UXmatters has published 15 articles on the topic Role of UX.
IA Summit 2006 comprised three conference tracks:
If you give users what they ask for, they’ll continue to ask for more. As I sat reading the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to my son one evening, I started thinking about its applicability to our consulting for clients. If you do not know Laura Numeroff’s story, it is what some might describe as a circular tale. The plot centers around a little boy and a mouse. The mouse asks for various items and, when the little boy gives the mouse what he wants, the mouse asks for something else. If you give a mouse a cookie, it will want a glass of milk to go with it. If you give it some milk, it will eventually want something else—until you get to the very end of the story, when the mouse wants just one more cookie. So, the tale could conceivably go on forever.
My children love this book. They think it is very funny and ask me to read it again and again. It was during one of these countless readings that I realized this story holds some great messages about how I find myself interacting with clients every day. How many times have we gone through multiple iterations of designs, only to come back to our original design? How many times have we given the users what they want, only to find out the solution tests poorly and user adoption is low? Sometimes, during an engagement with a client, I feel as though the biggest impact of a request I’ve granted is simply that it begets yet another request. Read More
There have been a lot of articles recently that discuss the idea of whether User Experience has staying power as a profession. I’ve read about ten of these—most of them discussing how automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics will decimate the need for almost all professions as we know them today. Even the articles that were positive and upbeat about the future of User Experience made seemingly dire predictions about the need for all UX professionals to adapt to new technologies to survive. That actually sounds very reasonable to me. In fact, it’s what UX professionals have always done.
Before User experience, there was Human Factors. In some ways, that might be a better term to describe what UX professionals do. Now, it’s not a hip or edgy term, but it does encapsulate the fact that as long as there is a human factor in anything that people create, our profession has its place. We still live in a human world. Our job will still be to create products, services, and things that people interact with. Whether a user interface is on a screen or is a mechanical manifestation of our human selves, someone still has to ensure that people can work with it efficiently. I don’t really see that fundamental changing—certainly, not as much as the types of interactions people may have with products. UX professionals absolutely must adapt and learn—and that’s a really good thing. Read More