image credit: A-dit-ya [Flickr]A recent article in the UXmatters newsletter pointed out to a trend among some in the UX (user experience) community to take the U out of UX and refer to the discipline as experience design instead.
The reason for this change in terminology is that experience design recognizes the fact that most interactions are multifaceted and complex. They encompass much more than just the architecture or usability of a particular user interface. They also include all of the social, emotional and even cultural consequences of the interaction.
I'm in full support of making this change, as I don't think the title Information Architect really covers all the different types of work that I need to do in order to work together with the client and the team to craft the experience. I'd be happy to call myself an experience architect or designer.
But in the end the question isn't just about titles. By changing the titles, what we're really trying to solve is how to put all the pieces of this diverse field of work together.
One common misconception about user experience design is that it's the role of one person or department, and just one step in the process. Other steps are, for example, design, development, and testing. But user experience designers are not one subject matter experts, doctors or any kind of solve-it-all specialists in their area. They're liaisons. They help to evangelize effective processes to create the best experiences. They help make sure the other disciplines care about the user and the holistic experience. But ultimately it's up to all members of the organization to make it a success. The strategist, the designer, the developer and the writer need to all think about the best user experience and how to bring it alive from their angle of work, as much as the user experience designer does.
User experience design isn't a single discipline. On some projects we're building an online tool, a calculator or a survey. On other projects it's sheer advertising content; a campaign or a microsite. More and more often it seems like we would need an anthropologist or a sociologist to help us create the best model for what we're trying to solve. Other times it's just an architect or journalist type that we need.
Louis Rosenfeld, an independent information architecture consultant and publisher of several books on user experience design, argues that user experience may not yet even be a discipline at all. "At best, it's a common awareness, a thread that ties together people from different disciplines who care about good design, and who realize that today's increasingly complex design challenges require the synthesis of different varieties of design expertise."
That's where the Organic Three Minds model comes into the picture. We do our best work when we think through problems collectively. Maybe we don't have an in-house anthropologist to come in as needed, but when we gather a group of diverse people they can all bring different perspectives to the problem. Some of us are and need to be called Information Architects, Experience Designers or Usability Experts, and they bring a great deal of specific expertise from a certain area, but building the best total experience is everybody's responsibility. However, that doesn't mean we're all generalists.
Here's how Sandra Marsh at Organic puts it:
"Together, with strategy, experience architects are the "bird's eye view" folks and the voice of the consumer. Ideally, everyone from all disciplines would maintain focus on the user and the whole and operate with in their area of expertise all of the time. While it's something everyone should all work toward, it's not likely to happen. There are just too many moving pieces. And there's the risk of everyone turning into generalists - which to me, smacks of mediocrity."
Karri Ojanen
Strategists & Planners
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