The Evolution of UX - The Way of Life
It's all about going from (mostly) single interaction called event, to series of interactions called life.
If you are in the field of User Experience for a while (and I say for a while - 15+ years) you would appreciate how the "nomenclature" of what we did as professionals changed over the course of years.
First it was: HCI - Human Computer Interaction. A very fit term which described how us, the humans, interacted with computers, which are considered as a machine/separate entity. It focused on the challenges we faced as we tried to make that somewhat unnatural interaction natural. Mostly we talked about airplane cockpit controls, car dashboards and huge machine (CNC) interfaces that people had to operate through instrument panels and gadgetry of controls.
Then it became: Usability Science - some mixture of art and engineering in late 90's as the inter-webs became the new way of communication. Computers and related personal computing devices became much more household and part of everyday life. Shopping carts showed up on e-commerce websites mimicking real world shopping experience. But still we mostly talked about "making it easy to use and intuitive" and matching it to the mental models. Adopting how we did things in the past, to the new way of doing things.
Then iPhone came along. The mobile revolution started late 2007 and the term User Experience gained much root than pure Usability. It was not just about easy to use interfaces anymore but how do we feel when we use them. The emotional aspect (the intangibles) became part of product experience and its success. The computers went into our shirt pockets (aka mobile phones) and became even more integral part of of daily lives. The User Experience now was the differentiation to sell more and make real profits. If you didn't have the form or function, forget being even in the race. You needed both and then some additional appeal to be worthy of users attention.
And finally, The User Experience is becoming just the "Experience". One and the same. With technology almost embedded in us, we dont differentiate between us and machines any longer. We started enjoying the real world experiences through technology and the more seamless they became, the better experience we had.
Think about: Talking to a friend or family, showing them pictures of our adventure trip and laughing together sipping over cup of tea. Today it became --> Live FB video stream with your Go PRO camera which updates your twitter feed letting your family in other country know about your Saturday morning adventure, who then can share that pic or video with your grand-mom casting that on a large screen HDTV in her own bedroom; as she reminiscences looking at your young pics from her old photo album. You get the idea. Its not just user experience about one interaction anymore but how we experience our life these days in series of interactions.
I get fascinated by these changes and I know that as technology matures and becomes even more integral part of being human, the need for our discipline becomes even greater (and not less). It was easy to build instrument panels or even websites and make them "easy to use" since those user interactions had definite start and an end. Today as we weave our life in technology, those experiences are continuous, become ubiquitous. The user expectations are high, the cost of not delivering on the holistic experience is great and thats why the need to understand "new way of doing things" becomes even more crucial.
So to build those "fabulous interfaces" more so "the experiences", we need to go beyond HCI, Usability and UX. What is it that can take us beyond UX? Read more in my next blog post.
Author Bio: My name is Mandar Pathak and I run the website www.optimizeprodux.com and its associated blog. Optimize-ProdUX is my consulting adventure advising clients about better User Experience (UX) and Digital Strategy. The office is located in St. Louis, MO.
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