If you want to talk about a designed experience at McD, I’d suggest you look at the other end of the age spectrum. McD has designed a much better experience for children – box meals, playgrounds, toy giveaways – and a place where families on a budget who don’t have much time can eat quickly and cheaply – but not necessarily nutritiously.

I tend to think that Starbucks deals a whole lot more with the emotional design of the customer’s experience than McDonalds.

stevenb – you should hang out in a McD’s for a morning and watch the senior citizens who regularly frequent the establishment. They often have their social networks tied to the McDonalds experience — meeting for coffee, reading the paper, eating before a walk around the mall. They know the names of the people behind the counter and vice versa. They’re comfortable, sometimes walking up to the counter and saying “I’ll have the usual.”

You must be ‘off your rocker’ if you think UX doesn’t matter as much in tough economic times. I’m glad that you and Picoult think the relevance is even more important given the difficult times. Mark Hurst’s ‘Bit Literacy’ essays might be a good related read for anyone thinking of cutting costs in library systems — they bring forth the idea of pushing atoms vs pushing bits — the activities libraries do all the time.

We may agree to disagree on this one, but I do believe your post is well written and researched. I just don’t agree on the “no experience” part. Minor detail.

Starbucks’ problem wasn’t that they had a “user experience”, it’s that they didn’t continue to research and evolve that experience based on the economy and consumer interest. User experience is necessary regardless of the economy because it is not “frills” vs “no frills”, it is a good experience based on user behavior, interest, desire, and motivation.

It bothers me that there are articles referring to the experience has a “has” or “doesn’t have” situation.