Man, is this a can of worms, or what! Maybe only because we might sometimes choose to make it so. For the sake of building a profession as well as a professional identity, and perhaps also (as a consequence) to communicate the profession's purpose and importance to outsiders, one creates these artificial boundaries and walls ... perhaps it is necessary. And then again, things evolve so rapidly. For my part, I am deeply interested in both design as well as usability. As some have stated, I see it thus: Design FOR Usability
the left-hand side being the act and the right hand side being the consequence. Now comes the chicken and egg part: which of the two comes first. Obviously, there are arrows pointing in both directions, making the process a loop. Thus, The process of Design generates an artifact which then needs to be evaluated for (among other things) Usability. The process of Usability Testing generates data which inform the Designer about how to go about modifying the design. Someone will quickly point out that the Designer wouldn't have any basis to build a half-way decent design if she didn't have a set of Usability Principles to guide her. And then someone else will interject that the Usability 'Specialist' (the term 'expert' having now been banished from this discussion) wouldn't have any basis for conducting a decent Usability Test if she didn't have any basic understanding of the purpose of the design and constraints that shaped it's form. For instance, should a Usability Evaluator the usability of the design of an automobile 'cockpit' for the purpose of making cellphone calls and eating breakfast while checking the latest news on the internet? And if the design fails this test should the Usability Evaluator declare the design to be unusable? Design, I guess, is the process of Giving Form to Required/Desired Function. Unfortunately, we also call the resulting form a Design: The result of the Design Process is a Design. The Designer, being experienced and all, knows a lot about Usability, and designs usability into the Design. Some of the comments suggest that the term Usability is becoming passe and increasingly being replaced by User Experience which encompasses, more (much more, perhaps) than just Usability. Nobody wants 'merely' to be a Usability Tester/Evaluator -- they are now User Experience Specialists (not Experts). So, I guess User Experience Assessment (not just Evaluation) is the process of Determining if the Designed Form Meets Required/Designed Function and -- this is where it seems the line between design and evaluation gets fuzzy -- suggesting ways in which the design could go beyond just meeting requirements, like generating Delight. The result of the User Experience Assessment Process is a User Experience Assessment. Okay: Designer knows Usabilty/UX; UX Specialist knows Design. Only the Designer doesn't NECESSARILY do detailed UX testing, while the UX Specialist doesn't USUALLY do Design. Fair and square; no turf wars. Oh Lord! Could a Designer call herself a UX Specialist (or whatever)? Why or why not? What is she first and foremost? So what is User Experience? - Usability - Delight (or is delight also a part of 'usability' as Jared suggests?) - Amusement - Enlightenment - Joy - Nirvana - etc. BTW, one could conceive of such a thing as: Design for Unusability -- think security devices: you might want them to be unusable (by the bad guys). Or is 'unusability' merely a special case of 'usability' where 'usability' = 0 or a negative value, in a mathematical sense? <Tongue not entirely outside cheek> Whew! Did I get all this okay? -murli -- murli nagasundaram, ph.d. | www.murli.com | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +91 99 02 69 69 20 - The reason why death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity -- it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can. - Yann Martel, The Life of Pi. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
