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A tip for learning the online customer experience
I remember reading an interview of Simpsons creator Matt Groening a few years back where he was asked the secret to becoming a good cartoonist.
His answer was something like "Draw, draw, draw, draw, and draw some more." Drawing his early comic strip characters - at school, at home, in class, on break, any time and all the time - a bazillion times had taught him how to draw those characters. Experience itself was the teacher.
That's instructive for anyone who's interested in the online customer experience. Use this website, that website, and the one over there. Click, click, click, click, click, try this, demo that, engross yourself in every online interface you can find. Pretty soon you'll see the patterns that govern the successes and failures.
Obviously, it helps if you love digital interfaces. I've been hooked since age 5 when I saw my first computer (see Bit Literacy), so it's the air I breathe. If you need a work or school assignment to force you to check this stuff out, well hmm.
One good way to try lots of interfaces, by the way, is to spend some time on Good Experience Games. Hundreds of clever and unique UIs ready to try out, right now.
Necessary, but not sufficient. I assumed you were going to say to observe and/or interview users, a la listening labs and the like.
Shirley - true. Necessary, but certainly not sufficient. (The "sufficient" list would be pretty lengthy, much longer than this tiny blog post :)