I am working on a new discussion-oriented presentation, Twelve Spins on User Experience, which will try to explain some of the different things the term “user experience” has meant over the years and how people are using it today, often in confusing ways.
If you go looking on Twitter, you will find lots of rants and debates about how everyone is a UX designer, yet no one is qualified to be one. How UX is the same as some other process, but different. Why the UX profession needs to be regulated. Poking fun at another unicorn UX/UI job description.
Or browse on Medium and you will find at least one new article a week about service, industrial, and interaction design, or some other new type of design you have never heard of. How the different types of design are the same, but different. If one is about thinking, then another is about doing. Which one is the true discipline to rule them all. How being multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary is the road to success.
Or listen to podcasts about what is wrong with UX. How it has become a meaningless buzzword, and yet there are also a gazillion job openings for it. How everyone should be literate in it, yet we cannot tell when someone is fluent in it.
Some of the articles and discussions are interesting and valuable, but some are difficult to make sense of because many different concepts are overlapping with one another. For example: a field of study is not the same as a profession. You can get a degree in one thing and have a career in another. You can be skilled at something, but that does not mean you are a professional at it.
I’ve been through lots of these over the years. If we cannot communicate, we cannot make things better. So maybe it is time to help people argue better.
Twelve Spins on User Experience
- User Experience is an impression someone gets when interacting with products, services, spaces, brands, systems, and organizations
- User Experience is a mindset of caring about your users’ needs and doing your best to serve them
- User Experience is a human-centered process (with steps like discovery, analysis, conceptual design, and evaluation) used for business and social impact
- User Experience is a methodology, a body of techniques and rules about how to use them that govern our specialty
- User Experience is a field of study focused on how people behave in technology-enabled contexts and how to creatively address human needs
- User Experience is a community of practice, a group of people who share a passion for user-centered design and learn how to do it together in social settings
- User Experience is a profession, with careers, occupations, and jobs such as user researcher, information architect, user interface designer, and usability engineer
- User Experience is a team (made up of various roles) that defines, designs, and delivers solutions for customers, employees, business partners, citizens, and other groups of people
- User Experience is a buzzword misunderstood in business
- User Experience is a skill set, a collection of abilities, such as empathy, divergent thinking, and sketching, which can be applied to any professional or creative endeavor
- User Experience is an element of digital transformation and change, key for organizations to survive in the future
- User Experience is an industry, a collection of business establishments used to regulate and analyze economic activity
If you want to plan a visit where I can lead a discussion with your meetup group, local professional association chapter, or conference round table, send me an email.
