User experience has become a fundamental term in the design of digital services and products. But what does it mean, exactly? In short, UX is the entire experience a person has with a product or service: the emotional and practical perception they get from interacting with a website, an application, any digital product.
The reason UX matters so much has deep roots. We live in an era in which mere functionality is no longer enough: people expect what they use not only to work — function has become a commodity — but to be intuitive, easy, even pleasant to use. In this context, the quality of the experience is not an embellishment or an ancillary aspect: it is the factor that decides whether a service succeeds or fails.
The method: user-centered design
If UX is the overall experience, user-centered design is the methodology through which you achieve it. It puts the user at the center of the process, ensuring every decision is grounded in a deep understanding of needs, desires and expectations — obtained through objective research. This approach doesn't stop at asking "will it work?"; it asks whether the service will be intuitive, whether it solves a real need, and whether it does so efficiently.
Four contexts, one battle
In more than ten years leading experience and product design teams, I have faced very different challenges united by the same purpose: promoting and sustaining the adoption of user experience.
- At Bitmama, Armando Testa's digital agency, the obstacle was getting recognition for a discipline then considered secondary in digital communication.
- At Yoox Net-a-Porter the challenge evolved: in luxury, people assume — wrongly — that usability is a mass-market necessity that risks eroding exclusivity. I had to demonstrate that impeccable UX elevates the premium shopping experience.
- At Vodafone, the commitment was to promote clarity and transparency in an ecosystem of complicated offers, showing how good UX improves both brand perception and customer satisfaction.
- And it is at INPS that I met the most singular challenge and opportunity.
Pure service: designing without commercial trade-offs
In a "pure service" public institution, the goal is not to sell: it is to serve the citizen. This offers the rare opportunity to truly design for the user, without balancing their needs against commercial or marketing objectives. It is user-centered design in its most literal sense — which is, in fact, a spirit of service: every decision taken in consideration of the citizen's wellbeing and needs.
But here lies the paradox: where users cannot choose — nobody can "switch welfare provider" — experience matters more, not less. The INPS that serves 45 million users through nearly 500 digital services started from a very low level of usability, with no visual or communication standards. And citizens rightfully demanded that the gap with the private sector be closed: when services are critically important, providing the best and easiest-to-use service is not an ambition — it's a duty.
How we faced the challenge
The only way possible: making usability and the culture of user-centered design a mantra. Before getting our hands dirty, we defined the vision of this enormous work-site — "design digital services that improve citizens' quality of life" — and the mission: "provide citizens with all, and only, the information and services they need for their social protection". These are not empty words: they are, still today, the fundamentals guiding every design decision. Alongside them, a manifesto of values — people at the center, the value of sharing, measuring the impact for citizens — acts as the compass of decision-making.
On those foundations the projects were built: the Sirio design system — the "highway code" of INPS's digital design, recognized with an iF Design Award and included in the ADI Design Index; the new portal, conceived and refined "with users and for users" through surveys, interviews and usability tests, thanks to which people now find what they're looking for almost twice as easily; the redesign of dozens of services within the framework of Italy's Recovery Plan (PNRR); and a digital-first rebranding that is a true first for the Italian public administration.
The conclusion that applies to everyone
The deep adoption of user experience — its paradigms, principles and tools — is what ensures that every digital interaction with people is useful, easy and accessible for everyone. In the private sector, the market imposes it. In the public sector, where there is no market, it has to be a choice of organizational culture. And it's the most important choice of all, because it concerns the services people cannot walk away from — and on which, often, their lives depend.