Friday 10 April 2015

U is for User

I was introduced to an article a week or two ago - "UX is not UI" - which prompted a bit of thinking and a look back at other related articles.



In "UX is not UI", author Eric Flowers talks about all the disciplines and techniques that contribute to the development of a user experience, and how many just consider UX to be interface design. You can see this for yourself by taking a quick look at UX job listings that contain a lot of jobs which five years ago would have been titled 'Graphic Designer' or 'Website Designer'. UX has just become the buzz word dropped into job descriptions.

UX is not UI - blog post by Erik Flowers

What UX design should be about is providing the user with a solution to a defined problem, which of course is so much more than an interface issue. And it's something that can't achieved by one person, or even a UX team within an organisation. UX needs to be team sport, led by professionals, but with active participation across the whole of the development and service teams.

Thinking about this caused me to go back to an article on Jakob Nielsen's useit.com website by Hoa Loranger - "UX without user research is not UX"

This is quite a thorough piece that considers that challenges faced by UX professionals in organisations and in particular on development projects. It's not just about improving user interfaces, which if you're lucky is often as far as you can go. It should be about bringing the user and the business closer together; informing business change to better meet user needs.

UX without research is not UX - article by Hoa Loranger for useit,com



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