A couple months ago, my fellow researcher on Accessibility, User Experience (UX), and other Human Factors stuff, Simon Harper, blogged about UX and its misconceptions, as well as challenges for the future of this research field. Simon details, with some very very heaving backing from a really important paper from CHI 2009 (please do read its full text, it's a must), that UX might lay outside of current Human Factors practices due to being less generalisable. The community was questioned about reflecting on UX matters, their meaning, their goals.
I agree that UX practices are less likely to be generalised, in comparison to the more traditional, systematic User Centred Design discipline. What works in one instance, one product, one service, might not work in all others. Their essence, reflected in users' experience with a product or service, is often unique.
But I do like to take big challenges.
In the last couple of months I've been thinking hard about all of this. UX get thrown a lot in blogs, interviews, and all that fluff surrounding the latest crop of stuff coming out of technology. People are using it as the next coming of Jesus and solver of all problems in Human-Computer Interaction. Totally not true!
Furthermore, when people start talking about UX in a more practical, less fluffy way, they often misconcept it with a portion of its concerns, i.e., Usability. And the same goes between User Experience Design (UxD) and User Centred Design (UCD). Again, the latter is indeed a subset of the former. I often see the UxD process being used when people actually meant UCD. I would argue that UCD's goals is to create and study the effectiveness of UIs for their target audience, whereas UxD goes beyond that towards engagement and pleasureness.
For now, I won't be dissecate and dissertate too much on the actual definition of UX. Heck, if the top experts cannot agree on this, who am I to take the ultimate stake at its definition? Let us stay at a phylosophical, ontological definition for it: the property of being capable to provide a good experience to users.
However, what can actually be talked about is that ideed UX can be measured, directly or indirectly; individually or collectively. And by having the proper metrics, UxD can be leveraged towards the constant improvement of products and services. And this can, I argue, be replicated and generalised across products and services.
This is the kick-off on a series of blog posts I'll be writing in the forthcoming months. I'll delve into different forays on measuring UX, specially beyond the early phase focus of traditional UCD, or effectiveness benchmarks from usability studies. Worst case scenario, I'll learn a lot!
Fun times ahead, stay tuned :)
