If you deal with customers then you are involved in a User Experience. If your customers do anything more than just call or email you directly then you are involved in User Interface. UX and UI concepts are often thought of as software activities but they apply to any situation that involves customers.
I was in a meeting recently where the problem was presented that tenants in a building didn’t have a single way to communicate the problems they had onsite. They would email or call various people or hope to find someone involved in facilities while wandering around. This then led another group (IT) to say they had the same problem. Then another team popped in to say they had the same issue. Suddenly this wasn’t a limited client experience situation, it was the same clients having the same issues all over the place. And we only discovered it by talking openly about problems.
The teams were trying to put a solution in place and immediately jumped to thinking through software that could solve the problem. They had their first task to interview companies that provided systems sort of like this but they still hadn’t clearly defined the problem. I asked them to look at it from the customer perspective: what was the real problem? As they stepped back they realized the real issue was one of confusion. People didn’t know where to go for help.
In terms of UX they could now better start to approach the problem. If the problem is confusion and unclear information, the first step in a solution is communication and clarity. No software required. All they needed to do was figure out who should receive requests internally and then post/publish that to clear things up. After that they could begin to work through how to improve the process or track communications through different programs.
This also addresses the UI problem. The biggest issue in UI is confusion. If the UI is phone or email then there is no confusion because every customer of the process is familiar with these. Instead of jumping to something new at the beginning of the solution we can introduce change slowly and prevent confusion from creeping back in. UI can be a component to each part of the solution as we move forward.
UX and UI are really good ways of thinking through the problems we encounter. Everyone we deal with is a user/customer of our services whether they are internal or external. Thinking through their experience in dealing with us helps us to improve the process. Just as this can apply to just about anything else we do as well.