’s the opposite of user experience?  When users experience a website and engage with a company via the web, what do we call the resulting intelligence?  What’s the short hand term? Mostly it’s called metrics: hits, clicks, time on site, referring site, bounce, etc. Over and above metrics, thanks to social media monitoring and measurement tools from Radian Six and (freebie company) Social Mention, are more behavioral quantitative views: sentiment, passion and affinity.

Indirect Benefits

In her new book Open Leadership, Charlene Li talks about some harder-to-measure things that engagement and dialogue can accomplish for a brand, referred to as “indirect benefits.” When a non-employee in a brand community answers a help question it reduces customer care cost and gives that helper a sense of brand accomplishment – both direct and indirect benefit.

All of these inbound forms of market intelligence or user intelligence are valuable. Business changing valuable.  So what shall we call the opposite of UX? What a company experiences when mining intelligence.  It needs a name. Involvement tracking? User forensics?  What is your top-of-mind thought? Peace?