On UX Debt
"UX dept" is used to represent the gap between a product's ideal user experience and its actual quality. The expression gives life to that gap and provides designers a language for perceiving and evaluating the real state and quality of UX experience in terms of the four emotional measures: functional, reliable, usable, and pleasurable. According to Aarron Walter's "Hierarchy of User Needs," which follows Maslow's framework of Hierarchy of (Human) Needs, the functional measure lives at the lowest level of the quality axis and supports the increasingly qualitative measures: reliable, usable, and pleasurable; the latter sitting at the top of the pyramid denoting the ideal, target or "peak" experience.
This notion is interesting to me because it gives me a quality matrix to place my work against and aim for when designing a user experience. It seems the work delivered in UX focuses more on the first 3 floors of the pyramid, often sacrificing the best quality-defining measure: the pleasurable. For the article's author, Andrew Walter, "UX dept" only occurs when designers think an experience can or should be better. It is the result of "cutting corners" and making fast constraint-based decisions to the detriment of a pleasurable and best user experience.
source: http://bit.ly/18UoFHL
more articles
Information shadows enable users to access information about their products and experience them in very different ways than could have been imaginable before the Internet. Today, products mean so much more to people and impact their product/customer experiences in new ways. With built-in ubicomp, customers experience products that have a much wider network of associations.