A friend and sometimes client told me over lunch this week, "I think of you as the usability guy." I didn't much care for this, because I think of usability in terms of activities rather than an identity to aspire to. It got me thinking about related terms, like "user experience" (UX), and its cousin, user-centered design (UCD). As a result of those thoughts, I took some time to differentiate these terms, because even though they are often used interchangeably, I think they are different in ways that are important to interaction design work in related but distinct fields.
The details of the term distinctions are on my blog: http://www.virtualfloorspace.com . I'll just post the conclusion here: Usability: Important for all digital experiences, however, for software design and development it is a critical measuring stick. Software should be continually shaped by on-going, small rounds of usability testing. UCD: Web sites should speak the language of the people who use them, not the organizations that sponsor them or the people who design and develop them. UCD best practices should be adopted at the beginning of every web site project, scaled appropriately to the budget and the anticipated revenue or other gain. UX: Products, services, public spaces, and web sites that need to span multiple channels and areas of life will fall or rise based on their user experience design. Customer experience is gaining momentum as an entity in its own right. Please take a look at the blog, and let me what you think about the distinctions I draw between these terms. Thanks! Paul Bryan Usography (http://www.usography.com) Blog: Virtual Floorspace (http://www.virtualfloorspace.com) Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts ________________________________________________________________ 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
