"Experience Design" is better than "Product Design"

Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), one of the most authoritative voices in the UX community, is proposing merging what we currently call "Service Design" and "Product Design" under another umbrella term - "Experience Design".

While I'm not a fan of creating new terms every time we start doing the work in a slightly different way, I'm actually a fan of this one for one, very simple, reason: it shifts the focus back to the user and their experience.

I was there when we were Webmasters, then Web Designers, then mobile showed up, someone coined the term Interface Design, UX design, UI design, UX/UI design and - in the end - Product Design. All of those were good changes: we simplified, we removed confusing terms, we killed the UX vs UI debate which was moot to begin with, and we refocused the design on how it affects the entirety of the product - and given that designers were mostly sitting on the Product team, it worked very well. Good.

Then came Service Design, focusing on the service beyond the product - what are all the touchpoints? Where are the users struggling outside the product? Also good, even though Service and Product once again started to be separate terms, just like UX and UI were back in the day.

Experience Design? Better. The term is all-encompassing, inclusive, and brings the focus back to the experience of the person with the company, as opposed to somewhat inward-facing "Product", which implied we are beholden to product. Thinking about it from a semantics perspective, it might be the best term we came up with so far.