I have a bank account that rebates all ATM fees so I don’t care about which bank I visit to withdraw cash.  I’ve never paid attention to the amount of the fees, but if I did, I would consider paying more for a better user experience.  About 6 months ago, I had my first experience with the redesigned Bank of America ATM’s.  What an improvement!  Bank of America, or more likely the firm they hired, certainly thought through the user experience and did some testing prior to deployment.  As a result, if I have a choice, I will always use the Bank of America ATM solely based on superior usability.  Bank of America made these improvements in response to an update by Wells Fargo so hopefully they will continue to compete on user experience.

Of course there are other examples.  For regional travel, nothing beats http://southwest.com.  I thought their most recent updates were a step backwards, but Southwest still holds a major usability advantage that captures my business over other airlines.  In the airline business, the most frustrating brands are those that refuse to acknowledge the problem.

As more companies realize the advantages of superior user experience, usability will become a competitive matter, improving for all of us.  This trend is already accelerating in mobile applications because limited interface options dictate superior core task functionality as a requirement, even for bad designers.

Do you have any differentiating user experiences to share?

In an effort to figure out how some of these atrocities are making it on to the internet, I’ve created a two question anonymous survey to try to get an idea of the level of testing that is currently considered acceptable.  Please complete or forward to the appropriate people:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/G8VB28K