Jared’s Question:  Are we better off than we were four years ago?  Oops, wrong debate.  I mean, before the name change of HFS to HFES, which was more than four years.

The context of this discussion is, of course, over the recent name change of The Usability Professional’s Association to The User eXperience Professionals’ Association, UPA to UXPA.  This is a bit of history with some personal commentary.

Roger’s short answer:  I am not sure that it was an improvement, but I think it was necessary.

Roger’s longer answer:  There was a time when the rough equivalent of our profession was called the “man-machine” interface and, apart from the WWII Rosy the Riveter era, it was pretty accurate.  The technology was clanging smoking steaming  machinery and the users were generally male.   Times changed and the term Human Factors took over as the popular term.  It fit the facts of the times far better and is still in use today.
Then in the 1990s, the word “ergonomics” became popular.  It actually gained an audience even outside of the industry being used among intellectuals who couldn’t bring themselves to say “user-friendly”.  This word posed a problem for the Human Factors Society.  Their standing as the definitive elite who’s who of the human factors profession would be threatened as the center of gravity shifted to “ergonomics”.  To not somehow embrace the change suggested obsolescence.

Besides the obvious problem of trying to maintain the well-established brand and eat the cake too was the problem of differing definitions on opposite sides of the pond.  In the US, ergonomics was being used to denote the physical aspects of product interaction, roughly synonymous with human factors, while Europeans were using the term to describe the cognitive/psychological interactions, what we Americans were calling usability engineering.  There was no perfect answer.

After much debate, HFS simply absorbed the additional “and Ergonomics” into the title.   It seemed to accomplish the purpose, but created a funky meaning to Americans who still harbor logic in their thinking.   Human Factors AND Ergonomics is akin to the “Movie AND Film Society”, the “Motor Engine Society” or the famous “Department of Redundancy Department”.  I suppose they could have used OR in place of AND, but that’s just weird.  It makes me shudder thinking of all the times I’ve watched usability test participants struggle to decode and/or search logic.  Ugggh!! Frightening!

At about that same time, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (which sounds a little dated too) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (CHI) was having its own throne challenged by its evil twin, HCI (Human-Computer interaction, which must mean the opposite, right? CHI – HCI?) and a new little upstart organization calling itself the Usability Professionals Association, or UPA.

UPA had actually started as a “Birds of a Feather” group on Usability at the CHI 92 Conference.  I was one of the first people to crowd into that very small room.  I had been told about the meeting of the BOF group by Judith Ramey during her and Stephanie Rosenbaum’s workshop on usability testing.  I found my place in the room and then watched as the door became that of a clown car.  An endless train of usability enthusiasts entered.   And I was thinking, “Geeez, everybody wants to be part of this!  Even that Spool character is in here”.

As I recall, the basic idea was to have a group something like CHI, just smaller, less theoretical, more practical, and focused on usability.  If anybody in that first meeting used the words “User Experience” it apparently wasn’t sticky.   It all began as just a mailing list to start with and eventually, thanks to the ambitions of Janice James and some others, a conference, then another, and so on.  And gee whiz. Look at us now!

As I blogged a while back, (http://belveal.net/?p=1180) usability was the great deficiency in IT at that time.  Applying direct pressure to that sucking wound made perfect sense.   Today, things have changed and the bar has risen considerably.   When I started, usability wasn’t in the dictionary and MS Word spell-checker kept suggesting suability.  Now, I hear the words usability and “user experience” spoken just about everywhere by almost everyone.   I think we have succeeded in making our point.  Hurrah.

Now, let’s stand up, get the binding out of our shorts and move on.  We need to address the way things are today, not how they were then.  I think the UPA/UXPA leadership is trying to do just that.  The term UX makes sense now just like Usability did back then.
UX is about the quality of the total experience, not just “ease of use” as usability was generally taken to mean.  In fact, many folks, my company included, are dropping the U and just going with XD, Experience Design.  If you stop and think about it, the U is not really needed since “Experience” implies it already.    It is pretty much understood that where there is an experience, somebody had to have been a party to that experience.  Whether it is a user, a customer, shopper, owner, whatever is kind of more useful being left open-ended.  But I am still okay with UX.

If you’re a purest, I invite you to return to using the title “Man-Machine” interface expert.  You can start a reformed movement and gather followers.  Start a cult.  Discover the secret meaning of the Lorem Ipsum scrolls.  Make a name for yourself.

Those of us who consider it unfruitful to flaunt ourselves as an anachronism will probably support the change to UX and UXPA.   And better get ready, because who knows, in a decade or two, it may change again.

- roger