t-Welcome to UXmatters
Published: November 3, 2005
We are very pleased to welcome you to UXmatters—a Web
magazine created by and for user experience (UX) professionals.
Together, we can create the premiere source of information
and inspiration for the UX community.
From Human Interface to UX
At Apple® Computer in the early ’90s, I worked
in what was then called human interface design. When
Don Norman came to Apple, in 1993, as Vice President of Research
and head of the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), he brought
with him the new term user
experience design. Shortly after joining Apple, he spoke
to employees about user experience design. I wish I could
remember his words, but I do recall coming away from
his talk a convert to the idea of user experience
design. What he said resonated with me.
UX design takes a holistic, multidisciplinary
approach to the design of user interfaces for digital products.
Depending on the product, it can integrate interaction design,
industrial design, information architecture, visual interface
design, instructional design, and user-centered design, ensuring
coherence and consistency across all of these design dimensions.
UX design defines a product’s form, behavior,
and content.
Trends in UX
The advent of the World Wide Web forever changed the
landscape of UX. Before the Web, a fairly
small, close-knit UX community consisted mainly of people
who called themselves
user experience designers or user interface designers.
The Web brought an influx of new people to UX. Our community
expanded to include information architects and Web designers
and information designers.
Today, many professionals working within the broader field
of UX increasingly focus on specialized disciplines such as
interaction design, information architecture, visual interface
design, user research, and usability.
In addition to long-established UX organizations,
we’ve
recently seen the establishment of new organizations, including
the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)
Experience Design,
Information Architecture Institute (IAI),
and Interaction Design Association (IxDA).
The professional
organizations that support the UX community have
an important role to play in bringing UX professionals
the recognition and respect they deserve. Unfortunately, as
the number of organizations for UX professionals
proliferates, people are having to make hard choices about
which memberships offer essential benefits to them and which
do not. Many people are too busy in their work to attend conferences—even
local meetings—or read
a lot of print publications, so don’t join professional
organizations at all. If they won’t be able to avail
themselves of the services these organizations offer, why
pay the hefty membership fees? But these organizations deserve
our support—particularly for their
excellent content and services on the Web, which almost everyone
finds useful.
Bringing the UX Community Together
There’s now a growing awareness of a real need to
pull the diverse UX community together. In the last year or
so, we’ve
seen the creation of UXnet by people
who are committed to exploring opportunities for cooperation
and collaboration among UX-related organizations and individuals.
In late 2004, a BayCHI meeting on the topic “User
Experience: Why Do So Many Organizations Believe They Own
It?” brought together Don Norman
and a panel of representatives from all of these organizations,
where we came to the obvious conclusion that we all share
ownership of UX. A similar meeting subsequently took
place in New York City, where the discussion focused on collaboration.
At CHI 2005, representatives of most of the above-mentioned
UX organizations met at the Development Consortium
(DevCon) to discuss how practitioners and organizations can
work together, and there was a lively debate about how CHI
can meet the needs of both practitioners and academics. And
now the Usability
Professionals’ Association has organized World Usability
Day, a worldwide series of events promoting awareness
of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered
design. The UX
community is becoming a community of collaboration,
working together to create opportunities for knowledge-sharing,
networking, and career development.
Why UXmatters
It’s our goal to provide a venue where people working
in UX can come together to discuss important issues, share
information, and work collaboratively to create a resource
that will benefit us all. We hope to foster cooperation and
collaboration among people in all UX professions. Working
together, we can ensure that business leaders understand the
importance of designing good user experiences and have a greater
impact on the quality of digital products.
While there are some excellent Web magazines,
online journals, newsletters, and blogs that cover certain
aspects of UX design, most existing Web publications
focus predominantly on specialties such as Web design, information
architecture, usability, technical communications, graphic
design, or industrial design; or on UX design
news. Many are from professional organizations or academia
and are available only to members or paying subscribers.
There is currently no Web magazine that provides full coverage
of all disciplines that contribute to UX design,
nor do existing magazines tackle the issues of strategies
for digital product design or UX design management.
Our goal for UXmatters is to cover a
broad spectrum of topics about UX strategy, design, and
usability for a diverse range of digital products—from
application programs and Web applications to mobile devices
and consumer electronics products. We want to involve people
in all UX professions, including
- UX strategy
- UX management
- UX design
- interaction design
- industrial design
- information architecture
- visual interface design
- Web design
- branding
- information design
- instructional design
- user-centered design
- usability
Each of these UX specialties has an important
role to play in digital product design and, working in concert,
we have a much greater potential for making a real impact
on our companies’ products.
It’s important to communicate the value of UX design
and strategy to business leaders, so they’ll view good
user experience as essential to the success of their digital
products. Through publishing reviews of digital products, we
also have an opportunity to communicate about user experience
and usability to the general public, who are consumers of the
products we design. We can make UXmatters the place where everyone
can come to learn about user experience.
Please join us in making UXmatters be all that
it needs to be to serve our diverse UX community well. Volunteer,
write articles, or join the discussions on our blog. Make
UXmatters your own magazine.
If you’re a business person who wants to learn
what user experience professionals can do for your company
or a consumer who wants to know how to choose products that
are both useful and usable, we hope you’ll both enjoy
and benefit from reading UXmatters.
Posted on November 3, 2005 10:12 AM