A lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounds the term "user experience." The multitude of acitivities that can be labeled with these two words span a vast spectrum of people, skills and situations. If you ask for UX design (UXD), what exactly are you asking for? Similary, if someone tells you they are going to provide you with UXD for an application, website or intranet or extranet, what exactly are you going to get?

Is it just one person who is responsible or is it a team of people who are in charge of UXD? In this story I´ll sketch my ideas of UXD based on my experiences and at the end of this story I will give you my answer.

Let us start at the beginning – UXD starts with experience – experience of the users. And so I will talk about the users first.

UXD-P – every person is an individual

Every person is an individual. Every person is in possession of different roles. For each individual there will be many roles and each person adopts a different role depending on the circumstances.

User Roles

Sometimes the individual person holds one role, but mainly he w