In his recent post, Listening is hard, Mark Hurst once again provides user experience professionals (well, anyone for the matter) with some timely advice.

It's a reminder of how vital it is to listen... really listen... to the all the people who will benefit from your design work: new customers, existing customers, customer support, internal teams, logistics, business leads, stakeholders, finance... the list is endless.

It's easy to soak in a few days worth of ideas, then lock in your plans. Yet, the conversation will continue throughout the project. Don't forget to keep the ears wide open:

The thing is, listening is DIFFICULT. I'm not referring to hearing, i.e., using an auditory nerve to detect sound waves. Having the tools says nothing about whether one has the skills to use them to some meaningful end.

Listening - real listening - is difficult because it requires a real investment: of focus, and empathy, and time. Worse yet, it's not even clear what the payoff is going to be. (You have to listen to find out!) It's easier to leave it undone and move on to the next thing.

Anyone who works at creating better experiences - for customers, or patients, or students, or readers, or viewers, or parishioners, or constituents - will tell you, or should be able to tell you, two universal truths:

1. You can't create something better for someone unless you understand what it is they need.
2. Finding out what they need - often by listening to them - is hard.

David Trewem, from DTDigital in Melbourne, has written one of the smartest and insightful articles on the state of online retailing in Australia I've read in years.

David's post, Why Aussie e-trailers need to pick up the pace, is his reaction to attending the Online Retailer conference held in Sydney last month. David was inspired by all the talk that suggested Australia is slated to be the next golden land of opportunity for online retail.

However, as he quickly points out, more established retailers overseas may get a decent share of that revenue:

Given that customers demand the 'best' online experiences (which can lead to the kind of online market dominance Google enjoys) there is a very real possibility that Australian retailers will end up with little choice other than to use Amazon (or equivalent) technology, therefore sharing margin and profits while losing differentiation. It may sound far fetched, but I'm pretty sure this is Amazon's 'Big Hairy Audacious Goal'. And they are tracking well towards it so far, thank you very much.

David recommends that Australian retailers (even Harvey Norman, which has downplayed online retail's potential) need to continue investing in online retailing to insure they don't lose market share to those overseas retailers who have years of experience (and failures) behind them.

Australian customers who have visited global sites such as Amazon, Zappos or Threadless already know what a great customer experience feels like -- clear navigation, useful shopping tools, recommendations from like-minded people and a quick, painless checkout process to name a few -- and those global retailers will only get better.

If Australian retailers continue to treat their online retail channel as only an add-on in their overall business strategy, global players will happily, and successfully, move in.

In a recent post of mine, Design is a verb, I walked through my soul-searching process of defining what I do as a designer and business owner. After letting the typical, more heroic responses come out (e.g. deliver measurable value to clients, improve the way companies treat people), I managed to boil the definition down to two statements:

• Fix things that are broken and improve people’s lives
• Make things better by designing better things

I went on in the post to point out how these two statements said nothing about tools, frameworks, disciplines, titles or processes. Although the definitions felt overly simplistic and juvenile, they resonated with me due to their pure and label-free nature.

Designers struggle with labels. A lot. There is a never-ending supply of arguments over which discipline does what and what title will solicit the right response from business stakeholders. I believe this inward navel gazing has been, and always will be, detrimental to our industry. It's not that I don't think it's valuable to rally around a consistent message; it’s more that I see it as being just too precious.

A great example is the recent post on service design from experience design pundit Peter Merholz. Merholz ponders the term “service design" and attempts to provide some answers to why the term hasn't caught on in the US as much as it has in the UK and other European countries. Merholz concludes that the term’s lack of notoriety in the US mainly stems from its association with the public sector. And we all know how well design and the public sector get along.

Due to service design's poor recognition in business circles, Merholz believes using “customer experience design” in its place is appropriate:

For my blog posts at HarvardBusiness.org, I’m talking almost exclusively about service design, but I’ve never used that phrase. Instead, I use “customer experience”, the phrase that’s received traction in the US, and it’s variants “customer experience design” or just “experience design.”

This hasn't sat well with Jeff Howard, a San Francisco-based designer who runs the popular service design blog, Design for Service. Howard believes maintaining and championing the label "service design" is crucial to its success in gaining traction in the US.

In a response to Merholz’s post, Howard quickly points to service design’s history, exposure in business publications and prominence in the academic world. He believes hiding it under the user/customer experience umbrella does it a disservice:

Merholz makes the argument that he’s actually writing about service design over at Harvard Business — he just isn’t calling it that. As a term, “customer experience” may be a better fit with Adaptive Path’s focus on “user experience” but overall he’s doing a disservice to the community, on all sides. There’s nothing magical about the term “service design,” but at this point it’s a defacto boundary object between academia, design and business. A vibrant worldwide network has identified with the term “service design” and a deep pool of knowledge is developing to support the practice. An emerging generation of service design students will become tomorrow’s service design practitioners with alumni from CMU, ID and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea leading the charge.

Yet, does it really matter, especially to those seeking our services?

Do CEOs, division managers and business owners really care if it's called service design or experience design or user experience design or customer experience design? Does defining ourselves make our services and offering any more compelling?

I don't think so. As Paul McKey points out in a response to my soul-searching post, our yearning to define and divide ourselves often leads to larger barrier: one between us and our clients:

[Joel ] has noticed that the user-centred/interaction/experience/service/information design field can be a bit self-interested at times which leads to what I call Digital Noise. This noise gets the hip young things doing groovy design sites and products extremely excited and leaves their clients stone cold. Why? Mainly because they are speaking different languages. The former is focussed on the means and the latter is focussed on the end.

If you know the current version numbers to more than three or four applications and you can rattle off arcane designer speak (like iterative redundancy like) you are living in a sea of digital noise. To survive you may need to stick your head out and see what the humans are up to (that is the people who pay for your services). Then if you want to be successful build some bridges between the technical and the client needs without swamping them in noise. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Don't get me wrong. I do believe we deserve a seat at the big table and should fight for it. We need to distinguish ourselves from those designers who solely make a living at the tail end of the production process.

However, I don't see it coming from labelling ourselves. Action always speaks louder than words, and action lead to results. Results are what the business world is seeking, not our latest definition or methodology.

We need to prove our value through action and results in order for businesses to notice, understand, and then recognise our contribution to overall business strategy and customer satisfaction. Time to get back to work.

Mark Hurst's reaction to Microsoft's latest attempt to unseat Google in the search engine space. To quote:

Customers online don't respond to a brand marketed to them, they respond to the EXPERIENCE they have. If they can accomplish their goal quickly and easily, they return to the site, and tell their friends. It's that simple. And if one site already provides a good experience, then there's no need to consider switching to some other site, no matter what the company brags about itself in its ads.