User experience or UX as its annoyingly known as these days, is disappearing up its own rear end. As usual, a very good concept has been taken and butchered/tailored according to the compnay/individual using it as a self-marketing toy. User Experience is part of Usability, not some ethereal designer concept playground. The primary issue around approach to user experience is it quickly becomes personal opinion, i.e. the UX designer defining what the user wants, rather than observing user demographics of the web application in question. User experience is part of Usability, and as such in the realms of QA. Usability is something than all developers should observe as general rule when coding, as there are certain fundamentals around the user exeperience that should not need definition. Clear registration process, for example.
User Experience (abbreviated: UX) … quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific design. This can range from a specific artifact, such as a cup, toy or website, up to larger, integrated experiences such as a museum or an airport.
Not so #nathanbarley now – the easiest way to view IT terminology is to apply them in more general context than just IT projects. We don’t need anyone to tell us that putting one leg in front of the other is the best way to walk. In IT you can get away with doing that, and even documenting such levels of banality.
A good recent example of this obsessive level of pointless granularity is a query I had, around security questions set by website users on their profile. I logged a defect that when entering this section, the answer fields were blank, implying I had not entered any before (I had). The developer claimed this is a requirements change, and needed to go through that process. My first question was under what circumstances would that ever be “required”. of course there are no circumstances – it is an error in code that failed to return the previously entered answers.
User Experience (UX) is full of this kind of hyperbole – and it doesn’t belong. You can get round this by having a set of best-practice rules, and I would suggest you do to avoid the frankly comical discussions you can get trapped into around User Experience and Usability in general. Everyone thinks they know UX, becuase we are all users. Do understand other users requirements is more the question to ask. Do we understand UX/usability demands of our user demographic, as well as good UX/Usability fundamentals.
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