This is a gift to my group at my day job. Experience Design “XD” is the name we are known by in a culture that gets it. Usability is the target, yes, but it is the target’s edge. In 2012 the center is an awesome experience. That is our mantra.
A little side note about XD in place of UX
The term “User Experience” happened when we realized that creating a User Interface (UI) is not the goal, but the means. The user experience is the goal. In that title, “User experience, or UX, needing to explicitly include the word “user” is actually baggage leftover from the days when an “interface” without that distinction of user interface was assumed to be something connecting different parts of a system.
Ironically, interface was a purely technical term that borrowed the word “face” from the human context and metaphorically applied it to mechanical or virtual elements. The coining of the term “User interface” was actually borrowing the term back to describe a human element as one side of the connection. That usage grew so much that the word interface alone has now come to more often mean the user interface.
The word ‘experience’ has no such baggage. There is no history of any part of the system besides the user having an “experience”. So making such a distinction is unnecessary. So, since we know that we most definitely are not referring to a part of the system having an experience, do we really need to even say “user” anymore? And if there is someone else, another person or group of people, that is impacted by what we do besides the “user”, well okay. It’s still an experience isn’t it? And that is what we are designing isn’t it?
So then, just “experience”. Yes, it sounds a little Hendrix-esque. And that’s okay too.
- roger
- Music in the short video is by Zuriel Merek
