“User experience has momentum. Let it roll, and get back to work.”
(Robert Hoekman Jr. a.k.a. @rhjr ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows)
The Music Outlives the Band
Let’s rock too.
All posts about
User experience
A Perfection of Means and a Confusion of Aims
Is it what you are or what you do? Both.”
“My work involves helping people to understand how to best plan circumstances in which users are engaged and satisfied with their experience. Yet, I do not call myself a user experience designer.”
(Abby Covert a.k.a. @Abby_the_IA ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows)
What is User Experience?
“I shall not today attempt further to define ‘it’; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”
“I am one of these people. I design experiences. Or I design for experiences, if we must mince words. I don’t do this because I was trained to do so. I do this because I must. I am a User Experience Designer. Or whatever they’re calling it these days.”
(Stephen Anderson a.k.a. @stephenanderson ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows)
Whither “User Experience Design”?
Revitalized and DTDT (again). Just like love.
“It makes no sense to ask what “user experience design” really means; it means whatever we use it to mean. We can ask what we need it to mean and how we already use it. I submit that we need a term for designing systems that include interaction design. And we already use “user experience design” to mean that now. If we could agree on that, I might stop feeling so bad about calling myself a “user experience designer”.”
(Jonathan Korman ~ NEW Boxes and Arrows)
Content, the once and future king
Shaping compelling experiences with data, lots of them.
“This is a new sandbox for technologists, data scientists, marketers, and experience designers. What are the corpora we have access to? What is lurking within our data smog? What are the new experiences we can create? No doubt we will continue to see art and humor, but let’s use those to inspire us as we imagine what else is possible. The biggest potential (and as always the hardest problem) is in the development of game-changing experiences. I look forward to seeing where this goes.”
(Steve Portugal a.k.a. @steveportigal ~ ACM Interactions November + December 2012)
What is User Experience Design?
DTDTs are signs of community dynamics. More DTDTs, the better.
“The translation of megabytes and code into a deliverable product that fulfills the needs of a user is done through User Experience Design.”
The business of design: A series of interviews
Business will open up for UX, only when UX shows respect.
“A lot of the problems with practitioners in our field arise because we are sometimes seen as almost anti-business. I’ve seen this attitude in the community, I’ve seen practitioners become zealots about the user, their feelings and their rights. They fight and resist decisions that are made for commercial benefit because they might impinge on the perfect user experience. This isn’t helped by an often evangelical, polemic and condescending attitude and language.”
UX Strategy on the Job: An Interview with Three UX Strategists
From business, through digital to C/UX strategy. The plan to achieve the vision.
“The statement that they agreed to participate is significant. Some of the people I asked to participate in this interview said their companies wouldn’t allow it. A couple of the UX Strategists who did participate said that they would have to send their responses all the way up the command chain for editing and approval. Why the secrecy? Why can’t UX Strategists share their craft openly like other UX professionals do when they discuss things like Photoshop filters or research methods or JavaScript tips? It’s because a UX strategy is a valuable asset that companies want to protect: a battle plan for success in the digital realm.”
(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)
Dueling and Design : How fencing and UX are quite alike
Seeing parallels between UX and other fields of practice stimulates the creative flows.
“Since most people are not very familiar with modern competition fencing, let’s start by taking a look at the sport. Modern fencing has its roots in swordplay, but the training and tactics employed are meant to win competitions, not duels. Bouts are fenced to a set number of points. Points are most often scored by making a valid touch on your opponent although points can also be awarded if a fencer retreats off the end of the strip or for certain rule violations. There is a director who judges the bout and enforces the rules.”
(Ben Self ~ UX magazine)
All Experience is Organized
Organized through orchestration, choreography, or direction.
“Experience design claims to know better both a user experience as well as its design. The paradox therein being that no experience is designed. Experience is either in the Now, in which case it is event. Or it’s in the past, in which case it is reflected upon and then retold.”
(Adrian Chan a.k.a. @gravity7 ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)
The UX of publishing for tablets and smartphones
How fast things are going is a matter of perspective. Even in the publishing industry.
“You can debate all these things for as long as you want, but your audience has already chosen for you. They’ve already gone “mobile first”. You probably need to start playing catch up.”
(Martin Belam ~ Emblem)
Hardware Specs vs. User Experience
A kind of atoms versus bits, again.
“Product quality has to be judged in the context of human tasks, and reviews should emphasize real use—not raw numbers.”
Testing Positive for Healthcare UX
Experience design for employees, customers, users, and (now) patients.
“The healthcare experience is improving even though we’ve almost all had a less-than-pleasant memory of either waiting endlessly for an appointment, forgetting when and what dose of meds to take, crying over massive and unpredictable bills, or even just locating decent care in the first place. All of these mounting complaints and expenses have finally pushed healthcare to the tipping point. As a result, a patient-centered paradigm has emerged that is forcing organizations to more closely examine and improve the experiences they provide.”
(Maren Connary a.k.a. @MarenConnary ~ UX Week 2012 videos)
“Product designers” and design team evolution
The new ‘homo universalis’ of experience design.
“Product designers often work alone, and because they’re expected to do so many things, end up working on projects of limited scope. (I think this contributes to the problem of managing complex user experiences). My supposition is that the small team of generalists can also out-produce an equal number of team-of-one product designers. You get higher quality, because folks who have a functional emphasis (such as visual design or interaction design) can deliver better than those whose priority is developing a broader set of tools. And you get greater output, because their mastery of those areas means they can deliver more quickly. What you give up are the transaction/overhead costs of teamwork, but I don’t think those are as great as the gains.”
(Peter Merholz a.k.a. @peterme)
The Experience is the Product
Product, service, platform, ecosystem, and experience. All the way.
“(…) Service Design is about creating meaningful experiences and meaningful interactions – for and with the customers. It’s not about the products itself anymore (their features can easily be replicated) it’s about differentiating products by creating new ideas and emotional interconnections.”
(Pedro Custódio a.k.a. @pedrocustodio ~ NEXT Berlin)
It’s all about the experience!
Digital agencies (also) discover experience design.
“The role of a business now is to orchestrate such experiences for its customers, in such a way that the memory itself becomes part of the product – the experience.”
User Experience is Not Just Design, It’s the Key to Innovation and Growth
It’s Garrett, not Garret.
“It’s not every day you have Jesse James Garrett stop by to talk about the state of user experience and its role in the future of business. But, we were fortunate to have him visit the set of Revolution to talk about the importance of people and experiences and how UX deserves the attention of the c-suite.”
10 Benchmarks for User Experience Metrics
Metrics of Usability or CX, framed as UX benchmarks.
“Quantifying the user experience is the first step to making measured improvements.”
(Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MeasuringU ~ Measuring Usability)
UX design for startups: The age of user experience design
Startups being the fertile ground for UX design. That’s ‘users’ as in ‘customers’.
“Like many of my contemporary UX Design peers, I started my career as a so-called usability specialist. Fascinated by ergonomics and cognitive science, I was working to make sure users were able to actually use interfaces. Armed with user research, heuristics and a little bit of prototyping, I was trying to find my place in the ‘developer-oriented’ world. This wasn’t easy.”
(Marcin Treder a.k.a. @uxpin ~ NET Magazine)
User Experience v. Customer Experience
Here we go again. DTDT, re-framed as “what came first”.
“Customer experience is always a little tricky to explain. It’s just so darn big. What doesn’t it cover (not much) and who is responsible (good question). Often, customer experience is translated into user experience – the front-end digital experience of users.”