If you were to ask 100 people how their experience was on amazon.com, you'd probably get 50 different answers. And if we we're to believe that there is such a thing as user experience design, a team of designers would have been responsible for designing all those experiences.

And while it's nice to think that someone was thinking about the user, it's unlikely that the designers were truly influencing all the emotions, feelings and experiences of the user. Sure, you might say that somebody in the company needs to be focused on the user, but that's not designing something, that's observing, talking and learning from them- we call that 'customer service' and 'marketing'.

The designers that work on amazon.com don't create the experience— they're responsible for building the system, product and service that allowed those different experiences to happen. The designers work to understand how the user interacts with the website to create the most desirable and profitable experiences. We call that interaction design.

Designers need to stop thinking that they're creating experiences. They're allowing them to unfold with sound design decisions.

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Bryan Zmijewski

Leading the charge at ZURB since 1998

Our fearless leader has been driving progressive design at ZURB since 1998. That makes him quite the instigator around the offices, consistently challenging both the team and our customers to strive to always do better and better.
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Follow him at @bryanzmijewski