After speaking with my friend and co-conspirator Matt Snyder about how his job search and how he’s selling his position (see his post on design thinkers not design keepers here).  He said he doesn’t think people will be talking about UX in a couple of years, but we’ll call it something else.  If historical trends are any indicator then he is right.

Then today I had a request on our Philips Yammer network about “how do I get started in User Experience?” In response to that question I wrote this overly long response.  So the context is responding to a newcomer who was ready to jump in but had no idea how, and he needed to continue in his current job function while jumping into it.    This is the context of the post.    I am cutting and pasting that response wholesale as the rest of this blog post.  here it is:

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So you, (newcomer to UX), are now enterering a field that doesn’t have a proper name.  Right here we call it user experience design (or at least that is one of the very highly popular names).  You could draw venn diagrams of the following “fields” or “schools of thought” and while there is a lot of overlap, it’s not total.  Some people use them interchangably.  Here they are. IxD (Interaction Design, see http://www.ixda.org) UCD (user centered Design), Usability (try Nielsen Norman Group for the best known company/people, you mentioned Don Norman, the other partner is Jacob Nielsen), UXD has already been mentioned, UI Design (user interface), HCI (Human computer Interaction), IA (information architecture), and I think I must be leaving some out.  Then there are the variants like Human-centered design or human-system interaction or what have you, mostly differences in semantics.  To those outside the field all of these things may seem very much the same, and to some extent that is true.  I would say that each has their own distinct personality though, and some are more distincly academic so it may be less helpful for you.

I could talk about how UI Design is more about the look/feel of an interface, or how IxD is more about how an interaction works and how it fits into a flow of work, IA talks more about site or application wide standards and structures, but it also clearly talks about consistency of look and feel etc.  Usability focuses on testing users, usually in very specific ways and it’s fantastic for coming to design decisions, but this approach has shortcomings for unfamiliar designs or introducing new interaction paradigms (they basically say to avoid it, which in some measure is not bad advice).  I think you get the picture.

In short there are a lots of ways of approaching this whole big bundle of methods, but I really think it all boils down to an attitude, and that attitude is that people are more important that technology.  If a person can’t figure it out, if the thing being used for a purpose constantly calls attention to itself and interrupts the task, if it forces people to conform to the system and not to the other way round then there’s a problem.  What part of that you want to approach is up to you.

One way to do that will be to start reading books and blogs and talking to people who are doing it.  I guess it’s the kind of career exploration advice anyone could give you.  Let me say this though: there is a great demand for people who still retain “hard” coding skillz who also have an appreciation and some experience with user-centered methods.  I see job openings every day for such people.

Getting involved with a community can help.  The IxD community for example has a lot of active discussions on their website as well as their linkedin group.  There are a number of popular blogs that have good discussions, or at least a very thoughtful and well written posts.  By becoming an active member of a community in a thoughtful reflective way you will start to understand all the terminology, the “important people” to have read, and get an understanding of the trends.  This community within Philips is not terribly active, in fact your thread is the most active one and it’s just the three of us contributing to it.  THat’s fine, but you may find other more active communities that will be better.

Nielsen and Norman are some big names in my opinion, and worth reading.  Observing the user experience by Kuniavsky is a very good hands on book (here’s his blog)  If you are interested in other ways of studying users I have some other recommendations.  Dan Saffer’s books on designing interactions are recommendable as well, though he is not as well known.  And the really really short version of why usability is important and how you can implement it and get a better design NOW and without much time is indeed “don’t make me think” by Krug.  Bill Moggridges book is big and expensive, but gives a series of vignettes and interviews that can give you a good overview.

OK clearly this has gotten out of control on length.  I’ll be the first one to admit I can be long winded (which is not terribly usable sometimes).

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So my only comment on that post I made is that of course we do have a name, but it’s not something everyone agrees on.  The other quandary is explaining what you do to your family.  Yes, grandma I’m a user experience designer…. Then the last part is the part Matt originally brought up in his job hunt, but is something we dealt with in our Internal special interest group meeting again this morning: How do we explain and sell our value to the other parts of Philips?  Coming up with a good, easy to understand answer to that question would be extremely valuable.